-
After our annual movie-going blitz, we've seen enough to post a best-of list for 2007. This is how my ranking would go:

1. Atonement: The most complex film of the year, and my favorite by far.

2. Into the Wild: So memorable. I have to believe that if the director's name had been Ron Howard rather than Sean Penn, this would have been a huge hit at the multiplexes.

3. The Savages: Complex, layered seriocomic film about sibling relationships. There are a hundred different details I could praise about this film.

4. Eastern Promises: The new golden duo of David Cronenberg and Viggo Mortensen hit another home run. You never know where this is going, especially with Viggo's character, but every step feels just right.

5. Gone Baby Gone: Haunting. Casey Affleck is not just a fantastic actor but also pretty studly in this debut film by his brother Ben. If I hadn't known who the director was, I would have guessed Clint Eastwood; it's that assured.

6. Hairspray: The most fun you could have in a theater this year.

7. Becoming Jane: An imagined biopic of Jane Austen, this is life and love as Austen lived it instead of how she sculpted it.

8. Hot Fuzz: The second most fun you could have in a theater this year.

9. Ratatouille: I looove animation, and this was a great one.

10. Avenue Montaigne: This French romantic comedy is both warm and sophisticated---a rare combo in the world of film.

I have to leave room here for the films I haven't had a chance to see yet but suspect I might love: Assassination of Jesse James, Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead, No Country for Old Men, The Diving Bell and the Butterfly
-

-

One of the greatest delights in life is finding a film that is as perfect as you hoped it would be. Just a few come to mind---especially movies taken from sources like beloved novels, that have so much potential to be great, and such a likelihood to fall on their faces. The best example of this is Fellowship of the Rings, which you could tell even in its opening credits, when the watery type of the opening credits emerged with that haunting music behind it, was going to be not just acceptable but wonderful.

Atonement is just that kind of movie. Watch, and be amazed. Hot on the heels of Pride & Prejudice, this movie also makes it clear that Keira Knightley is one of the greatest stars to ever appear on film. She's stunningly beautiful but also stylish, wise, and deeply talented. It can be hard to see among contemporaries---it's always easier to praise actors who are dead, really. But as one critic said, she's "a miracle of adult confidence at 22." Pair her up with James McAvoy and put them in "the almost spookily capable hands of director Joe Wright" and you have an amazing movie that manages to capture much of the wonder and genius of Ian McEwan's amazing novel.

-

-
I have a few movies to see before I compile my own best-of list, but here are lists by A.O. Scott of the NY Times and Roger Ebert of the Chicago Sun-Times:

A.O. SCOTT:

1. 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days
2. Ratatouille
3. Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street (tie)
3. There Will Be Blood (tie)
4. I’m Not There (tie)
4. Joe Strummer: The Future Is Unwritten (tie)
5. No End in Sight (tie)
5. Terror’s Advocate (tie)
6. 12:08 East of Bucharest (tie)
6. Live-in Maid (tie)
7. Into the Wild (tie)
7. The Diving Bell and the Butterfly (tie)
8. Michael Clayton
9. The Savages (tie)
9. Away From Her (tie)
10. Knocked Up (tie)
10. Juno (tie)

HONORABLE MENTIONS Lady Chatterley, Into Great Silence, Starting Out in the Evening, Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead, No Country for Old Men, The Band’s Visit, Charlie Wilson’s War, Bamako, and Zodiac

ROGER EBERT:

1. Juno
2. No Country for Old Men
3. Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead
4. Atonement
5. The Kite Runner
6. Away from Her
7. Across the Universe
8. La Vie en Rose
9. The Great Debaters
10. Into the Wild

Special Jury Prize: Once

Tie for 11th Place: Eastern Promises, I’m Not There, In the Valley of Elah, Michael Clayton, Rendition, Romance & Cigarettes, Starting Out in the Evening, Sweeney Todd, Talk to Me, There Will Be Blood

Best Foreign Films: The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, 4 Months 3 Weeks and 2 Days, Lust Caution, The Orphanage, Vanaja

Best Animated Films: Beowulf, Persepolis, Ratatouille

Best Documentaries: In the Shadow of the Moon, The King of Kong, Lake of Fire, No End in Sight, Pete Seeger, Sicko

-

-
PUPPY'S DIALOGS

Dog 1: Plato, can you tell us the location of the lost city of Atlantis?
Dog 2: Ruff!
Dog 1: Okay.

