On the morning of a new Congressional hearing led by popular congressman Stephen Collins (Ben Affleck) the lead Research Assistant falls in front of a train on her way to the hearings. Old style news reporter for the Washington Globe Cal McAffrey (Russell Crowe), investigating a shooting of a petty thief thinks there may be a connection because his seasoned hunches as a reporter just tell him so. His old college roommate Congressman Collins is taking a high-profile position as a champion against a private corporation called PointCorp which will have taps on the entire workings of American phones, e-mails, and all private information. As the story breaks of the death of the Research Assistant so does the congressman break in public, shedding tears and generating rumors that he was having an affair with the young thing from Minnesota. When the Washington Globe’s blogger newbie college grad Della Frye (Rachel McAdams) approaches McAffrey for an opinion about his former dorm buddy Collins, she is immediately told to get lost by the old-school reporter, but after looking over the coincidences, McAffrey pulls Frye into his investigation and reporting of how murder and PointCorp may be threatening Collins. As the two get deeper into the facts they realize that there is a structured network of former soldiers that have been trained into a mercenary group-for-hire and now are employed by a division of the corporation Collins is questioning in Congress. As Della learns how to get a story from the inside from the old pro McAffrey the story develops and exposes corruption on a much deeper level than was initially seen. What is more shocking is that a murderer is attempting to keep the story from breaking and McAffrey and Frye are in his sights. -spelvini

A thief is fleeing through Washington DC at night and is killed with a silenced gun by a man carrying a briefcase. The killer shoots a pizza delivery man who sees the incident and is left in a coma. The next day, a young woman is killed by a subway train in an apparent suicide. Congressman Stephen Collins (Affleck) is distraught to hear the news, as the woman was Sonia, a lead researcher on his staff. Collins, who has military experience, is leading an investigation into PointCorp, a private defense contractor with controversial operations involving mercenaries. Reporter Cal McAffrey (Crowe) was a college roommate of Collins, and the two discuss Sonia’s death. Collins reveals that he had been having an affair with Sonia, and that Sonia had sent him a cheerful video message on the morning of her death, which he believes is inconsistent behavior for someone about to commit suicide. Della Frye (McAdams), a colleague of Cal, discovers that Sonia’s death occurred in one of only three CCTV blind spots on the metro platform. Cal believes the shootings are related to Sonia’s death and finds a link between the thief and a homeless girl who sought out Cal. She gives him photographs that the thief, a friend of hers, stole from the killer’s briefcase. The photos show surveillance images of Sonia talking to a well-dressed man. Della visits the hospital where the pizza delivery man is regaining consciousness. She bumps into a man while exiting an elevator. She sees the pizza man in his hospital bed shot dead by an unseen sniper. Distraught, she returns to her newspaper’s office and reviews CCTV footage; she recognises the man she bumped into at the hospital on the footage from the metro platform and at the elevator in the hospital. Cal asks a connection he has inside PointCorp to find information regarding the man. He reveals that PointCorp stands to gain $40 billion annually from its mercenary activities in the Middle East and domestically. Cal speaks with Collins, who shares his research findingsPointCorp is cooperating with other defense contractors to create a monopoly and purchase Government surveillance and defense contracts, essentially privatizing United States security. Cal’s PointCorp insider returns with the address of someone linked to the suspected assassin. Cal visits the address to find the assassin living there. Terrified, Cal makes an excuse and tries to leave. Stalked by the man, Cal calls the police who arrive and force the man to disappear after he shoots at Cal. Della, following a lead, finds the identity of the well-dressed man speaking to Sonia in the photographsa PR executive working for a subsidiary of PointCorp. Cal blackmails him into talking about his activities with Sonia, and secretly tapes their conversation. He reveals that Sonia was paid to spy on Collins for PointCorp, but that she loved Collins and was pregnant with his baby when she was killed. Before Cal’s newspaper goes to press, Collins goes on record to present his research into PointCorp. Cal notices Collins’ wife knows more about Sonia than he thought, and rushes to Collins’ office to speak with him. Collins reveals that he had been suspicious of Sonia, and that he hired the assassin to watch her. The assassin is Corporal Bingham, a former military colleague of Collins’, whose life Collins had once saved. Collins says that Bingham didn’t trust Sonia and killed her with no authorization from him. Cal goes to his car where he is confronted by Bingham, who says he will kill for a friend. Cal ducks, and federal officers shoot Bingham before he opens fire. At the office, Cal and Della type up their story and depart together. The film credits roll with footage of the newspaper being printed.

