Wild Thing

In addition to loving carriage-and-corset dramas, what you may not know about me, gentle reader, is that I love non-fiction accounts of real-life wilderness survival. I get all worked-up assuming whoever is in whatever ungodly predicament must certainly be a goner. (Sometimes they are, sometimes they aren't.) I'm fascinated by men like Ernest Shackleton, William Bligh, Robert Scott, Robert O'Hara Burke (if you love these type of books, you MUST read the tragic Cooper's Creek by Alan Moorehead).

We can probably chalk up my interest in this subject matter to my own laziness and inability to endure one night of camping (in an R.V., even), let alone make an attempt to claw my way back to civilization after being stranded on a sheet of ice in Antarctica. (I'm trying to learn, however, as evidenced by my obsession for "Man Vs. Wild" on the Discovery Channel. Bear Grylls ate a dead sheep's eyeball this week while stuck in a remote part of Iceland!)

That said, I remember not being tremendously keen on Jon Krakauer's Into the Wild (now a movie starring Emile Hirsch) because the "explorer," Christopher McCandless, is really little more than an ill-equipped hippie who wasn't very smart about things, and thus, got himself up a not-so-proverbial creek without a paddle. Still, I MIGHT be interested in the movie, which also stars Vince Vaughn, Catherine Keener, Marcia Gay Harden and William Hurt. I'll probably "rough it" and wait for Netflix.

Here's the trailer.