Sean Penn
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Connections, in both directions
In this way “Land,” which at one point felt a little like “Into the Wild” actually recalls “Wild” – there’s even an exchange where Edee confesses to sometimes being lonely, but not as lonely as she’d be “back there,” which if memories serve, echoes almost verbatim a passage in the Reese Witherspoon movie.
There are parallels, too, with ex-husband Sean Penn’s “Into the Wild” or Kelly Reichardt’s off-the-grid rambles, though Wright resists the heady art-house austerity of such indies.
After all, innocent-tenderfoot-lost-in-the-boondocks adventures such as Into the Wild (Emile Hirsch exiling himself to Alaska) and Wild (Reese Witherspoon solo-backpacking the Pacific Crest Trail) can provide needed thrills—not to mention valuable life lessons—to bored urban audiences, even when the tenderfoot is a fool, à la Harrison Ford in The Mosquito Coast.
It’s difficult not to compare the film to Jean Marc-Vallée’s Wild (or even Sean Penn’s Into the Wild), but Land is a much more insular take on familiar survival material, with Wright putting on a nearly one-woman show for the film’s 90-minute running time.
Speaking of wild, “Land” will remind many of “Into the Wild,” directed by Wright’s ex, but it is nowhere near as good a film.
We’ve also seen it, to a different degree, in Into the Wild , directed by Sean Penn.
In this regard, compare the film with Werner Herzog’s Grizzly Man (2005), the documentary about self-styled grizzly bear activist Timothy Treadwell, who was killed by the very animals he sought to protect.
The audacity of a commitment that contains such a high potential for death brings to mind the story of Timothy Treadwell ( "Grizzly Man," a Werner Herzog documentary), another adventurer who engaged in a dangerous enterprise in a remote location.
Werner Herzog’s “ Grizzly Man ” documents the life and death of another soul who sought spiritual purity in an environment that was drawn more from Hobbes than Thoreau.
Consider Timothy Treadwell, whose video diary of life among the Alaskan grizzlies was chronicled in Werner Herzog's Grizzly Man.
I couldn't help but think of another film about an idealist who got in trouble from romanticising the Alaskan wilderness, Werner Herzog's Grizzly Man , but while that film was almost comically happy to indict the protagonist's idiocy, Penn clearly expects us to regard McCandless's fate as a beautiful tragedy.
Both the cruel beauty of the film and this quality of its main character call to mind Werner Herzog’s similar, and similarly brilliant, documentary “Grizzly Man,” about Timothy Treadwell, a nature lover who lived among the bears in Alaska and treated them as big fluffy pets, until they ate him.
But compared to hapless Chris McCandless, who walked "Into the Wild" and never walked out, "127 Hours" has a happy ending, since the armless Ralston lived to tell about it.
As a portrait of youthful recklessness amidst the grandeur of indifferent nature, "127 Hours" may remind some viewers of Sean Penn's magnificent "Into the Wild," about a similarly brash young man on his own physically extreme journey.
The result is something akin to " Buried " meets "Into the Wild" -- and, odd as it seems, it's every bit as beautiful as it is harrowing.
Unlike Chris McCandless of “Into the Wild,’’ he’s not propelled by discontent or an unhappy childhood but by the sheer joy of being out in the world.
Naturally, the film is a survivalist's tale, but Boyle digs deeper and, similar to Sean Penn's deeply affecting Into The Wild, this is also a stirring exploration of a cocky independent spirit who becomes painfully aware of the inadequacy of his lone-wolf mentality when it comes to surviving in the wilderness.
Echoes of Into the Wild, Jeremiah Johnson, and the occasional Bear Grylls episode.
Although the title and the idea of someone going back to nature might remind audiences of 2007's Into the Wild , the two stories could not be more different thematically.
The film has unmistakable parallels to Sean Penn’s movie, Into the Wild, and if this story is ultimately more uplifting, we always feel that Cheryl Strayed is just a few beats away from catastrophe.
I kept thinking of Into the Wild , Sean Penn's film about Christopher McCandless and his ultimately tragic ramble across the West.
Sean Penn's Into the Wild made his convert to nature saintly, but flawed humanity matters here.
At first glance, “Wild” invites some obvious comparisons to other movies about reckless risk and solitary treks — Sean Penn’s masterful “ Into the Wild ,” Emilio Estevez’s “ The Way ,” about the Camino de Santiago, and this year’s “Tracks,” in which Mia Wasikowska starred as a figure similar to Strayed, a woman walking across Australia to exorcise her demons.
I remember asking that same question during Into The Wild, a similar tale of self-discovery released back in 2007.