One of Afleck’s better moments.

Rating: 4.3 out of 5

The film opens in Lexington, Massachusetts in 1959, where a competition is held among the students of a new elementary school to celebrate its opening. The winning plan, from student Lucinda Embry, a seemingly mental disorder/mentally disturbed girl, is to bury a time capsule containing the students’ drawings of the future to be opened 50 years later in 2009. She is prevented from finishing her image, which is actually a series of seemingly random numbers, and goes missing during the ceremony. Her teacher later finds her in a gym closet, frantically scratching the remaining numbers into the door.

Fifty years later, the time capsule is opened and the pictures are handed down to the new generation of students. Caleb, the son of MIT professor and astrophysics|astrophysicist John Koestler, receives Lucinda’s envelope. Initially dismissing them as random numbers, John notices a single random number sequence, 911012996, which contains the date of the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks|World Trade Center attacks as well as the death toll of the attack. Further research leads John to realise the numbers are a list contain the dates and death tolls of every major disaster, natural and man made, that has happened over the past 50 years, with three that have not occurred yet.

When a commercial plane crash kills 81, the legitimacy of the list of numbers is confirmed and leading John to believe that Lucinda had an ability to prognosticate since childhood until she died. It is also revealed through this incident that the numbers contain the coordinates for every event listed. As his wife died in one of the past events, John starts to believe his son was chosen to get Lucinda’s prophecies. After Caleb receives a vision of future global catastrophe from a silent man, John tries to contact the late Lucinda’s daughter, Diana, to gain more information, but is rebuffed. But when John also predicts the second event, a subway train crash, Diana and her daughter, Abby, visit John and Caleb, and Diana reveals that her mother foretold of the date of her death would be on October 19th, which is also within the list. They investigate Lucinda’s old mobile home in the woods, discovering walls of news clippings of the events and a drawing of Merkabah|Ezekiel’s Wheel. During their investigation, the group encounters the silent man and three others, who vanish in a flash of light protruded from the man’s mouth when John confronts them. Later Caleb is found writing numbers very similar to the ones that Lucinda wrote without realizing what he is doing. This may suggest that those numbers are predictions for future events. As a result of the confrontation, Abby is revealed to have been contacted by the “whisper people”.

Initially believing that the last event will kill only 33, John eventually re-examines the numbers after Diana’s mention on how her mother used to write numbers and letters backward. He discovers that the final digits are not “33″, but actually “EE” written backwards; the final event is a massive solar flare that will kill “Everyone Else.” As Diana prepares to travel to a system of caves she believes will save them, John breaks into the school to steal the door Lucinda scratched the numbers on. At his house, he begins to scrape the paint off the door, but Diana refuses to wait for him, and leaves with the kids. As the solar flare approaches, it begins to disrupt cell phone signals, preventing John from contacting Diana. She is finally able to contact John through a gas station pay phone, and he tells her that the final numbers are the coordinates of her mother’s house, which he believes is safe, while the caves won’t protect them from the solar flare’s radiation. When panic erupts at the gas station following the government’s activation of the national Emergency Alert System and announcement of the solar flare, two of the whisper people hijack Diana’s car with the two children. Giving chase in another car, Diana is hit by a truck trying to run a red light, dying exactly at midnight, on the very day her mother predicted.

Arriving back at Lucinda’s mobile home, John discovers the children are safe and comfortable in the presence of the whisper people. The whisper people are revealed to be celestial angel-like beings who invite the children to escape the destruction “to help everyone start over”. At first, Caleb is very reluctant to go when his father is not invited to come along; John successfully persuades him to go, saying that they will be together again eventually. The whisper people leave Earth on their ship, a massive structure resembling Ezekiel’s Wheel, as other ships also depart Earth. As anarchy reigns in New York City and Boston John arrives to be with his parents and sister just as the solar flare strikes Earth and incinerates all life on the planet. Caleb and Abby are dropped off on an Earth-like planet with at least two moons as the other ships drop off their passengers. The movie ends as the two children, dressed in white, run toward a large white tree, possibly being the fabled Tree of Life.

