jessicalindsey:lovepuppy:katylindy:

changed my mind after thinking about into the wild again (and seeing this movie still). we’re back on! he just needs a trim. or something.

thank you to jessica dot schoeder!

I also think he looks sort of like Josh in the eyes. Which is another reason I liked the movie.

Amazing book, amazing story, mediocre movie. I’m a huge non-fiction journalism/memorist reader and my problem is as always reading the books before I see the movie and inevitably spending those 90 minutes in the theater comparing the two. Books don’t have to make up shit to be dramatic - real life gives us enough material to spark the brain, but this movie inserted drama where none existed (and I thought none was needed). It bordered on the cheesy MTV true-life treatment at times, zooming in on words as if they needed more emphasis and treating the viewer in a condescending way sometimes.

However it gave us one of the best (and underrated) performances of Vince Vaughn’s career and I love Hirsch and Penn’s style is all around hard to enjoy. I know Penn worked very close with the author (Krakauer) and you can see that, but at the same time I hated that they added a random love interest and forced much of the introspection and enlightenment I had discovered myself in the book. The movie, I’d say, is around 80% accurate and if I hadn’t read the book first, I know I would’ve come away much more satisfied.

Of course the same goes for 21 (with Bringing Down the House) and The Lost World, and how many other book/movie combos did I ruin by not waiting to see the flick first?

In the cases of “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas” and “Fight Club” - two movies I love inside and out, I saw the movies first (Fight Club blew me away and I watched it immediately again as soon as the credits hit, but FaLiLV didn’t register for me) and then sought out the books. When I did that, I found that the books added so much more to the experience for me.

Fight Club even had a different ending than the book, but Chuck (also working closely on the movie) ended up liking the movie’s treatment more. The book made the Narrator/Durden relationship much clearer for me.

FaLiLV is what turned me onto HST and what is so interesting about that movie is that not a single word, scene, or character in the movie isn’t directly lifted (cut and pasted) from the book. It’s an adaptation in the purest form. There was even a part of the book written, but cut out of the final printing, that was put into the movie! It made me appreciate the movie that much more.

But at it’s core, Into the Wild needed to be made and ultimately it delivers. Anything that inspires you to shake up your life is worth watching. There’s a piece of Chris McCandless in each of us.