"Into the Wild"

They are making a movie out of Jon Krakauer's book "Into the Wild," a great story about Christopher McCandless, a free-spirit who dropped in and out of civilization and who ultimately starved to death in an abandoned bus in Alaska. I'm disappointed. I'm always disappointed when they make a movie about a book I've read, because they always ruin it. I try to make a point of not seeing the movies, and I even try to avoid the commercials, as I did with "All the Pretty Horses" by Cormac McCarthy. You just can't improve on a Cormac McCarthy book and any movie based on it is going to be a pale and shallow imitation. I've only ever seen one movie that came anywhere near what I imagined the book to be, and that was "A Separate Peace," one of my favorite books as an adolescent. I also thought "The World According to Garp" was pretty good, and perhaps even an improvement on the book. Perhaps. But beyond these I've always been so disappointed by movies-based-on-books that I've vowed not to see them and I will certainly not see "Into the Wild." I'm a little disappointed in Jon Krakauer that he even sold the movie rights, although if I was an author I'd probably sell the movie rights too. But there's no way I'd go to the theatre to see the final product. No way.