Rating: 3.7 out of 5 (plotline is good, movie is good, ending sucks)

A group of self-absorbed actors set out to make the most expensive war film. But after ballooning costs force the studio to cancel the movie, the frustrated director refuses to stop shooting, leading his cast into the jungles of Southeast Asia, where they encounter real bad guys.

Tropic Thunder may go down as Stiller’s first brush with genius, as well as new, rippling biceps. Countering them (and his pecs and all around movie star looks) is a grizzled, ’60s lingo-dropping African-American Sgt. Osiris, played by Australian thespian Kirk Lazarus, played by Robert Downey Jr. Osiris/Lazarus/Downey uses a play to Stiller’s vanity (how do you look so good? Diet, mostly…) to steal a map away from him at a critical point in the film. What’s really happening is Downey stealing every scene he’s in and, what ultimately makes Tropic Thunder so terrific, ensuring that it will never be thought of as “that Ben Stiller movie.” When it first comes out it will be the “Robert Downey plays a black guy movie” and then, once it settles on cable and DVD, will simply be known as Tropic Thunder, comedy masterpiece. They’ll be quoting from this one for years.

The premise is idiotic and simple – a Hollywood production of a Vietnam war tale is going horribly overbudget and the frazzled Brit theatre director on his first picture (played perfectly by Steve Coogan) takes the advice of the thousand-yard-staring vet (Nick Nolte) on whose book the film based. Put them in the sh*t.

A few misunderstandings, dormant land mines and run-ins with Burmese opium concerns later and you have the best actors-in-distress movie since Three Amigos. But where the Amigos had Randy Newman as a singing bush, Tropic Thunder has Robert Downey Jr. His Kirk Lazarus, the dude playing the dude disguised as the other dude, is a landmark in cinema. I’m not joking. Arriving at a time when racial identity is taking on new dimensions in American life, Downey’s blackface is a carnival of metatextuality, impervious to cries of racism. Partially because “Osiris” is so cool! He’s one of the hippest black characters since Shaft! (I should be careful here – I’m really speaking about Lazarus-as-Osiris, the character we see during the bulk of the film, as Downey’s Lazarus refuses to break character. The “Osiris” we see in clips of Tropic Thunder, the movie they are making in Tropic Thunder is just boilerplate.

All praise goes to Downey, of course, and the chutzpah to let him play this role, but the other performances are top notch. The bald, fat Tom Cruise you’ve heard about is quite good – one can’t help thinking about Cruise during the film’s set-up of Stiller’s Speedman, an A-lister that suddenly everyone despises.  Jack Black reels in his usual shtick a bit as the drug addicted a-hole, and second tier names Brandon T. Jackson and Jay Baruchel do more than hold their own. The big breakout, though, is young Brandon Soo Hoo – the best moppetty Asian kid in a Hollywood movie since Short Round.

Brandon Soo Hoo, as the head of the evil Opium ring who also loves “retarded movies,” made me choke on my complimentary popcorn. He manages to be adorable and ,somehow, also frightening. . . in a 13 year old broken English kinda way.

This is a refreshing departure from some of the more inane comedic roles Stiller has salvaged. Robert Downey, Jr. should be nominated for an academy award for his performance. And, of course, Jack Black had a typical scene in his underwear. While Stiller is a very talented actor and is very capable in a dramatic role as demonstrated in his earlier movie, Permanent Midnight, he seems to find greater pleasure flexing his pecs in a comedy. His comedic roles are getting a bit too stereotypical and some of his mannerisms which carry over from one role to the next, make them all sometimes appear the same. Nonetheless he is very talented and this movie may truly be his comedic pinnacle.

Rating: 4.7 out of 5 Jalapenos

The Dark Knight – 5 out of 5 Habeneros

Hellboy II: The Golden Army – 3.7 out of 5 Jalapenos

Hancock – 3.5 out of 5 Jalapenos

Step Brothers – 1.5 out of 5 Jalapenos

Mama Mia – 1 out of 5 Jalapenos

Swing Vote – 3.7 out of 5 Jalapenos

The Mummy 3 – a good romp – 4.2 out of 5 Jalapenos

The latest from M. Night Shyamalan.

