I was quite glad that Hal Holbrook didn’t win the Oscar for Best Supporting Actor. Look, I realize the guy is old and has been around a long time, but that’s no reason to win an Oscar. In fact, it’s not a good reason to be nominated. Holbrook’s performance is short and generally forgettable.

The basic message of “Into the Wild” is this: take all that Thoreau living-in-concert-with-nature shit too seriously and you’re likely to die. As you may know, “Into the Wild” is the film adaptation of the Jon Krakauer book about Christopher McCandless (Emile Hirsch), who went to Alaska to commune with nature and got himself killed in the process. Frankly, I thought this film would have been a lot more interesting if director Sean Penn had taken a page from “Grizzly Man” and had McCandless eaten by a bear. However, all that happens is that he eats a poisonous plant and gets sick and dies. He does learn in the end “don’t worry, be happy”. Or maybe that’s “happiness is shared”. I forget.

I guess we’re supposed to care about McCandless because he’s a nice, white kid from a middle class family. Naturally, the family has a few problems, mostly surrounding Walt (William Hurt) and Billie (Marica Gay Harden) fighting, but we hardly see any of that. Chris just up and disappears, leaving his poor sister, Carine (Jena Malone) to narrate his story. Since McCandless was a real person and his family a real family, perhaps I should be less harsh. But no. Remember that this is a rip on the fictional McCandless in this movie, not the real one.

Having read the book, I don’t really recall who McCandless ran into, but since a movie about a kid going to Alaska and dying is rather dull, Penn has McCandless meet various people (I think he met them in the book too. I just don’t remember). Basically, we discover that McCandless is pretty much a great kid and having him inevitably die in the middle of Alaska is a pointless loss.

Ironically, that was kind of how I felt about my time watching “Into the Wild”.