A Walk in the Woods

A Walk in the Woods is a pretty good film.

Small-budged with some big-shot actors in, the film is simple, light-hearted, somewhat funny, and with a fresh life-appreciating style long unseen since 911. Without any flashy scene of gun-fights, car-chasing, a terrorist attack averted at the last second, a superhero defying the gravity and humiliating the rest of natural laws, nor any far-reaching dramatization of human struggles and confrontations that often end on a high and happy note, it is just a small straightforward story of two men who become bored enough to try something impossible under the blue sky. They decide to finish Appalachian Trail by walking, yet unsuccessfully at last.

After many heart-enlightened days, some mind-twisting nights, and a couple of unexpected and even dangerous incidents in between, the more prudent men lack of the otherwise ultimate self-satisfaction decide to abort their expedition and go back to celebrate their pre-adventure life of their own with one thing in common, a happier heart. One takes a Greyhound bus to go on about his wandering life all over the place, while another returns home to his wife who, after having failed to put a lid on her husband's desire for a long walk of over 2,000 miles in woods, romantically parlays her beautiful accent into the least demanding term on him, "Please try not to die out there", when she sees him off to his doomed mission. How lovely and understanding!

While having her bone-shattering accent echoing around is certainly one kind of man's life wonderfully fulfilled, a man's life may also in a thousand other ways be reckoned with.