In the northeast part of America, people suddenly begin committing suicide en masse. First they become disoriented, then stop moving, and finally find the quickest way to kill themselves. The pandemic begins in parks, and quickly spreads to nearby population centers. It is initially believed to be a bioterrorist attack, but this is ruled out as the events increase in frequency.

Elliot Moore (Mark Wahlberg) is a science teacher in Philadelphia. After the school is informed of the pandemic, he decides to leave the city with his wife, Alma Moore (Zooey Deschanel), and his fellow math teacher, Julian (John Leguizamo), who is also bringing his eight-year-old daughter, Jess (Ashlyn Sanchez). The train soon stops at a small town in western Pennsylvania; train services are discontinued after the crew loses contact with “everyone.” Julian finds out that the “attacks” have hit Princeton, where his wife is currently headed, and leaves Jess with Elliot while he hitches a ride in an attempt to retrieve her. However, it has already been hit by the pandemic, and a hole in the car’s roof exposes them.

Meanwhile, Elliot, Alma, and Jess manage to hitchhike with a botanist and his wife; the man explains his theory that plants are attacking people as a defense mechanism. He elaborates on the complex mechanisms that often seem to appear spontaneously, involving strategies such as attracting predators to kill off specific threats and fostering communication between different species of plants. As they drive, they find themselves surrounded on all sides by affected towns. A number of other cars arrive in the same location. A soldier, Private First Class Auster, suggests moving away from the population centers on foot to avoid any attacks, as the pandemic has been occurring in smaller and smaller populations.

The group of survivors splits into two, with Elliot, Alma, and Jess in a smaller group. Auster’s group is struck by the pandemic within earshot of Elliot, and he concludes that it is likely caused by an airborne neurotoxin exuded by the surrounding plants. The larger the group of people, the more likely it is to trigger the defense mechanism. Elliot makes the group split into three smaller ones with Elliot, Alma, Jess, and two teenage boys staying together.

While looking for food for Jess, Elliot’s group finds a boarded up house with survivors inside, still believing the pandemic to be a terrorist attack. They are unwilling to open the doors. When the two teenage boys begin to aggressively force an entry, they are shot dead. Elliot’s group is forced to leave. They make their way to the house of an elderly woman, who lives in complete isolation; thus, she is ignorant of the pandemic. Though she allows them to stay, she proves to be a harsh host and a paranoid woman once she sees Elliot “eyeing her lemon drink”. In the morning, Elliot finds himself alone; going downstairs, he hears the voices of Alma and Jess but cannot find them. He inadvertently enters the old woman’s room and she angrily insists that they leave immediately.

The woman storms out of the house into the garden, where she is affected by the neurotoxin. Realizing that the defense mechanism has become even more sensitive, Elliot locks himself inside the house. Elliot finds himself in a room where he can hear Alma and Jess. He finds a speaking tube, which leads to a shed outside the house. Conversing with his wife, he says that he would want nothing more than to be with her. They relinquish themselves to their fate, but the neurotoxin doesn’t affect them: the pandemic is over.

Three months later, Elliot and Alma have adjusted to a new life with Jess as their adopted daughter. On television, an environmentalist warns that the pandemic may only have been a warning, like a rash that precedes an infection. Elliot takes Jess to the bus stop for the first day of school while Alma stays at home, timing a home pregnancy test. When he returns, Alma greets him with a smile, and they embrace. In the Jardin des Tuileries in Paris, the pandemic appears to happen once again as everyone in sight suddenly stops moving as the wind suddenly moves the trees.

Now that the plot has been exposed, you may want to save yourself the price of admission and wait for it to come to HBO or even network TV. The movie clocks in at one hour and 28 minutes. The cinematography must have been low bid and certainly contributes to this being another flop. It is a much better plot line than seen in The Village, but like The Village, the essence of the plot is exposed early and then you are just bored. What was up with Zooey Deschanel? Did he force her to be “doe-eyed” to the point of almost being Marty Feldmanesque with exopthalmos? At least Feldman has a medical explanation. Also with her useless dialog and almost autistic acting, she should have been blonde. Of course, the entire dialog was more suited for a Sylvester Stallone movie. In fact, this movie may have played better with simply a good musical score and no dialog and only an occasional superscript. Being a fan of Shyalaman’s earlier works, such as Unbreakable, he continues to disappoint. Maybe if he got over his fear of going more than 50 miles from home his movie’s would improve.