THE CANINA MONOLOGUES

Dog: I feel real good about my body, even if I don't have any testicles. The girls love safe sex.
-

-
Here are a few best-of books lists I've run into:

BBC/Observer best novels of last 300 years

Waterstone's Book That Made a Century

Modern Library's 100 Best for Fiction and Non-Fiction

-

-
I only got a few shots in before the camera battery died, but here they are:

-
Here's an artist I just ran into. I love the first and second works here, though the third one seems to be more typical of her work (at least past work):

-

-
And for those whose secondary religion is film:

14th ANNUAL SCREEN ACTORS GUILD AWARDS® NOMINATIONS

THEATRICAL MOTION PICTURES

Outstanding Performance by a Male Actor in a Leading Role

GEORGE CLOONEY / “Michael Clayton”

DANIEL DAY-LEWIS / “There Will Be Blood”

RYAN GOSLING / “Lars And The Real Girl”

EMILE HIRSCH / “Into The Wild”

VIGGO MORTENSEN / “Eastern Promises”

Outstanding Performance by a Female Actor in a Leading Role

CATE BLANCHETT / “Elizabeth: The Golden Age”

JULIE CHRISTIE / “Away From Her”
MARION COTILLARD / “La Vie En Rose”
ANGELINA JOLIE / “A Mighty Heart”
ELLEN PAGE / “Juno”

Outstanding Performance by a Male Actor in a Supporting Role

CASEY AFFLECK / “The Assassination of Jesse James By The Coward Robert Ford”

JAVIER BARDEM / “No Country For Old Men”
HAL HOLBROOK / “Into The Wild”
TOMMY LEE JONES / “No Country For Old Men”
TOM WILKINSON / “Michael Clayton”

Outstanding Performance by a Female Actor in a Supporting Role

CATE BLANCHETT / “I’m Not There”

RUBY DEE / American Gangster”
CATHERINE KEENER / “Into The Wild”

AMY RYAN / Helene McCready – “Gone Baby Gone”

TILDA SWINTON / “Michael Clayton”

Outstanding Performance by a Cast in a Motion Picture

3:10 TO YUMA
AMERICAN GANGSTER
HAIRSPRAY
INTO THE WILD
NO COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN

PRIMETIME TELEVISION

Outstanding Performance by a Male Actor in a Television Movie or Miniseries

MICHAEL KEATON / “The Company

KEVIN KLINE / “As You Like It”
OLIVER PLATT / “The Bronx is Burning”
SAM SHEPARD / “Ruffian”
JOHN TURTURRO / “The Bronx is Burning”


Outstanding Performance by a Female Actor in a Television Movie or Miniseries

ELLEN BURSTYN / “Mitch Albom’s For One More Day”
DEBRA MESSING / “The Starter Wife”
ANNA PAQUIN / “Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee”
QUEEN LATIFAH / “Life Support “
VANESSA REDGRAVE / “The Fever”
GENA ROWLANDS / “What If God Were the Sun?”


Outstanding Performance by a Male Actor in a Drama Series

JAMES GANDOLFINI / “The Sopranos”
MICHAEL C. HALL / “Dexter”
JON HAMM / “Mad Men”
HUGH LAURIE / “House”
JAMES SPADER /“Boston Legal”


Outstanding Performance by a Female Actor in a Drama Series

GLENN CLOSE / Patty Hewes – “Damages”
EDIE FALCO / “The Sopranos”
SALLY FIELD / “Brothers & Sisters”
HOLLY HUNTER / “Saving Grace”
KYRA SEDGWICK / “The Closer”


Outstanding Performance by a Male Actor in a Comedy Series

ALEC BALDWIN / “30 Rock”
STEVE CARELL / “The Office”
RICKY GERVAIS / “Extras”
JEREMY PIVEN / “Entourage”
TONY SHALHOUB / “Monk”


Outstanding Performance by a Female Actor in a Comedy Series

CHRISTINA APPLEGATE / “Samantha Who?”
AMERICA FERRERA / “Ugly Betty”
TINA FEY / “30 Rock”
MARY-LOUISE PARKER / “Weeds”
VANESSA WILLIAMS / “Ugly Betty”


Outstanding Performance by an Ensemble in a Drama Series

BOSTON LEGAL
THE CLOSER
GREY’S ANATOMY
MAD MEN
THE SOPRANOS

Outstanding Performance by an Ensemble in a Comedy Series

30 ROCK
DESPERATE HOUSEWIVES
ENTOURAGE
THE OFFICE
UGLY BETTY

-

-

Here are the lyrics of two of my favorite Christmas songs. If you can, download the actual songs; they're really beautiful:

