Into the Wild

"There was a boy, a very strange enchanted boy...", so began a song written in the wartorn 40s, which tells a fantasy of a boy who "wandered very far, over lands and seas" only to learn that "the greatest thing... was just to love and be loved in return". The song could very well have been about Christopher McCandless, whose story has haunted me ever since I caught the movie Into the Wild.

Uneven at times and beautiful in parts, it tells the tale of a boy who hails from middle-class America, but found himself in spiritual discord with the excesses of modern times. To him, a career is a 20th century invention--smart suits, sharp ties, empty souls--and he didn't want anything to do with them.

Paraphrasing Henry Thoreau, he said, "Rather than love, than money, than faith, than fame, than fairness, give me truth." After fulfilling the tedious and absurd duty of graduating from college, he set off on a journey to seek his truth. Starting from Atlanta, he crossed the great American plains, worked his way to Nevada, and into Mexico via the Gulf of Mexico, and crossed the desert back to the US. Having gained an intimacy with the North American continent, his wanderlust now took him to the ultimate wilderness frontier: Alaska. Trekking alone into the Great White North, the wilderness finally caught up with him and, remorselessly, claimed his life. He got himself killed all because he refused simple navigational tools like maps and compass. The tragedy was not that he seemed so lacking in basic sense that he somehow threw away a life like that. Thousands of nutcases get themselves bumped off the gene pool all the time. The tragedy was he was otherwise a very competent and intelligent guy, fleet of foot and quick of reflexes, and he should never have died under the circumstances.

The director was rather heavy-handed in trying to explain the inner soul of Christopher McCandless, alluding often to his overbearing father and the dysfunctional element which ran in his family. While no doubt he had to escape his life because his family embodies all that he hates about society, I think the director is missing the point. It is simply the call of the wild. The same siren song which led Columbus to the Americas, Marco Polo to the far east, and Dr Livingstone to the heart of Africa. The wild promises adventures that enrich your life, a spiritual reunion with the earth, and a peace that simply cannot be gotten from our modern-day jungle. It stirs you alive. All I know is when the siren song of the wild beckons, I have to go.

Barry Lopez, a landscape photographer who writes for National Geographic, and who too had found his calling in wilderness attributed it to a sense of loneliness. He writes, "The cure for loneliness, I have come to understand, is not more socialising. It's achieving and maintaining close friendships. The trust that characterises that kind of friendship allows one to be vulnerable, to discuss problems that resist a solution, for example, without having to risk being judged or dismissed. I bring this up because the desire I experience most keenly, when I travel in landscapes like the ones made so evocative here, is for intimacy. I have learned that I will not experience the exhilaration intimacy brings unless I become vulnerable to the place, unless I come to a landscape without judgements, unless I trust that the place is indifferent to me. The practice I strive for when I travel is to meet the land as if it were a person. To encounter it as if it were as deep in its meaning as human personality. I wait for it to speak. And wait. And wait."

Pieces of April

So, being a huge Stephin Merrit fan, it's inevitable that I start checking out movies he graciously pens the soundtrack for, based on the somewhat flawed "If its Merrit-endorsed, it must be good" theory. With that in mind, I eagerly anticipated Pieces of April.

The title proves apt, as the dialogue is pretty sparse for a movie shot in New York. Instead you get to piece April's life together, through snippets of her very believable interactions with the people around her and snapshots from a Nikon SLR running parallel in another story. Charming little product placement, noted this very biased reviewer, himself a proud owner of a Nikon SLR.

At the deathly early morning of 7:00am, April struggles to wake up to a special day--thanksgiving in fact. She's supposed to prepare the feast for her family, who hails a day's drive away from the suburbs. But she's not particularly adept at it, and when we find her to-do list having only one item, "1. Pre-heat oven.", we know she's in for some adventure.

The simple premise could very well be frivolously centred on Katie Holmes's Gothic persona when the universe conspires to spoil her day. There was much light-hearted humour involving her turkey, who had the unfortunate experience of being roasted in no less than 4 different stoves. But as the story unfolds, the human insights and the emotions that come with it start to cut much deeper than is expected of an amiable light-weight comedy.

Running parallel to the culinary adventure is the road trip that her extended family, together with all their dysfunctionalities, took to New York. April's character is not very well developed. Instead we feed on scraps of information about her through the conversations and bickerings from the road trip. The gravity of the thanksgiving dinner is slowly revealed to us in the Nikon snapshots provided by the avid photographer in her brother. April and family had not been in the best of terms, she of the wild ways estranged from the deeply religious mother. The mother is dying, and the family is spiritually compelled to make good this last dinner, whether they like it or not.

Peter Hedges has written a very heartwarming tale of redemption, shot and directed it with a few dollars, a digital camcorder and a whole lot of heart. He is ambly supported by his casting, which makes for a very realistic story-telling. Contrived scenes there were a few, especially the ones involving a British neighbour who, with his posh tastes and immaculate manners, leave me wondering how could he have accepted dwelling in the derelicts inhabited mostly by the marginalised. Nonetheless, a big fan of his other work, a screenplay adaptation of Nick Hornby's About A Boy, I am ranking him alongside Richard Linklater as the American names to look out for.

Weird, funny, honest, intelligent, and very very touching, it's a typical Stephin Merrit song translated onto the silver screen. What's more, running at just under 80 min, it's the perfect movie if time's not on your side (for the day, that is!).

Rating: 7.6

Next up, through the lenses of Peter Hedges again, What's Eating Gilbert Grape?.

Movie Review: 15:The Movie

The last time a local film actually garnered critical acclaim, Cleopatra Wong was still karate chopping up policemen in shorts. Hailing from 21th century Singapore, I was all eager to watch 15. Too eager, on hindsight, as I passed up Broken Flowers and Julie Delpy for it.

Opening sequence with 3 leads playing bow-and arrows in a metaphorical wasteland (Nope! There's no desert in monsoon-ravaged Singapore), a sense of foreboding crept up inside me. A film which purports to capture street life grittiness but opens with some high arty farty concept, is suffering from a clash of ideologies, something akin to getting Jesus and God of Mercy tattooed on your back.

So the movie meanders down this slippery path of pseudo high concept art. We find Ah-bengs, or 'street thugs' in colloquial Hokkien, not in the streets spilling blood, but hanging around in their not-so-spartan HDB flats musing about the vagaries of life and occasionally breaking into colourful song-and-dance. Sounds a lot like my life, thank you.

Granted, there were a few great takes of self-mutilation and drug-smuggling, which was stomach churning even to the hardboiled. But the terrible pacing blunted the scenes and ruined the senses. It was with much gratitude that I survived the extreme tedium, thanks to my fingers on the FAST FORWARD button. Mind you, it was not just a casual fast forward, but a SUPER TURBO FAST FORWARD of 8x.

15 would indeed be a smashing hit as a 15 min long feature. Royston Tan shouldn't have dragged 15 out from the relative comforts of short films to the hazards of full-lengths. A full-length film needs to be sustained by a story, a heartbeat. Witness how blood courses through the veins of Amores Perros, or Cidade de Deus. A concept alone, even if wrapped up in garish lighting and high contrast colours, is simply not enough.

IMDb Rating: 4.7 (-1 for lack of Ah Lians in a movie about Ah Bengs. Oh! Ludicrious!)