I went into seeing Into the Wild convinced that the main character was a total idiot. The movie is based on the real life (and death) of Christopher McCandless.

McCandless graduated from Emory in 1990 and traded in his life savings for a life wandering around the country on foot. He stopped along the way and made friends with all kinds of folks. It’s the classic On-the-Road story. That can’t be idiotic. Except eventually he decided to find truth by hiking on foot into the wilderness of Alaska with little more than a bag of rice, a rifle, and a book about edible plants. Ah, there’s the idiocy I’m talking about.

The story immediately made me think of Grizzly Man, the real life documentary about a guy with no special animal knowledge who decided it was his calling to commune with grizzly bears. It worked out for a little while. Actually it worked out for years. He captured his yearly adventures on video. And then he was torn to strips by a grizzly bear, and that too was captured on video. This is the truth that I expected McCandless to find in the wild.

What Sean Penn’s movie does though is present the McCandless’s story without taking sides. There’s a palpable struggle for the character against the confines of society, against the expectations of his family, against expectations. Where Grizzly Man was clearly some kind of insane, McCandless was lashing out against the constraints in his life. Sure, his way of dealing was idiotic. And he paid for it when he found out that the truth of the wilderness is kill or be killed. But the story is complex and the movie does a surprisingly great job of telling it.

Not since the double-sided funfest that was Requiem for a Dream has a movie left me feeling like I was just punched in the stomach for two hours straight.

Picture sickly teacher dude buying drugs from a disadvantaged teenage student on the bathroom floor of a skeevey hotel room while prostitutes smoke crack and dance about the room. Yeah…

Add Half Nelson to the list of movies to watch when seeking out feelings of intense hopelessness.

Project Greenlight is a reality tv series that follows the making of a movie from script to production. I got hooked watching when it jumped from HBO to Bravo in 2005 for its third season. Basic premise: Ben Affleck and Matt Damon pluck a screenwriter and a director from amateur obscurity. They give them a minuscule budget to make a movie. Dysfunctional comedy ensues.

Feast, season three’s attempt at a horror/comedy hybrid, was just released direct-to-DVD. The comedy-horror thing is difficult to pull off intentionally. There’s plenty of movies that want to be Evil Dead, and almost all of them are terrible.

Feast is pretty terrible.

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I only heard a few days ago that there was going to be a live-action Transformers movie. The idea sounded like a steaming pile of turds.

But the trailer I saw last night makes it look bad-ass.

Rocky movies are 80% pretext, and 20% fight.

The pretext usually involves Rocky making idiotic jokes and squabbling with Paulie. There are the emotional retrospectives cobbled together from snippets of Micky screaming, Mr. T scowling, and Adrian crying. And there is always a training montage where Rocky lifts something extremely heavy over and over again with increasing ease.

The pretext in Rocky Balboa isn’t terrible. Paulie is grouchy. Rocky spews plenty of dimwitted banter. South Philly still looks a lot like Kensington.

Sure, maybe there is one too many visits to Adrian’s grave. And the slowed Gonna Fly Now theme music building to a movie-ending crescendo is more than a little saccharine. But all told it is a much better cap to the series than the Tommy Gun drivel in Rocky V.

And then there is the fight. I’m normally an advocate of sixty-year-olds keeping their shirts on. And after seeing this fight, I would still kindly request that all sixty-year-olds please retain their respective outerwear.

Sagging skin aside, Stallone holds his own and keeps it believable. The fight, like the entire movie, seems just plausible enough to be exciting.

According to early reviews, Rocky Bolboa might just be watchable, perhaps even enjoyable.

Only a few more days to wait and see.