WELCOME TO OUR WORLD
by Chris Rice

Tears are falling, hearts are breaking
How we need to hear from God
You've been promised, we've been waiting
Welcome Holy Child
Welcome Holy Child

Hope that you don't mind our manger
How I wish we would have known
But long-awaited Holy Stranger
Make yourself at home
Please make yourself at home

Bring Your peace into our violence

Bid our hungry souls be filled
Word now breaking Heaven's silence
Welcome to our world
Welcome to our world

Fragile finger sent to heal us
Tender brow prepared for thorn
Tiny heart whose blood will save us
Unto us is born
Unto us is born

So wrap our injured flesh around you
Brethe our air and walk our sod
Rob our sin and make us holy
Perfect Son of God
Perfect Son of God
Welcome to our world


THE ATHEIST CHRISTMAS CAROL
by Vienna Teng

It's the season of grace coming out of the void

Where a man is saved by a voice in the distance

It's the season of possible miracle cures

Where hope is currency and death is not the last unknown

Where time begins to fade

And age is welcome home

It's the season of eyes meeting over the noise

And holding fast with sharp realization

It's the season of cold making warm the divine intervention

You are safe here, you know now

Don't forget

Don't forget I love, I love, I love you

Don't forget

Don't forget I love, I love, I love you

It's the season of scars and of wounds in the heart
Of feeling the full weight of our burdens
It's the season of bowing our heads in the wind
And knowing we are not alone in fear
Not alone in the dark

Don't forget

Don't forget I love, I love, I love you

Don't forget

Don't forget I love, I love, I love you

-

In response to my Life in the 70s entry:


Kissel, Jonathan wrote:

I feel a little ashamed at knowing this, but it's Kristy McNichol, not McNichols.

-

-
As children of the 70s, we had it hard.

First of all, we knew that we had, by just a few years, missed what was clearly the coolest decade in the history of time, the 1960s.

Second, our fashion moment coincided with the discovery and widespread proliferation of the most unfortunate of fabrics, polyester. And I'm talking early, really cheap polyester. Thankfully, our mother insisted on buying all our clothes at classic department stores---we didn't have many clothes, but we had good ones---so our exposure to polyester was merely visual, not tactile. But still. Retinal memory is long.

Third, we were squished in that generation between traditional family structure and revised family structure (for lack of a better word), where women had started to have opportunities but sometimes didn't know how to handle the resentment of the inequality that remained (you know, they worked 8 hours, but were still responsible for housework). The traditional moms tried to do it all and just about broke down. Other moms gave up on the traditional role altogether and were lulled into thinking that their selfishness was a great individualizing virtue. Divorce skyrocketed, and after-school specials followed. Children lost their sense of security, wondering if their family could be next.

Did I mention the after-school specials? Featuring charmless actors like Kristy McNichols, whose talent lay precisely in portraying truly realistic teenagers of her time?

But worst of all, by far, was the music. Now, there was a lot of great music made in the 70s: Led Zeppelin, later Stones, funk, Heart, even the best of disco . . . But I am convinced that in no other decade was as much bad, depressing music made. Not just bad music---DEPRESSING, DEPRESSING music. Let me just give you a virtual jukebox of the 70s here, at its worst:

Cats in the Cradle: Family alienation set to music.
The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down: Southern despair.
Seventeen: Suicide on a 45.

Almost worse were the often chipper "novelty" songs that flooded our soundwaves with their sense of profound artistic purposelessness:

Henry the Eighth: You know, "Henn-er-y the Eight I am I am! Henn-er-y the Eigth I am!!"
Lord's Prayer: Can you hear it? "Our Father . . . Who Art in Heaven . . . Hallowed by thy name!"
Convoy: The tune that brought trucker CBing to life!
The Hustle: "Do the Hustle!! Doo doo doo doo doo doo-doo doo doo, Doo doo doo doo doo doo-doo doo doo, Doo doo doo doo doo doo-doo doo doo, Doo doo doo doo doo doo-doo doo doo, Do the Hustle!"

Then, lord help us, the easy listening:

Wildfire
Welcome Back (theme from "Welcome Back Kotter")
Raindrops Keep Fallin' On My Head
The Morning After
Mandy
the entire Dionne Warwick repetoire

Even the good music was depressing. Ever heard these?

