"Their father kept them alive and well" — sheltered under an overturned Jeep for 48 hours in temperatures as low as -16.

"Everybody is in good shape. There was no frostbite. They are stable. They suffered a little exposure and dehydration, but that is all."

"They stayed together and that was the key that allowed them to live through this experience. You don’t see that that often in search and rescue," said Paul Burke, search-and-rescue coordinator for the state. "They did some pretty inventive things, heating up rocks and things. Staying together, that was a big deal."

The 6 survivors consisted of a man and his girlfriend, their 2 children, and the woman's niece and nephew. The children were aged 3 to 10. I'd like to know what the man and woman thought and talked about and how the children responded. I await a new episode of "I Shouldn't Be Alive."

How could you be lost in the Cozumel jungle for 19 days?

I love the TV show "I Shouldn't Be Alive," but the new episode, which has a man wandering into the jungle on Cozumel and unable to bumble his way out of it for 19 days was just ridiculous. The show inserted aerial views of the jungle, with voiceover narration intended to make it seem really scary, but Cozumel is an island. It's 30 miles north-south and 9.9 miles east-west. The shots were framed to exclude the shoreline which encircled the area where he was lost.

The man knew he was on an island, and he could see the sun. Pick a direction, preferably east or west, and — even if you can only cover a mile a day — you'll get to the shore (or a road) within 5 days or so. What was really going on here? He seemed like a nice person. In the end, he said what he'd learned was to be kinder to people. But I'm not inclined to be kind to the TV hacks who wrote the script making his story into an "I Shouldn't Be Alive" as if it's the terrible jungle of Cozumel that should have killed him. It was incomprehensible stupidity/insanity that nearly got him.

When do we want to see actors pretend to go through what actually was a horrible experience that happened to real people, when we also know exactly what happened?

ALOTT5MA says:

Suggest a form of physical suffering you'd rather endure this weeken than spending $10+ to watch James Franco reenact what hiker Aron Ralston did....

I feel like we've had a bunch of films like this lately -- United 93, A Mighty Heart (the Daniel Pearl story), World Trade Center and others I'm sure you can name -- dramatic films based on real-life events where I can understand why filmmakers believed this was a story worth telling, but where the story itself is not one I have any interest in spending my entertainment dollars/time to see. And yet we (pretty much) all saw Schindler's List, which somehow became a cultural obligation in a way that none of the others -- not even the remarkable story of United 93 -- did.

Are we ghoulish to want to see more than the mental picture we had when we read about it in the press? Is there something different about a filmed depiction of an incident in which human beings did something evil to other human beings — "Schindler's List," "United 93" — and man-against-nature survival tales?

One of my favorite TV shows is "I Shouldn't Be Alive," which features reenacted survival stories like "Trapped Under a Boulder." And one of my favorite movies, "Touching the Void," is the same thing. In these stories, individuals have made a decision to go out into the wilderness or climb mountains and they get into trouble because of their own bad decisions or over-optimistic ideas about the dangers that are out there. Then they need to deal with the consequences. I think it's kind of right-wing to watch dramas like that. What if you leave the comforts of civilization and go out where you will have to be self-reliant? In many of these scenarios, the characters begin with the idea that they want to prove something to themselves by doing something difficult out where there will be no one to help them if things go bad.

And that's the story in the movie ALOTT5MA is talking about, "127 Hours."



That's the new movie by the director of "Slumdog Millionaire," which was a fictional story showing terrible things happening to children. Why do we make up stories of causing children to suffer and entertain ourselves with that? ALOTT5MA seems to think there's something very different about subjecting ourselves to a story where we know what the terrible thing is. Now, in fiction or nonfiction stories, we might know or not know what's going to happen. Are you more willing to watch movies and TV shows where you don't know what the particular horrors are? Would I have avoided seeing "Slumdog Millionaire" if I knew the exact torture that I'd see inflicted on children? Does my answer change if I know that things like that are really done to children in India?

And then there are the movies that depict real historical events, like the Holocaust and 9/11. We know the horrors, but in a rough, general sense. The point of these movies is to allow us to enter the individual experience of the human beings whose lives were part of the familiar history. We see those movies, if they are good enough, because of the way they give us deep psychic understanding of what happened. There's that quote (attributed to Stalin), "A single death is a tragedy; a million deaths is a statistic." A good movie might get you to the tragedy by putting you inside one person within the millions. But it might not be good. It might be a commercial exploitation of the emotions you already have. You may feel that you're obligated to care about these phony scenes full of actors because this really happened to real people. There will be celebrities in Nazi uniforms hamming up how evil they are. Then it's a travesty. Frankly, that's how I felt about "Schindler's List."

"Date From Hell."

My DVR dragged in a new episode of one of my favorite shows "I Shouldn't Be Alive." This is one where the people really are too dumb to live. All they need to do is stay on the path, which they were told to do — even warned about rattlesnakes and cougars if they leave the path. So, of course, la la la, they leave the path. They hear a waterfall. It sounds so close by! 

As for the Hell Date, I knew they were morons as soon as they made the conscious decision to leave their cell phones behind (I take my phone with me just to walk over to the mailbox, for fuck's sake, and they're hiking in a canyon where, you know, something could go really wrong very quickly!). Therefore, I was not a whit surprised that they wandered off looking for fairies and unicorns.

And what was up with that tour guide? She's sitting there with a list of passengers and goes, "Hmm, two people didn't return... I guess they went home! OK let's go!" ... Holy Fail.

Ha. Holy Fail. But it would also be moronic to assume your cell phone would work out there in the wilderness.

What we watched off the TiVo last night.

1. "Death Camp of Tolerance." (And no, we're not going to using "Lemmiwinks" as a pet name for our dear commenter Lem.) ("Death Camp" ≈ "death panels," no?)

2. "The Colbert Report," #05108 with Barbara Boxer. (Haven't watched Colbert in a while. He's less funny pretending to hate Democrats than he was pretending to love Republicans.)

3. "Trapped Under a Boulder." (This one never gets old. Well, what would you do if you were out camping amongst the Australian boulders and you had to pee in the middle of the night? Watch for the crawfish cameo.)