nothing on sale . . .

Posted by Quixie at 1:57 PM Read our previous post

I saw the film adaptation of Jon Krakauer's "Into The Wild" last night. I quite enjoyed the book, it's one that I read in one sitting, in fact, a rare thing. The film is not too bad. It was interesting to see how the screenwriter (Sean Penn in this case) changed some details and omitted others in order to translate the story to a film format.
Two examples: he gives much more prominence to Tracy "the girl" in the film than the book does, and he makes Chris' book of local flora and fauna explicitly say something which Krakauer's story does not, namely that the wild potato seed pods that ultimately killed him were poisonous. Chris would not have been that careless as to miss that detail in his foraging had that bit been in there, but then how else to explain to the movie's audience that it was this poisoning that did him in? In that sense, I could see how Penn had no choice.

It's cool to see the creative visualization process at work.

Before the movie, I did a little window shopping. One of the things I found for sale was a package of "nothing". Imagine packaging that would be wrapped around a small toy-like product - moulded plastic shaped into a spherical capsule - with nothing within that moulded space.

The label says, "for the person who already has everything, NOTHING".

And get this . . .

It costs $5.00!!!

I just had to mention this weird bit of pop culture.

Also, before the start of the movie, before the previews, there was projected on the screen a series of "trivia questions" and "factoids".

One of these went something like:
"Animals can sense spirits. That's why they can be often found staring into space."

Excuse me?? This is obviously bullshit founded on nothing that could remotely be called scientific. I mean, how would one test this hypothesis (stated here as fact, no less) to verify it?

Another factoid went:

"According to a recent Harris poll, 27% of Americans believe in reincarnation or in some form of coming back in another "body"."

If this is true, and if another recent poll that shows that something like 85% of Americans are self-described Christians is also true . . . then there is an overlap here. Some people who profess Christianity also believe in something which is not an acceptable position to Christian orthodoxy. Is this a simple case of syncretism? . . . or is someone just lying somewhere in there? Y'think?

Just a thought.

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