Into the Wild

I’d been looking forward to seeing this movie and yesterday, happened to be at the only local Redbox that had it in stock.
So, last night, Fluffles and I, having woken up from early evening naps, settled in to view.
First of all, any movie directed by Sean Penn with a cast that includes Donald Sutherland, Hal Holbrook, William Hurt, Marcia Gay Harden and leading man Emile Hirsch, who also played Cleve Jones in “Milk”, is pretty much guaranteed to be worth a watch.
What little I knew of the story appealed to me because of its Walden-inspired theme.
I also knew that Chris McCandless’s journey to Alaska ended badly. What I didn’t know is that many consider his final days to be a deliberate and inexcusable exercise in self-destruction due to poor planning and ignorance.
For example, McCandless didn’t have a compass or a map. For that reason, he didn’t know that he could have forded the river which blocked his return to safety by traveling only a quarter mile to a hand-operated tram.
This contrasts with the story of Dick Proenneke, who at age 52 built a log cabin in the Alaska Wilderness and lived there for 30 years.
Like McCandless, Proenneke’s level of fitness at the start of his journey was extraordinary, and he also had the self-discipline to keep a diary.
Unlike McCandless, Dick Proenneke was a skilled carpenter, mechanic and repairman who financed his Alaska lifestyle with his hard-earned retirement income. McCandless was a college graduate who gave away $24,000, the bulk of the college fund that his self-made millionaire parents gave him, to charity and burned most of his remaining cash.
Proenneke’s meticulous planning is documented in a book and a film, “One Man’s Wilderness”. As spare and business-like as the author, this documentary lacks “Into the Wild”‘s philosophical, introspective and idealistic tone – not a bad thing. As a result, “One Man’s Wilderness” is fresh and inspirational, while “Into the Wild”, a more recent film, comes across as dated and clich