not bad but not great either

Rating: 5/10 (4 September 2007)

i read this book about 4 years ago. i randomly found it at a coffee shop/bookstore in Greenville NC where you could read books for free while sipping a cappuccino and eating a scone for $10. ha-ha. the book was engrossing and as my older sister went to Emory university as well, i was fascinated by this character/real guy who was brilliant and graduated from that rigorous university with honors and then decided to scrap a career for living as a nomad. the book is extremely well written and although i like Emile Hirsch, he was poor casting. he can act, but i felt he's too young to even play Chris who from the book seemed a TALL, ahead of his time, cocky college graduate. Hirsch is too cocky, too full of himself and sort of knee jerk about everything. the Chris in the book is much more thoughtful, calculating, and mature than he's portrayed. also, the character development is bad. you never get inside Chris at all. this book is hard to adapt. because you don't want to pass up the godliness of that landscape that Chris traversed and Penn does encapsulate it in his filming. however, the movie is more an adventure story than a true biography (which it should have been) of a unique young brash man who was in over his head. i didn't even like the casting of hurt or harden either. i again pictured his parents to be more like perhaps Donald Sutherland/Mary Tyler Moore (i'm serious). it's a watchable movie and entertaining. but if you had read the book, it's simply a huge disappointment because it doesn't even skim the surface of the rite of passage this guy tries to take and fails at as nature overwhelmed and defeated him. the oldest story ever told.