Rating: 1 out of 5 Jalapenos.

This romantic comedy film stars Cameron Diaz as a  strait-laced, Type-A commodities trader who cuts loose in Vegas after being dumped by her pill of a boyfriend. There she bumps into irresponsible, irrepressible Jack, played by Ashton Kutcher who is in Vegas because his father fired him from the family business. They drink, they marry, they win $3 mil at the slots, they wake up with hangovers, they bicker and regret and rue the day. Then they return to New York and their respective hollow lives. Before granting their annulment, a fancifully creative judge (Dennis Miller) orders these Bickersons to live together for six months, or else no money. The screenplay by Dana Fox devolves into a series of humiliating pranks. 

 Joy and Jack cohabitate uneasily, whine to their respective best pals, drive each other nuts and eventually acknowledge that what they have is real. So they end up with love and money. 

 The movie is quite formularic. Actually not a bad performance by Kutcher. It would have been better with any co-star than Cameron Diaz. I do not understand why she is a drawing card. She is unattractive and always has a “pruney” look. She reminds me of someone who has spent too much time in the sun and whose skin has turned leathery and wrinkly. She is a horrible actress and alway winds up with the parts where she is always screaming and flailing around like a “valley girl.”

Not a real cinematographic event, but watchable and provides some senseless humor.

Rating: 3.5 out of 5 Jalapenos

Harold and Kumar Escape from Guantanamo Bay marks the triumphant return of these two hilarious, slacker anti-heroes. The movie stars John Cho as Harold and Kal Penn as Kumar, two stoners who can’t seem to get a break. Their last adventure found them traveling across country to find a White Castle hamburger in order to satisfy a weed-induced case of “the munchies.”

This time, the boys get themselves in trouble trying to sneak a bong on board a flight to Amsterdam. Now, being suspected of terrorism, they are forced to run from the law and try to find a way to prove their innocence. What follows is an irreverent and epic journey of deep thoughts, deeper inhaling and a wild trip around the world that is as “un-PC” as it gets.

This is an absolutely mindless movie not to be taken too seriously. If you can laugh at crude, stoner based toilet humor, then you will appreciate many of the moments throughout the movie. There is even bigger cameo performance by Neal Patrick Harris (as himself). He does however get blasted with a shotgun in this one … will he survive to appear in Harold and Kumar’s next adventure?

There is no stereotype or subject matter too taboo in “Harold and Kumar Escape from Guantanamo Bay.” So if you’re easily or even somewhat offended at the prospect of jokes about race, rampant xenophobia or even a cookout with the Ku Klux Klan, you might not appreciate the film’s decidedly anti-PC take on the world. For the rest of us, this is a wildly unapologetic comedy that will keep you thoroughly entertained and laughing right to the final credits.

Harold and Kumar” isn’t for the intellectual seeking a deeper meaning in their movie. It’s just dumb and goofy with a pair of stoners getting into one improbable situation after another and in this case, that’s all that’s needed for a funny, often hilarious film.

Rating: 4 out of 5 Tobasco Peppers for Ole Time Stoner, non PC humor

3 out of 5 Jalapenos for true movie value. Still worth seeing.

Not being famililar with the comic book version of this story, I have no idea whether it is like the Marvel comic version or not. However, this proved to be the first real blockbuster of the Summer. Let’s hope it’s just the start of a good movie season.