Nights in White Satin (Moody Blues)
Killing Me Softly (Roberta Flack)
The Carpenters (yes, I have listed this under Good Music)
After Hours, by Rickie Lee Jones (in fact, most of her debut album, which is brilliant but almost as suicide-inducing as Janis Ian)

It's my conclusion, after reviewing the historical evidence, that any "reparations" to be made by the federal government to historically disadvantaged peoples should be made first to the children of the 70s. Other groups have suffered more, but at least they had good music to get them through. I'm not asking you to sign a petition now. Just consider it.
-

-
These just came out this week. For my taste, there was one notable exclusion and one notable inclusion. The exclusion: Sean Penn's Into the Wild. It's hard to see how that wouldn't be included among the best films of the year. The inclusion: Eastern Promises, the David Cronenberg film starring Viggo Mortensen (who was also nominated). I think it's Cronenberg's best film, and I was impressed that the voters remembered it, since it came out early in the year.

-
Jay reminded me yesterday that when we both worked at Waverly Press in our 20s, they assigned numbers to all their employees. We had to use these numbers all the time---for timesheets, interoffice communications, etc. And it's pretty sad that more than 15 years later, we still remember our numbers:

Jay = K23
Lynn = K18

-

-
Just yesterday a friend who got a dog 11 months ago said to me: "Why didn't we do this 12 years ago??"

If you or someone you know is interested in some extra love and spark in your lives, check out the cuties at

Beagle Rescue


-

-
This year ended up being more a music year than a book year for me. I read a lot, but there were only a few books that really captured me:

* The Sociopath Next Door: This was a fascinating nonfiction book about the nature of sociopaths. In a nice departure from custom, this author didn't focus on violent sociopaths, which most (apparently) aren't. She defines sociopaths as people missing a conscience.

* 1982 Janine: An amazing and unusual novel about an older, alcoholic Scottish man looking back on his life, confronting his mistakes, and fantasizing about sex.

* God against the Gods: An excellent, excellent history of the early Christian period.

* Severance: A book of poems, each of which imagines the thoughts of a person who has been beheaded, in those few moments in which some have speculated consciousness endures after beheading. Each subject is a real historical figure who was beheaded, ranging from a prehistoric hunter killed by a saber tooth tiger to Ann Boleyn to Nicole Simpson.

* The Closing of the Western Mind: One of the best history books I've ever read, detailing the transition from the classical world to the medieval world.

* On Chesil Beach: Another great Ian McEwan novel, more short story than novel, really. Very contained and modest, but just as brilliant as his other work.

I was enthralled with the following music this year:

* Carry On, by Chris Cornell
* Out of Exile, by Audioslave
* Thank You, by Stone Temple Pilots
* The Imposter, by Kevin Max
* Warm Strangers, by Vienna Teng
* The Green World, Dar Williams
* Camino Largo, by Fernando Ortega

Please post your favorites of the year in the Comments section if you're so inclined!
-

-
So yesterday I had an extended email conversation with my friend Deb. However, it turns out that the foundational email on which the entire conversation was based had not reached her at all . . . in fact, she only received four hours later. To which she responded this morning:


NOTA BENE: this message *just* came through at 8:09 p.m., quite possibly fourish hours after you sent it. *screaming toward dick cheney/NSA* THIS IS DECIDEDLY SUBPAR!!!!!


Heh heh heh. "Decidedly subpar." I love Deb. I was also quite impressed witih her ability to carry on a lengthy discourse, the entire basis of which was unknown to her at the time.
-

-
Now, I'm not saying he's the cutest dog in the world. Just that he has the cutest ears, eyes, face, legs, and tail. And spirit.

-
I picked up this book by Jack Miles a year ago after reading its first paragraph. The book as a whole didn't grab me---it takes a literary approach to the New Testament that doesn't work for me. But it does have a great introduction. Here's how it starts:

"All mankind is forgiven, but the Lord must die. This is the revolutionary import of the epilogue that, two thousand years ago, a group of radical Jewish writers appended to the sacred scripture of their religion. Because they did so, millions in the West today worship before the image of a deity executed as a criminal, and---no less important---other millions who never worship at all carry within their cultural DNA a religiously derived suspicion that somehow, someday, 'the last will be first, and the first last' (Matt. 20:16)."

