Megamind: It doesn’t matter if you happen to be a convicted criminal who was serving consecutive life sentences when you broke jail. Just do one spectacularly good and heroic thing, and the public and the law alike will simply forgive and forget, no formal pardon necessary, and hail you as the new protector of the city – even if you murdered your predecessor.
We’ve done this before, but I don’t think this was the intended message, and in any case it’s certainly not “clearly” so.
What I took from the movie was no matter how hard you tried sometimes you can’t win unless the other person gets tired of beating you so often
Apparently no law was so stupid, so inhumane or so outrageously unjust that McCoy wouldn’t insist that we still have to follow it because The Law is The Law. I took to calling McCoy the Grand Inquisitor of New York.
What’s more, it works even if you save the city from a threat you created yourself, solely for your own amusement.
Wait, did I miss something? My vague memories of the movie depict him dying of having mistakenly foraged some poisonous plant.
At first they thought he had eaten some toxic root, confusing it with another root; then they thought he had eaten some seeds he had stored in a damp Ziploc bag and they got moldy, and the mold killed him. They speculated that if he hadn’t already lost so much weight he might have been able to fight off whatever toxic effects either the roots or the seeds might have given him; they were thought to be toxic because they would paralyze his stomach or something, making him unable to digest anything he did eat. But I think in the end they concluded that he had just gotten too weak to go searching for more food and died of starvation.
At the time the movie was being made, they were still going with the toxic root theory, so that’s what’s in the movie.
Oh that makes sense. Thanks!
Remember Michael Moriarty?
AFAIK it wasn’t really “they” who considered various poisoning explanations for McCandless’s death, it was mostly just Into the Wild author Jon Krakauer. Krakauer has been criticized by some for going searching for a poisoning explanation when starvation seems like the obvious cause of death. However, McCandless’s diary says that he thought he was sick from the seeds he’d eaten, so it’s not like Krakauer invented the idea himself.
The poisonous plant explanation also works better onscreen than the moldy seeds and is more dramatic than starvation. In the movie, we see that McCandless is feeling really bad, he checks his plant guide, and he sees that there’s a poisonous plant that looks a lot like the safe plant he thought he ate. IIRC there’s no voice-over or anything, it plays out visually. It’s hard to think of a way the character could be shown to have figured out that he’s about to die from toxic mold or starvation. Although the movie could have used the sister’s voice-over to explain some other cause of death, it makes for better cinema to stick with our main character and have him realize that he’s doomed.
I don’t get this:
The strong stoic jock, showed emotion
The shy crazy girl, showed her outgoing personality
The guy who doesn’t care, showed he cares
The stuck up superficial girl, laughs at herself and learns appearances aren’t everything
And the brown nosing, suck-up nerd, writes like a 10 sentence fuck you to the principal instead of doing the assignment. (or anyone else’s assignment)
Happy Ending, They all get a bit of freedom from the pigeon hole of high school clicks.
But dimly.
UMMM, if he has a kid, it’s his RESPONSIBILITY to provide for him! :rolleyes: He needs to put his ego aside and do right by his son!
Sleeping Beauty: Roofies are awesome! Also, rape is ok if you’re rich and good looking
Kindergarten Cop: all problems can be solved by punching someone
I think the book is about more than just reporting on a disappearance. It’s not easy to put into a simple ‘message’ – which is part of why I think it’s a good book – but I think at heart it’s about taking chances away from a simple, boring, member-of-the-herd life, and whether those risks are worth it. Krakauer’s crazy solo trip that he recounts in the book didn’t kill him, and McCandless’s did; I think the book asks (but doesn’t answer; again that’s why it’s good) whether it was worth it taking that kind of potentially deadly chance to avoid a life of gray mediocrity.
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See the TVTropes page Values Dissonance for examples (cinematic, literary, etc.) where the intended message is clear enough, and shocking to a modern audience.
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Yeah, I agree with you. The message I got from the movie was all the bad that comes with a father being selfish. That’s not what the writer had in mind. Do you not understand the op?
Soory Sitnam. :smack: I understand the OP. Just got on a contrarian role.
I might be wrong, but I believe Michael Moriary left what turned into the most sucessful television franchise because he agreed with you. He did not like the direction the show was taking the character of the DA.
I will look for a cite …