FilmBender: sh*tfaced on movies

"Into the Wild" and over the river and out of your mind

 

Emile Hirsch plays the college kid who's fed up with the real world, so he goes off the grid to the real world in the film adaptation directed by Sean Penn, Into the Wild.  His journey is beautiful and tragic and true (based on Jon Krakauer's epic biographic novel on Christopher McCandless).  Emile bumps into so many great characters along the way like Kristen Stewart as a super-young-but-sexually-curious-and-sizzlin' hippie on a commune to Vince Vaughn who plays his funny and friendly and felonious boss at the grain mill to Hal Holbrook as the venerable sage (I used this term twice this week, and those who happen to be Betas will also find it familiar) to a list that's too long to fully detail but includes Catherine Keener, Marcia Gay Harden, William Hurt and Jena Malone.

The wilderness is packed with irony with its beauty and unforgiving ways (er, can anyone say flash flood) while freeing and trapping in isolation along with being an adventure and claustrophobic to the state of insanity.  The Alanis Morissett lyric that ends up being the dichotomy of death is that while the wilderness presents a safety blanket from the cold madness of what our lives have become in this modern world, if you happen to have the b*lls to actually venture way out there, even the simplest of issues (and there can be many issues) can bring about the most complex and dangerous of predicaments.  Watch the movie trailer and read on because...

"Synecdoche, New York" doesn't feel like it's spelled right

And this movie doesn't feel like it's really much of anything.  Really.  I feel like a trader even saying it.  But I didn't like it.  I want to bang my head against the wall like Dobby for letting the words escape from my mouth, but sh*t, I just didn't get it.  Synecdoche, New York is a wildly large little film about a nebbish, hypochondriac playwright (Philip Seymour Hoffman) -- who is almost turned on by Samantha Morton's bodacious box office -- and his dissatisfied wife (Catherine Keener) who leaves him and becomes an accomplished painter.

But it's not really about any of that stuff... because it's a screenplay by Charlie Kaufman, we all have to figure out what in the sam h*ll is actually happening.  As you may know, Charlie wrote some of my favorite movies including Adaptation, Confessions of a Dangerous Mind, Eternal Sunshine of a Spotless Mind and Being John Malkovich.  This one, like Adaptation, becomes a recursive story but doesn't quite all come together.  Maybe because it's because this is the first time he's tried to direct, but I'm thinking that no one could save this monstrosity.

FilmBender is Funny Movie Reviews.  Jennifer Jason Leigh was a nice surprise in this one... slutty as always.  Wish I had more to say.  But I really want you to know that I tried hard to like this one... I laughed at all the right times and thought at all the others.  What more could I do?  Bums me out to be hatin' like this, but I guess this is really just a cry for help.  Can someone help me understand this one or at least help me learn to spell it?