Later it continues:

"Winners usually look like winners, and losers like losers. But thanks to this paradoxical feature of the Christian myth, there remains lodged deep in the political consciousness of the West a readiness to believe that the apparent loser may be the real winner unrecognized. . . . One of the many implications of this epilogue to God's life story has been that in the West no regime can declare itself above review. All power is conditional; and when the powerless rise, God may be with them. . . . Wherever lines like these or the ideas behind them have spread, human authority has begun to lose its grip on unimpeachable legitimacy. In the West, any criminal may be Christ, and therefore any prosecutor Pilate. As the abolitionist poet James Russell Lowell put it:

Truth forever on the scaffold, Wrong forever on the throne,
Yet that scaffold sways the future, and, behind the dim unknown,
Standeth God within the shadow, keeping watch above his own."

It's funny to think how Nietzsche believed basically the same thing, but with a much much sinister view toward it.

Later Miles addresses further the meaning of the crucifixion:

"The great Western myth is designed to raise a second, more profound and more disturbing question, however: If God had to suffer and die, then God had to inflict this suffering and death upon himself. But why would God do this? Tout comprendre, c'est tout pardonner, the French say: To understand everything is to forgive everything. Every perpetrator was first a victim. Behind every crime stretches a millennial history of earlier crimes, each in its way an extenuating circumstance. But to whom does this infinite regression lead in the end if not to God? The guilt of God is certainly not a Christian dogma, and yet it is an emotionally inescapable implication of the Christian myth."

Miles then writes about the history of humankind condemned after the Fall: "[It evokes] what many feel on visiting a battlefield where grave markers stretch to the far horizon. So many subjected to capital punishment, and so few, surely, guilty of anything approaching capital crime."

Miles actually talks about Nietzsche in the course of this first chapter. Nietzsche found "the dignification of suffering perverse . . . Spiritually speaking, he said, the early Christian stank in his nostrils like Polish Jews." Nietzsche writes: "What is good? Everything that heightens the feeling of power in man, the will to power, power itself. What is bad? Everything that is born of weakness." And yet not long before he sank into an insanity that would last until his death, Nietzsche was so distraught by seeing a coachman flog a horse that he flung himself on the horse in a vain attempt to protect it. In this moment of unguarded emotional response, he sides with the weak and vulnerable, not with the powerful. I've always thought Nietzsche was brilliant but brilliantly wrong, absolutely blind to structural deficiencies of his philosophy. Maybe he suspected these deficiencies himself, and this "cognitive dissonance" added to his insanity.

Miles discusses one of Philip's first converts, a eunuch from Ethiopia, noting that "the enslaved eunuch is, if you will, just the kind of convert Nietzsche would have predicted, believing as he did that Christianity is a religion for slaves and other emasculate losers, a cult of resentment deriving all its malignant energy from their bad luck. . . . And yet, so far as we can tell, Philip says nothing to the eunuch about the eunuch's own suffering, only directing his attention to the sufferings of the prophesied Lamb of God. What this kindles in the man, however, is a desire to undergo the death-and-resurrection rite of baptism, uniting his humiliation with God's own and trusting that it will lead to exaltation in just the way that so appalled Nietzsche."

He goes on: "Castration is an atrocity within an atrocity. Perhaps someone in Ethiopia could have been hunted down and punished for castrating Philip's convert, but who can be punished for perpetrating the human condition itself? . . . Our offense was so mild, [God's] punishment so ferocious. Can we avenge himself upon him? No, we cannot; we cannot make him 'bear the awful curse' that he has inflicted on his creatures. But he can make himself bear it. And when he does, all lesser offenses can be caught up in one primal offense, his own, for which, though not without a wrenching change in his character, he can wreak the ultimate vegeance upon himself and deliver the ultimate gift---eternal life---as atonement. . . . as Christ, he can taste death."

I like this statement at the end of this section about what we look for in all great literature and ideas: "The myth tht he once did so [taste death] has within it, as the greatest literature always does, the power to still that rage against the universe which any individual history can engender."

And finally: "The world is a great crime, and someone must be made to pay for it. Mythologically read, the New Testament is the story of how someone, the right someone, does pay for it."