The synopsis of Iron Man looks something like this: “Tony Stark (Robert Downey Jr.) is the CEO of Stark Industries which produces advance weapon systems for the U.S. military. Tony’s father started the company after WWII, and after his death Tony inherited the company, worth billions. Tony lives the life as a hard drinking, rich playboy ladies man, but he is also a genius who has invented many high-tech items for the company. Tony flies to Afghanistan to demonstrate a new weapons test to the army. On his way back to his plane, his convoy is attacked by terrorists, and Tony is wounded by a Stark Industries missile. Tony is captured and held hostage in a cave with Raza (Faran Tahir), a doctor who saves his life. The terrorists force Tony and Raza to reproduce the new destructive Jericho missile Tony was demonstrating from parts of other weapons. Instead, Tony decides to build a suit of armor with Razas help. The suit gives Tony the strength and protection to be able to escape the terrorists. Back in America, Tony builds a better suit of armor which gives him superhuman strength with the ability to fly. With the help of his personal assistant Pepper Potts (Gwyneth Paltrow) and Jim Rhodes (Terrence Howard), Tony vows to protect the world as Iron Man.”

Robert Downey, Jr. is a proven quality actor. Why he crashed his career because of addictions like so many others, we will probably never know. At least he is still alive. He does look a bit beat up from all the drug abuse, etc., but his acting ability is still there. Who would have thought he would be comic book hero, but hopefully he can enjoy this success in this venue and get his promising career back on track.

The movie was fast-paced from beginning to end. It had meaningful dialog a decent plot and great special effects. I had to go back and check the cast for the actor who played the anti-hero. I kept thinking it was William Hurt but it was really Jeff Bridges. I guess I never considered Jeff Bridges because his character wasn’t autistic like StarMan.

A really good time. Well worth the price of full admission.

Rating: 5 out of 5 Jalapenos.

“For die-hard fans of the Fab Four — and anyone who was touched by the magic of the ’60s — the film is a strange, nostalgic, suitably outrageous ode to a very real revolution in consciousness.” – William Arnold, Seattle Post-Intelligencer

This is a very interesting and entertaining movie that is worth the experience just for the musical arrangements of 33 Beatles’ songs. As one who was coming of age in that era – with the draft, Viet Nam, and student rebellion and protest – this is a nostalgic journey back through time. In fact that essentially sums up the basic story line. A 20 something blue collar Brit comes to America to locate his Father who had had an affair with his Mother leaving her with a child in the oven. Unfortunately Pop is a Janitor at Princeton. While there he runs into a “Richie Rich” type and they establish a friendship that results in our Brit attending the typical dysfunctional upper class Thanksgiving dinner where he meets the sister. Of course our college boy has no ambition and as a result goes on an extended road trip to the Village in NYC taking along his new found friend. The sister soon follows, a love relationship ensues, she becomes politically active, brother gets drafted, and our illegal alien Brit is an artistic pacifist.

It’s a loosely bound plot. More a menagerie of music videos than story lines. Very well done and the arrangements are by far more superior than the originals – from a musical standpoint. This ain’t rock and roll, it is a compendium of functional lyrics set to real music – probably more suited now to those who grew up in that era and are becoming more placid and traditional.

Although this is a 2 hour and 11 minute movie, it actually goes too fast. It is definitely worth the price of admission just to hear the arrangement of “Let it Be” and the accompanying video clips.

A great stroll down memory lane and actually a pretty good overview of the attitude and mores of late 60′s and early 70′s.

This lengthy movie is base on a true story. A very good overview has been published in Men’s Journal online and I will give you excerpts here to review the storyline: “

Fifteen years after an enigmatic 24-year-old walked Into the Wild, the site of his death has become a shrine. As Hollywood weighs in with a portrait of the young man as a saintlike visionary, has the truth been lost? Inside the strange life and tragic death of “Alexander Supertramp.” –Matthew Power

