Name of movie: Into The wild
Date: 2007
Length (hrs): 2h 28mins
Film genre: Adventure, Biography, Drama
Characters: Christopher McCandless
Awards: Nominated for 2 Oscars; Won Golden Glove ‘Best Original Song’, Nominated Golden Glove Best Original Score, Screen Actors Guild Awars Nominated Actor in 4 areas, AFI Awards Won Movie of the Year
Setting: Mostly Alaska
Plot information: Christopher McCandless has just graduated from Emory University as a top student and athlete. However, he is disillusioned with the ‘rat race’ and gives his $24,000 university savings account to charity and then through a series of adventures and encounters with wonderful characters, who are like pen drawings in their details and shortness on the screen, he makes his way to Alaska – his journey ‘Into The Wild’.
This is based on a true story, and the movie comes across as real, as do the characters. You get engrossed with the development of the story, and also you want to know what happens with all the characters.
When does the movie take place?
Who are the main characters:
What makes the Into The Wild interesting? For myself what makes this interesting, is that earlier in my life, I considered going walk about. I looked at Canada, I looked at the Grand Canyon, I looked at many areas to get away from it all. I think many of us during our lives encounter a time when we have had enough of ‘life’ and want to escape. For most of us, we shake it off, probably regret it at some time in the future, but we settled down for the mundane. This movie shows what can happen if you follow that dream.
The best part for me is when he discovers Alaska and finds his dream. He encounters many adversities during his time in Alaska, and at times evens has pangs for the’real’ world. However he stills ends up staying in Alaska.
The people who will love this movie are those who can dream, and can understand why others have dreams which are outside the norm for society.
On a scale of 1 (don’t like) – 5 (like), how do you rate this movie? I give this move a 5
The notion that there is a Gay sensibility has been controverted by some people but this film seems to me to be in a Gay mode – the word ‘tradition’ is too strong at present. Some of the set-pieces at the beginning of Orlando’s adventures in Elizabethan England reminded one of Paradjanov’s films specially Colour of Pomgranates. Not in their look but in the tretment of the screen as a ‘picture’ (that films started out as “motion pictures” is something that western European and especially British Isles film-makes have tended to forget). The ‘picture’ here were like those Tudor-period pictures where the subjects all look out at the viewer. The welcome for Queen Elizabeth I to Orlando’s parents house is clearly based on such paintings – the skating scenes where Orlando waxes rather too familiar with Sasha the Muscovite princess is a bit sneaky, it is more like a Victorian genre painting than the genuine Elizabethan article.
original novel by Virginia Woolf are simply taken for granted. And they are very odd oddities, Orlando is granted immortality and in the middle of the eighteenth century changes gender! This is after a period where the “male” Orlando’s realtionship with the local Indian Rajah was less than entirely heterosexual (it is not implied that they were “at it” – but even for the period it is pictured as … unrestrained).