1. "Primary Colors", a fictional story based on the '92 Bill Clinton presidential campaign. -- Primary Colors vs. "W."

... themes:

playlist --

3.2 -- Into the Wild Project

textbook reading -- [ old edition :
Chapter Five - Documentary, Experimental, and Animated Films
Documentary
Experimental Film
The Animated Film ]

... Vertov in class [ when? new Bordwell, 8th ed. -- ch.10 ] Documentary as ART.

Calendar : 12.5.2007 -- Film History, last textbook's chapter!

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"The holy fool occupies a special place in the American imagination. The twin myths of the self-made man and the endless frontier sustain us even when - especially when - the evidence isn't there, and we itch to flee the corruptions of civilization into a purer, better land. Out of this romance have come the Pilgrims, the pioneers, Henry Thoreau, Jack Kerouac - the Mormons and the hippies and everyone else hoping to cleanse the taint. Out of it, too, have come the Unabomber and the Branch Davidians."

Movie type: Action/Adventure, Drama boston.com/movies :

"Into the Wild" is Penn's best and most ambitious work as a director, but the movie's not about recklessness, and it probably should have been.

...

These sequences are gorgeously filmed by cinematographer Eric Gautier, and they're heady with the joy of discovery - they make you want to hit the road into the magnificent landscape we forget is out there. As Christopher treks ever outward, though, there's no corresponding journey inward; his travels only make him more unyielding. When Stewart's Tracy offers herself to this beautiful young saint of the open highway, he declines, saying it would defile her innocence. In fact, it's Christopher's own purity he wants to maintain, and with it a fatal distance from other people.
Penn knows that, and he acknowledges as much in the final moments of "Into the Wild." In general, though, he loves his hero too much to sort out his own feelings. The result is a road movie oddly lacking in the exuberance of the road; the tone is occasionally as dour and scolding as Eddie Vedder's unadorned songs on the soundtrack. Yet Penn's fascination with Christopher is genuine and legitimate. What does it take to go on a vision quest in modern America? Whose fault is it if the journey ends in death?
Only an American could have made this "Into the Wild" - impassioned, broad, unexamined. (Correction: Only an American from the Lower 48, since many Alaskans apparently consider McCandless an idiot of classic proportions.) To stand outside our myths and see them with a cold eye requires a director like Werner Herzog, whose 2005 documentary "Grizzly Man" contains all the lucid, bothersome paradoxes Penn's movie only guesses at.
One such paradox, which "Into the Wild" doesn't note, is that those who flee civilization more often than not bring it with them. The bus in which Christopher McCandless died is now a tourist destination.
Ty Burr can be reached at tburr@globe.com.