Your Highness is Holding Your Chains

The Good The Bad & The Queen: I love Blur, and this new supergroup of Damon Albarn's is certainly one of the musical highlights of 2007. Dense and atmospheric, a fusion of so many interesting styles, I've been listening to it non-stop for the past three days.

Into the Wild: There was a time in the early 90s - when I was just beginning my interest in cinema - where I felt Sean Penn was the best actor of our generation, comparable to DeNiro or Pacino or even Hackman. Classic roles in Carlito's Way, Casualties of War, Colors, Bad Boys, Falcon & the Snowman (his most underrated film) and Fast Times made this abundantly clear. (Of course this was before his comeback in Dead Man Walking, when every hipster and film critic jumped on board and suddenly "rediscovered" his early work, and then Penn began cultivating his inner existentialist by quoting Bukowski in every conversation, and well, the rest is history.) Because of this, though, I always wanted to like Penn as a director too, wanted to grasp the dark brooding artist I saw chain-smoking on Charlie Rose, but honestly, I never found his films very compelling. The Indian Runner, The Crossing Guard & The Pledge all contain great moments, elements that suggest this was an intellect capable of making a profound work of art, but they were all flawed in some way too. The conversations were didactic, the narratives unrealistic, the preoccupation with despair too forced, I always came away with the same feeling: these films aspire to greatness but are missing something crucial.

Well, with Into the Wild Penn has found his narrative voice and created one of the most important films of the last decade, one of those daring, ambitious, lyrical films that hit all the right notes. From the fragmentary temporal logic to the beautiful cinematography, from Eddie Vedder's haunting score to Emile Hirsh's impeccable performance, this is everything independent cinema should be. It's also the first time I cried since Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (well, Closer brought me to the brink, also, but that's another discussion), although not for the reasons you may think.

Let me add that the way Penn conveyed the prose of the book, by literally typing certain passages over the images in this beautiful yellow font, by having us see what the boy writes in his diary - especially at the end, and his use of dueling brother/sister voice-over narrators were all brilliant tactical moves, unconventional at a time when Hollywood is getting more formulaic.

There's this scene about half-way through where Hirsh's character looks into an office building and sees a kid his age, just out of college, clean cut and smiling and every mother's dream. He then imagines himself in that same position, in the same suit, doing things "the right way": working hard and enjoying a life of comfort and convenience and smoozing with the big boys at the firm. He then walks away, penniless and cold and more determined than ever to leave society behind, to never approach that level of douchebaggery again. It's weird because, in a sense, this was my experience watching the film, seeing what it would have been like to go a different route and pursue my On the Road ambitions. And yet, instead of feeling secure in my decision to become another taxpayer, I was jealous of the way he was able to just walk away. And the great thing is, he didn't drop out to be an addict or a criminal, and he certainly didn't do it because he was crazy, he just wanted to seize every moment and embrace the magic of the natural world and capture the truth and the beauty of his experiences, wherever the journey took him, outside the scope of conventional wisdom and petty ignorance (not to mention, family abuse).

Meanwhile I'm left to over-intellectualize in a silly blog and wonder, what if?