I like these quotes as well. Miles writes of a novel in which the protagonist (a man named Mistler) is dying and says "The death Mistler wants God to notice is his own, and his deepest grievance, to quote the psychologist Allen Wheelis, is his 'awareness that, before we die, nothing is going to happen. . . That big vague thing, that redemptive fulfillment, is an illusion, a beckoning bribe to keep us loyal. A symphony has a climax, a poem builds to a burst of meaning, but we are unfinished business. No coming together of strands. The game is called because of darkness.' "
-

Into the Wild

-
We finally got to see this film on Saturday, and it was as great as they say. Most of you know the true-life story, based on the bestseller by Jon Krakauer of the same title: Chris McCandless is a college grad who ran away from his family and lived as a tramp, roaming all over the United States in an effort to live off nature. Cut off from his family, he lived some amazing adventures at the cost of his (albeit dysfunctional and sometimes abusive) family's despair at his disappearance. A charismatic and smart guy, he made an impression on many of the people who ran into, which allowed Jon Krakauer to retrace the events of his life from the time he left home till he met his end, stranded in the Alaska wilderness.

The film was directed by Sean Penn and stars Emile Hirsch as Chris. A few years ago I saw a great movie called The Lords of Dogtown, based on the rise of skateboarding as a sport in California. Especially memorable was the actor who played Jay, a young troubled skateboarder. I thought he was one of the most charismatic actors I'd ever seen . . . and he was really young. I'd always wondered what happened to him and voila! It turns out that actor was Emile Hirsch, who plays a totally different kind of character here. Not only is he absolutely watchable for three hours as Chris McCandless, but he manages to walk that thin line, as an actor, of making Chris sympathetic (as apparently he was) but not overly romanticized.

Some other things I liked about this film:

* The balance of Chris’s story with his parents’ story: I was afraid that the movie would exalt Chris as a character while downplaying the pain he caused his family. But just like Tim Robbins in Dead Man Walking orchestrated a perfect balance between his death row inmate's story and the story of his victims, here Sean Penn allows room for Chris's own story to breathe while never letting His parents’ and sister's heartbreak slip from view. His family's story during the time of his disappearance is narrated by Jena Malone as Chris's sister. And she allows you to see the abuse and pain that caused Chris to try to escape but also their parents' pain, and the way they grew and changed because of this tragedy. It illustrates what so many of us have learned through life: From suffering comes wisdom.

* The film made me see an aspect of Chris's story that I had missed in the book. Most of the wanderers in the movie have experienced some sort of life tragedy that has left them wounded and looking for comfort. Each has their way of dealing with it: Some take to alcohol, some take to the road, and it became clear that, for Chris, nature was that comfort. Most of us has been at the beach or in the mountains and felt the healing power of nature. For Chris, who hurt so badly, that healing power was almost an addiction. Swallowed up in the beauty, grandeur, and renovating experience that is nature, his pain was blunted or forgotten.

* The complexity of Sean Penn's vision of Chris's lifestyle: Partly he's running away from his parents, punishing his parents, running to something great, partly it's just in his personality to be extreme. The film also made me see that, like many victims of abuse (even just being a witness to abuse) he has deadened himself to avoid the pain. And like a cutter who cuts their skin to feel alive, he needs to experience something extreme to feel alive.

* The movie gives a peep hole into the lives of wanderers. Here, people like Catherine Keener are wounded beings who deal in the only ways they can. Again, the film neither romanticizes or dismisses their lifestyle.

* The use of symbolism: I liked the character of the girl Tracy as a symbol of the hurtful withdrawal that Chris performs on everyone. It's hard to understand: Is he trying to be hurtful? Does he realizes how hurtful he is to others and just doesn't care? Is human contact too painful to him? Or is he just tired of being desired, of being wanted, of having demands made on him? I also like the use of plane imagery. Throughout most of the film, wherever he goes, even if there is no other human contact, he can still see the occasional plane overhead. He seems to need to drive farther and farther into the wilderness to escape it. It is only in Alaska that the plane disappears from view.

* The way his acquaintances challenge him: While accepting him and enjoying him, they don't leave his decisions unquestioned. This is true of Catherine Keener, but also of Vince Vaughn, who, when Chris tells him of his plans to go to Alaska, says, "And then what??"

* The imagined image of reconciliation at his moment of death reminded me a little of the death scene in Pan's Labyrinth. We want to believe that beyond the pain and imperfections of this world, we will have another chance at happiness, peace, justice.

* The supporting performances: Hal Holbrook gives perhaps the best portrayal of old man ever seen in film. Vince Vaughn is great, as are Catherine Keener, Marcia Gay Harden, William Hurt, and Jena Malone.
-