It Sounds Great, Just Great (on Paper, Anyway)

I didn’t pay much attention when I first heard that Harmony Korine had released a new film called Mister Lonely. The dark recesses of my brain had pretty much (rightly or wrongly) consigned the controversial writer/director to the ‘90s trivia bin for Kids and Gummo. But his new film ran the festival circuit last year and should be getting a limited release this year, and it has contributions from some attention-getting parties. Korine himself may in fact be the least interesting person involved. Just look at who else is tied to the project:

Marcel Zyskind;
A cinematographer and cameraman with several Michael Winterbottom films and the visually riveting 28 Days Later.

James Fox, Anita Pallenberg;
Actors from the legendarily bizarre Mick Jagger film Performance, with which Mister Lonely would presumably share a few themes (albeit with a very different tone).

Jason Pierce, Sun City Girls;
The former a member of Spacemen 3 and Spiritualized, the latter an experimental rock band known for its idiosyncratic Arizonian psych weirdness.

…and Werner Fucking Herzog.
Anything with the soft-spoken documentarian is worth seeing. A Kevin James comedy about vomiting? A Jackie Chan vehicle in which he’s a ninja-turned-croquet-player? It would be worth it for Werner. In this movie, for some reason, Werner is in Central America getting nuns to jump out of a plane without parachutes. I’m sure he has his reasons.

And almost as an afterthought, the premise of Mister Lonely is pretty interesting too. A Marilyn Monroe imitator befriends a Michael Jackson impersonator in Paris, where he is moonwalking on the banks of the Seine. Ruminate on that phrase for a moment – moonwalking on the banks of the Seine. Awesome. The two travel together to a commune in Scotland where like-minded people live the lives of their idols. The trailer is enticing and suggests a surprisingly earnest tone.

Alternate Annoyances

Non-theatrical footage in DVD releases (like its frequent neighbor, the commentary track) is a double-edged sword, and few kinds of footage are as controversial as alternate endings. Pre-DVD, there were, of course, films with alternate endings for artistic reasons (Dawn of the Dead) or films that used the idea intentionally for effect (Clue), but these are isolated examples that prove the rule in the pre-DVD age. In 2008 every other horror B-movie and cult science fiction film has an alternate ending among its special features. Directors are fully aware during filming that they can have their cake and eat it too, and some DVDs – 28 Days Later, for example – suggest their directors indulged a bit too heavily.

Given the difficulty of interpreting the material, I Am Legend is an unsurprising new entry in the alternate-ending catalog, and this ending was the focus of much of the buzz around the DVD release on March 18. I wrote about the book and the previous film adaptations here and here. In an (apparently valid) bit of pessimism, I didn’t go see the film in theaters, although anyone looking for a review of the film itself can get a pretty good one here that hits all the key reasons why this doesn’t do the book justice. Here I’m going to talk strictly about the ending (with spoilers galore, of course).

The theatrical ending is absolutely terrible and probably pulls a C+ film into D+ territory on its own. What little optimism I did have about this film rested on the possibility that it would be faithful to the original story. Using the original character’s name, Robert Neville, and using the book’s original title seemed to suggest this might be possible.

Penn Goes Wild

I haven’t read Jon Krakauer’s Into the Wild in nearly a decade, but I don’t quite remember it like this. I am, of course, referring to Sean Penn’s film adaptation that hit theaters late last year and has recently arrived on DVD. I had avoided it during its theatrical run, scared away by my own pessimism, which only intensified after reading Penn’s asinine perspective on it. In that interview, one statement in particular, in which Penn responds to park rangers criticizing McCandless’ trek into the wild as idiotic, struck a nerve:

“I’m not all that interested in what the park rangers have to say. I accept that there’s an automatic instinct to judge those you envy and who have more courage than you do, and I think that while he (the ranger) rides around in his four-wheeler on a CB radio getting fat, Chris McCandless has spent 113 days fucking alone in the most unforgiving wilderness that God ever created. You just go out there and take a look at it sometime. This is a guy that wanted to challenge himself in a way that for us to judge would just be ridiculous.”

I disagree. Ostensibly, yes, one could call what McCandless did — abandoning his life of luxury to live off the land in the indifferent wilderness of Alaska — courageous, but this dualistic approach to human nature seems callow and shortsighted. Simply labeling actions as cowardly or courageous or typifying people as heroes or villains marks a reductionist viewpoint of a more complex matter. There’s more subtlety to it, and if we don’t approach it on all levels, even those that don’t put the subject in the best light, how are we to even begin to penetrate the human psyche?