Guest Post: Christmastime Movie Reviews from @pdxsag

There’s something interesting going on in Alaska. I think the extreme environment draws extreme people so rather than a normal distribution of personality types, you get a bi-modal distribution of the left and right wing. Call it the High Agency Horseshoe.

Last winter our family got into “The Last Alaskans” [5/5]. It was easy to sense the families that were the subjects of the series were conservative. Living off the land – resource extraction – does that to a person.

In contrast, a couple days ago the wife and I caught “ReWilding Kernwood” [3/5, 5/5 for unintended social commentary], which was about an artist couple — value transference — that were "decommissioning" the homestead they worked some 20 years to build. Suffice to say the artists come across as the stereotype of insufferable NPR liberals that made a carpetbagger like Bernie Sanders possible. And, in case you had any lingering doubts, their physiques – and recurring complaining about their bodies giving out due to aging, though they were only upper 60’s when they started the filming production – drove the point home.

About the only nice thing I can say to their credit is rather than doing the most Boomer thing ever (sell the rights to their homestead to a Cali-douche for $1M+), they instead did the second most Boomer thing ever (tear it down so no future generation can benefit from their investment).

I have said Boomers are childless in spirit, and this movie perfectly captures that narcissism. In fairness to them, personally, their son died in 2012, a month before his 26th birthday, and surely that had a deep psychological impact on them. Liberal boomers create millennial children, but more on that in a future guest post. Nonetheless, of the entire state of Alaska, that they could not find a worthy successor for leaving a legacy speaks volumes.

Pivoting to physique... a much better movie where aging figures in as one of the subtexts is “Dirtbag: The Legend of Fred Beckey” [5/5], about a largely self-taught alpinist from the Pacific Northwest. He was first-to-summit the most North American peaks of anyone in history. He was a young-ish member of the GI Generation and manifest the rugged self-reliance and will to competitive success that their cohort is famous for. Despite a reputation for being a cheapskate among a group notorious for being cheapskates, “dirtbag” rock climbers, and taking urban gleaning to an extreme art-form, he maintained a strong physique and ability to hike, if not successfully climb, mountains into his 90's!

Add another win for strength training which, autistic "fit-twit" is always talking about.

I'll close with a recommendation for another great adventure movie I've caught recently, “Go Fast. Go North" [5/5] about a group of millennial “Canadian bros,” in a barely sanctioned sailboat race from Port Townsend, WA, to Ketchikan, Alaska. It's a 750 mile race of the inside passage with only two rules: no motors, and no outside support.

Where are the Gen X-ers in all of this? No surprise, they are conspicuously absent. They are DIY-ing on YouTube. The few feature films [5/5] about them, are invariably indie projects put together by millennial aspiring auteurs.

Last thing: Blue-collar bf, Lib-writer gf ... once you see it [1/5], you see it all the time. My brothers, there is only one way to tame these flighty mares: you must take them to the sea and show them their survival depends on your masculine energy. They must see you battle nature at its most wild and raw, and win. If you fail to demonstrate your superiority, they will abandon you and your presumably unworthy children when they have their mid-fertility-life crisis, and go full Eat-Pray-Love.