“Fifteen years have passed: 15 howling Alaska winters and 15 brief frenzied summers, and the ancient bus on the Stampede Trail still rusts in the wilderness, almost exactly as Chris McCandless left it. Twenty-two miles from the nearest road, shaded out by alder and black spruce on a moraine rise above a creek, the green and white WWII-vintage International Harvester looks surreally out of place, like an artifact from a vanished civilization. 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. It doesn’t look to be the sort of place that would inspire a best-selling book, much less a major motion picture. But that’s exactly what it is. Fireweed and wild potato grow up in the wheel wells. On the side of the bus fairbanks 142 is still legible in paint that has been bleached and scoured by the seasons. A few bullet holes have starred the windows; whether they were fired out of anger or boredom is unclear. Other than that, the people who have made the trek out here, out of respect or superstition, have left the site largely untouched. The vertebrae of the young moose McCandless shot lie scattered. The bones, and a smattering of feathers, add to the spooky aura of a charnel ground. Inside, near an old oil-barrel stove, McCandless’s jeans are neatly folded on a shelf, knees patched with scraps of an old army blanket, seat patched with duct tape. And the bed is still there too, springs and stuffing bursting from the stained mattress, as if a wild animal’s been at it. The same bed where they found his body. It was a haunting tale, capturing the imagination of the country. September 1992, deep in the bush of the Alaskan interior northeast of Mount McKinley, in an abandoned bus on a disused mining trail, the decomposed body of a man was found by a moose hunter. The remains weighed only 67 pounds, and he had apparently died of starvation. He carried no identification, but a few rolls of undeveloped film and a cryptic journal chronicled a horrifying descent into sickness and slow death after 112 days alone in the wilderness. When the man’s identity was established, the puzzle only deepened. His name was Chris McCandless, a 24-year-old honors graduate from Emory University, star athlete, and beloved brother and son from a wealthy but dysfunctional East Coast family. With a head full of Jack London and Thoreau, McCandless rechristened himself “Alexander Supertramp,” cut all ties with his family, gave his trust fund to charity, and embarked on a two-year odyssey that brought him to Alaska, that mystic repository of American notions of wilderness, a blank spot on the map where he could test the limits of his wits and endurance. Setting off with little more than a .22 caliber rifle and a 10-pound bag of rice, McCandless hoped to find his true self by renouncing society and living off the land. But, as Craig Medred would note in the Anchorage Daily News, “the Alaska wilderness is a good place to test yourself. The Alaska wilderness is a bad place to find yourself.” No one ever saw McCandless alive again. Fifteen years later his story continues to resonate as a quintessentially American tale, and its hero has assumed near mythic status, blurring the lines between living memory and the creation of a legend. When writer Jon Krakauer first heard McCandless’s story, he later told a reporter, “the hair on my neck rose.” Krakauer’s profound empathy for his subject and obsessive research yielded Into the Wild, a heartbreaking portrait that has sold more than 2 million copies and become the authoritative version of the McCandless story, around which all discussions are framed. In Krakauer’s telling, McCandless represents the human urge to push the limits of experience, to live a life untouched by the trappings of culture and civilization. Now that portrait has been taken up by the ultimate mythologizer: Hollywood. This film was written and directed by Sean Penn and filmed on location in the many places McCandless traveled. Woven through with the timeless themes of self-invention, risk, and our complex relationship to the natural world, the enigma of Chris McCandless is once again being debated, more vociferously than ever. Was his death a Shakespearean tragedy or a pitch-black comedy of errors? What impact has the tale and its renown had on our perception of Alaska? And perhaps most tantalizingly: Did Krakauer, and now Penn, get key parts of the story wrong? ” This is a short summary compared to the 2 hour and 38 minute film. It was a haunting movie – even when you already knew the outcome. It was a sad movie because of the outcome. This is another one of those movies that makes you think. I came away conflicted. I appreciated that this young millenial student rejected his calling to be narcissistic and unproductive and struck out to find the meaning of life. Dramatized in the end is the true essence of reality in that we cannot successfully get through this world alone. We may reject the world but we should not reject human relationships. Many questions could be raised about why he didn’t look for an alternative way to cross the river and get back to society after he had survived the worst of the Alaskan Winter. Why did he not get more prepared in wilderness survival? Did he become mentally unbalanced as a result of the isolation from people or was he really potentially schizophrenic? Did he really not want to go back to civilization after he had accomplished his goal and simply gave up? One could attempt to psychoanalyze for decades but we will never have the real answer. What are the great lessons learned here? Part of happiness in living comes from the interpersonal relationships with other human organisms. Some solitude is often necessary so that we can listen to that still small voice by whatever name you want to call it. And, there can be joy in life without “stuff.” The bottom line is one must know their limits and everything must be done in moderation. See the movie. I would suspect it will speak to you. Maybe not the same way it did to me or to anyone else for that matter. I do think it speaks to us at whatever place we are in our journey of life. And like anything else, too many movies like this can be hazardous to your mental health. We all need a little slap-stick humor, vampire horror, gratuitous violence, and film noir drama from time to time.