Yoo Ah-in’s Jongsu is in a state of crippling inaction that with each mounting clue echoed Jack Nicholson’s tremendous performance in “The Pledge.”
Think Emile Hirsch as Chris McCandless in Sean Penn’s 2007 epic Into the Wild, giving his inheritance away to charity and hiking his way to Alaska, or the forthcoming saga Wild, with Reese Witherspoon making her way up the Pacific Crest Trail on foot from the Mexican border to Canada.
So it's like Into the Wild, but terrible, scored as a child or James Horner would score it and directed like a not-on-purpose horror film in the way that people who've never seen any horror films...or other films...shoot in locations like these.
Nor is it a mystery… like, say, the similarly themed Into the Wild , the true story of Christopher McCandless, who starved to death (for reasons still not fully understood ) in the Alaskan wilderness because he was woefully unprepared for life off the grid.
The Place Beyond the Pines (2013)
Directed by Derek Cianfrance
influenced by The Indian Runner (1991)
This is, however, the kind of narrative ambition that also eluded Sean Penn (in the similar-feeling “The Indian Runner”) as well as Cianfrance’s own cinematic father figure, John Cassavetes, in his later films.
Many patches of Into the Wild brought to mind Come and See, a 1985 WWII film from Russia directed by Elem Klimov and lavishly praised by Penn, about a Bellarussan teen caught up in some of the unspeakable horrors of that war.
It's a New Deal kind of film, with more than a hint of John Ford's 1940 masterpiece, The Grapes Of Wrath.
It’s perhaps the most superfluous movie music since Carly Simon underlined and italicized every other scene in Nora Ephron’s “This is My Life.”
He equates violence with redemption in a way that leaves Wind River inferior to Sean Penn’s The Pledge , the film it most resembles, which challenged the connection between vengeance and closure.
Her angsty teen period is denoted by that old staple: the “goth” phase, like John Travolta’s daughter in Face/Off , about as ’90s a film as you can get.
On the other hand, the film is impossibly gorgeous, as shot by Eric Gautier, who has made a career out of gorgeous movies that are kind of bad in all other ways (his last project to make much impact in this country was the pancake-flat Che biopic The Motorcycle Diaries ).
The "getting of wisdom" allows for an ample variety of landscapes, and, if Penn's eye for beauty is mostly trite (cathedral lighting ladled on tree trunks, golden sunsets seen out of a boxcar), a good deal of imagery is splashing-the-lens visceral, caught by the splendid cinematographer Eric Gautier with the offhand glow he lent The Motorcycle Diaries .
Cinematographer Eric Gautier (The Motorcycle Diaries, Clean, Those Who Love Me Can Take the Train) favors long lenses here, the kind that can isolate one subject twixt foreground and background and then, dramatically changing their plane of focus, seek out another.
Enhanced by the storytelling of Jon Krakauer and now Sean Penn, the countercultural tale of Into the Wild has some of the same poetry to it as On the Road or The Motorcycle Diaries.
The camerawork is skillfully designed and executed by cinematographer Eric Gautier ( "The Motorcycle Diaries" who takes advantage of the beauty and off beat off-the-beaten-path nature of the locales.
Watching Bentley’s elegy for a life and country that America used to be, and the need for deep connection between humans and nature and humans and time (and memory) brings to mind other contemplative films such as “Wild,” “Into the Wild,” and, of course, Malick’s “Tree f Life.”
Anyone who has lost themselves in the likes of Days of Heaven, Into the Wild, and Wild will find a place in their heart for Train Dreams.
Films like Into The Wild , Rescue Dawn , and Kon-Tiki derive an additional thrill from the “based on a true story” angle, the reality of the accounts inspiring a certain verisimilitude: With the artifice out of the way, there’s just a stranger-than-fiction narrative to tell.
While Jungle tries on the clothes of “based on a true story” films like Into the Wild and 127 Hours, they hang loosely as it becomes increasingly clear that Greg McLean has no earthly idea what made those narratives impactful.
Hirsch may now be where Leonardo DiCaprio was around the time of "What's Eating Gilbert Grape" and "The Basketball Diaries."
Yet unlike the similar protagonist of Sean Penn’s Into The Wild (2007), Forrest has not wandered far.
Penn's film poses a little bit of everything in the grand tradition of films like "Five Easy Pieces," and "Harry and Tonto," in which our main character is simply another pariah in a life they simply can't belong to.
At times, “The Mountain Between Us” recalls such arduous wilderness adventures as “ Into the Wild ,” “ The Grey ” and “ The Revenant .”
Penn's film poses a little bit of everything in the grand tradition of films like "Five Easy Pieces," and "Harry and Tonto," in which our main character is simply another pariah in a life they simply can't belong to.