the groundhog day project

You gotta wonder, actually, how detailed the script for Adventures of the Wilderness Family even was. Aside from a few scenes, there isn't much dialogue, the story turns arbitrarily--hey, look, a cougar; hey, look, a bear; hey, look, another bear; hey, look, a random mountain man; hey, look, arbitrary use of slow motion; hey, look, Jenny's sick despite our rather basic attempt to save her from urban pollution--and there isn't really much of a plot, not a formally structured one anyway. This is 1975, but as I've said before cinematic decades bleed into one another. This is more a tail-end 60s film, a family-friendly extension of the counterculture. Skip Robinson is like a shoulda-been hippie who turned establishment, maybe because he got Pat pregnant and he needed work, because that's how the man says it's supposed to be. Skip tells the pilot of the plane that drops them off, "We thought a lot more than twice" about bringing the family out there. Th...

When I was looking up information on the USC Shoah Foundation yesterday , I happened upon an interview with Steven Spielberg from USA Today with a (mis?)quotation as its title-- 'This is what I was put on earth to do' - Steven Spielberg Maybe he said that to the interviewer, but the only line I can find in the actual text of the interview that is similar to that is this (with a little context): When young people come up to me and instead of saying they liked my last movie, they say, "My grandparents gave testimony [to the foundation] in 1995." Hearing that make me feel I was put on this earth to make a difference, not just in the lives of movies audiences. The testimonies help others hear stories that are not easy to tell or listen to. I'm not going to talk about the holocaust again today, or the whole poetry after Auschwitz thing. Let's leave Adorno behind, maybe even leave Everything Is Illuminated behind for the most part. Today is Day 729 of this ...

The day before (or was it the day of? I know it's the first bookmark in my Into the Wild folder on Chrome) I was going to start watching this movie for this blog, someone linked to an article on RobGreenfield.TV called "How to Travel America For Free (without mooching)." He left his home in San Diego with $2000 cash and gave away his last $421 on August 12--this act he calls "a leap of faith in humanity." The article was published September 26. Greenfield (2014) summarizes the experience: This experience is about much more than just not spending money. It's about showing that you and I can be contributing members to society whether we have money or not, It's about showing that there are much more rewarding ways to live than just throwing money at every situation. It's about living a life that is truly beneficial to the earth, my community, and myself. It's about being more involved in our communities and treating each other with respect. And i...

Maybe Chris McCandless is insane. I mean, despite everything I said yesterday . Maybe we need to label it "insane" when someone can see the cracks in the veneer and the cracks in the facade of the world he or she has been born into and raised up through and in which he or she is expected to find a career and work and procreate and pop out another generation to do the same thing... ad infinitum. We've got to label that "insane" because what else are we going to do? Listen? See what he or she has got to say and risk seeing the faultlines ourselves? No. Fuck that. Watch your television, binge watch your Netflix and your Hulu and Amazon Prime , glue yourself to Instagram and Twitter and Facebook , check out of the real world except for (or maybe even during) those hours you are expected at your desk or the checkout counter or the garage or wherever the fuck it is that you work. If it gets to be too much, there's alcohol and medication and more of that telev...

I never got to the point I wanted to make yesterday . It's difficult, really, to demonstrate how Into the Wild doesn't (quite) romanticize Chris McCandless' adventure just by looking at how he leaves his parents and his sister behind. His parents are not portrayed as good people that we might care about when they hurt. We can objectively understand that they are in pain, but we just might not care (even if the film does make the effort of framing the film with the parents in pain, Billie in the opening scene, Walt just before the ending. And, Carine--she tells us that she understands her brother's choice to leave. In reality, she explicitly knew that he was going to separate himself from their parents, though she didn't know what he was going to do. In her book, she shares a letter he sent her, which included this: "I'm going to completely knock them out of my life... I'm going to divorce them as my parents." What I think really serves to de-ro...

But , Into the Wild doesn't really romanticize Chris McCandless. At least no more than it detracts from that same romanticism. We begin with a mother in pain. Billie (Marcia Gay Harden) sits up from sleeping because she has heard her son's voice. Of course, he is not there. He's been gone for two years, with no contact. The film even reduces his contact; in reality, Chris sent his grades home from Atlanta before leaving. There was a note attached: Here is a copy of my final transcript. Gradewise things went pretty well and I ended up with a high cumulative average. Thank you for the pictures, the shaving gear, and the postcard from Paris. It seems that you really enjoyed your trip there. It must have been a lot of fun. I gave Lloyd [Chris's closest friend at Emory] his picture, and he was very grateful; he did not have a shot of his diploma getting handed to him. Not much else happening, but it's starting to get real hot and humid down her. Say Hi to everyon...

Look, I can appreciate this. I was young too. I felt just like you. Hated authority, hated all my bosses, thought they were full of shit. Look, it's like they say, if you're not a rebel by the age of 20, you got no heart, but if you haven't turned establishment by 30, you've got no brains. Because there are no storybook romances, no fairytale endings. So, before you run out and change the world, ask yourself, "What do you really want?" --Buddy Ackerman (Kevin Spacey), Swimming with Sharks The movie begins with lines from Lord Byron, not just because of the link to nature. Also, Chris McCandless--the fictional version, if not the real version--is a Byronic hero. A bit like an antihero, the Byronic hero doesn't fit in with society. He's got a distaste for social norms and the trappings of life as most of us know it. I don't need to deliberately be political (or avoid being so) in this blog, as I did yesterday , because the Byronic hero is inherentl...

There is a pleasure in the pathless woods, There is a rapture on the lonely shore, There is society where none intrudes, By the deep Sea, and music in its roar: I love not Man the less, but Nature more... That's Lord Byron, from "Childe Harold's Pilgrimage." Those lines start the film Into the Wild . With those lines, that last one, especially, we get a clear picture of how Jon Krakauer, who wrote the book, (or Sean Penn, who directed the film), if not Chris McCandless himself, saw things with this story--McCandless wasn't necessarily turning away from people--from society maybe, but that's a separate thing. He was turning toward nature. And, I get that. I live in the city, have lived around Los Angeles virtually my entire life. But, I like getting out of here when I can. The recent roadtrip involved far too much time in the car, not enough time outside, but there were still some nice moments, at Willow Canyon, at Meteor Crater, at Acoma... (I shared...

On the Stampede Trail near the Sushana River, about ten miles west of the Teklanika and Savage Rivers (and 22 miles from the closest road), sits an abandoned bus--Fairbanks City Transit System 142. Matthew Power (2007), at Men's Journal writes about this "green and white WWII-vintage International Harvester [which] looks surrealy out of place, like an artifact from a vanished civilization." (And, Chris (Emil Hirsch) just found it as I typed that; nice timing.) Power continues: "The bus doesn't at first seem a likely time capsule of American mythology, a shrine to which people from around the world make pilgrimages and leave tributes in memory of a young man whom they see as a fallen hero." Objects, like films, can anchor memories, anchor stories. Looking at the graves in at Boot Hill a few weeks ago, for example--while my kids didn't get it, I thought on the story of the "Gunfight at the OK Corral" the men who died there. If I had a car han...