My Weekend (Into the Wild)

Since having moved to NY, my roommate and I have been trying to take full advantage of all that NY has to offer. With the magazine Time Out NY to guide us in finding all activities free, we've done a lot of cool things (international pickle festival, art parade, book festivals and more).

This weekend was really great - on Saturday Brittany and I volunteered to spruce up a local park, and we were put on the task of erosion control! This basically means that we dug trenches for logs, hammered stakes into the ground, and I spent 20 tedious minutes with a handsaw getting nowhere (but that's not the point). It was so much fun, and we met a lot of really cool people, so I am definitely hooked on that project. The only negative bit was that there were a lot of worms in the dirt, which I didn't appreciate too much.

Yesterday evening we went to see a movie at a movie theatre near Lincoln Center (actually, it might have been in the Lincoln Center for all I know) called "Into the Wild."


This article sums up the movie really well:

McCandless grew up in Virginia with affluent and attentive parents. But after he graduated from Emory University, he gave away his $24,000 in savings to charity, abandoned his car, went by the name Alexander Supertramp and hitchhiked around the country and then up the coast to Alaska, telling his family virtually nothing.

There, he spent more than 100 days living in an abandoned bus in the brush. When he ran out of food and decided to leave, McCandless found the river too swollen to pass. Desperate and ravenous, he mistakenly ate some wild plants that he soon realized inhibited his body from absorbing nutrition and he died of starvation.

Needless to say, I left the theatre before seeing the end of the film. Do I really need to see someone starving to death? No, not really (especially when the acting is so convincing). The above article continues by discussing the making of the end of the film:

Creating that moment on film, when he knows his fate is sealed, was one of the toughest for Hirsch. Throughout the shoot, Penn had encouraged him to preserve his analytical mind but never second-guess his instincts. After Hirsch had done one take and wasn't satisfied, Penn approached him with a thought.

"You know, this is your life," Penn told Hirsch. "I can't tell you what to do here. This is your life.' "

"Then he walked off," Hirsch said. "It was just an amazing moment. How can you tell someone how to react when you find out you're going to die like that? He wanted it to be so personal and real. He just gave it to me."

Anyhow, if you have a stronger conscience than I, I'd really recommend seeing this movie. I've always liked Emile Hirsch, and he's really amazing in this film. There are also some really incredible messages about how you choose to live your life and how you treat the people who know you, so it's truly a worthwhile movie.