Am
awfully overdue with the commentary on the mountaineering movies I’ve been
watching this past week. Pretty much all of them were excellent, though I liked
some a lot more than the others. My favourite was the one about hammy the
hamster, the best one done was the first and the worst was, ironically, the
last one I saw, as it seemed to be done by a retarded rich Canadian moron,
whose idea of a good story was half an hour of whining in tandem with an
equally retarded African native and then a glide. That said, it was a
surprisingly well portrayal of the country.
Okay,
here goes.
The
Gauri Shankar expedition
This
wasn’t a movie, it was a retelling of the story of a local climbing party which
took on at the time considered the tallest mountain. This quickly taught me
that when men see something very large and beautiful, they must either sink it
or crawl on top. As I have no conquest tendencies and am usually only
interested in either food, sex, photos or lore, I made due taking pictures of
the reunion and admitting the fact most brought home their toes. Gauri Shankar
is a very pretty and fairly bloodthirsty mountain, such as they all are. Later
movies will show, however, that where you find difficult, painful places, you
probably find crazy white men trying to pitch a tent there.
Vanishing
Point (missed it.)
Petzl
Rocktrip Argentina
This one
in my opinion was the one best made – it had colour, music, story, comedy,
acting, magnificent footage and it actually made sense to people who don’t
happen to be eager climbers. I couldn’t fucking care less about it, as I
couldn’t care less about wind surfing, base jumping or … I dunno.. sand heading.
Whatever. Large numbers of devoted folk do seem to care, though, and to them
it’s like a rocky Woodstock. They act cheerful, fit young people, determined to
do sporty stuff without any boundaries or any political bullshit. Respect.
Wide
Boyz
This one
was also really good. I thought. It was more about how elderly climbers piss
and shit on two young foreigners, but the climb was majestic. These two kids,
Pete and Tom, as English as can be, white and middle class and all that, built
their training room in one of their basements, imitating off-width routes – the
climbing problems known as the tricky width, because it is too wide for the
fist and too narrow for the body – so neither cracks or chimneys. They worked
their way to a really nasty crack which has never been done by anybody and when
they did it, everyone else gave them the stink, jealous old farts.
Here is a really good photo cover vy Alex Ekins
Here is a really good photo cover vy Alex Ekins
The
pillar (Or column?)
A Slovenian
feature movie about the man who finally managed to solo a hard route up …
dunno, some mountain, probably ThreeHead, Slovenia tallest peak. This was
mostly a political movie, because all the inner turmoils of the characters had
something to do with either war, job or party allegiance. It was a nice movie,
well acted, nicely shot, a little over-dramatised. Though the guy’s description
of his final ascend was poetry.
Spice
Girl
This one
was my favourite. Not because it was about a girl – far from it, as I have
nothing in common with someone like that, but because I liked how she was
portrayed. Her dad, who trained and inspired her, was also someone who really
liked her and would call her Hammy the Hamster, saying her face was so wide
when she was little and chubby (hence Ham-my, her name being Hazel), you could
see her smile from behind. The first part of the movie is the two of them
conquering the E9 cliff, mastering the crumbling rock – which looks pretty much
like a glass wall. When you first see that cliff you think – you must be
fucking kidding… But she does it and the next part is a climb she does with a
friend in Morocco. The movie is made very realistically without trying to be
hysterically cinematic and bullshitty.
The
Climbing Shepherd
Another
well done one, about a Welsh lad that is doing work on his uncle’s farm,
raising his own tiny flock with his young wife, all the while drawn to his
other great passion – hard ascends. Some sheep die, but the movie is lovely. I
have no idea what language they are speaking. (Welsh, obviously, but it sounds
really unrelated to the Indo-European pool, so it sounds like secret chant to
me…)
The
eagles return
In this
one, shot masterfully, you meet people trying to repopulate the white-tail
eagles back into Ireland. They tell you all predators have been extinct (in
fact they tell you this about thirty-seven times) and that Norway has granted them access
to 20 chicks. So they have to climb into the high nests and weight the little
buggers – and when I say little I mean they were bigger than men if they opened
their wing, but they can’t open their wings yet, so it’s okay.) Then they tell you one more time all of the
eagles were extinct and are now slowly and surely working to repopulate them.
In the
footsteps of the snow leopard
was the one
I didn’t get.. I missed the first few minutes, but then again I miss the first
few minutes of all of them, and there was this Mongolian man, in a tiny
camouflage tent, stalking an irbis, a.k.a. a big fat cat with a long tail that
resides in highlands, a snow leopard. He does this for about 54 minutes and I
simply never got what he wanted from it. Did he want to see it (cause he did),
observe, hunt, eat, stuff, photograph or tag it… Nothing much of any of this
happened. There were just okay, not really great sequences of irbis doing
nothing. Even worse, before anything happened, an annoying Belgium guy kept
announcing it. (He was some famous film maker/photographer, but as footage
goes, this was not at all impressive.) All the time. Now an irbis will come
down the cliff. Now an irbis will look around. Now an irbis will go up the
cliff. Now an irbis will make three steps to the left. Basaan will be watching
this – cue shot of Basaan’s eyes watching from the tent. It’s okay, Belgian
dude. We get it.
One
thing I did observe, though – I mean besides the overwhelming beauty of remote
plains and deserts…. That we, the white civilisation, the western progress
oriented society, are so often told we are such bad people, so out of tune with
nature … and yet ALL the time you can see the most secluded of traditional
nomads, hunters, shepherds, fishermen, whatever, using modern tents, modern
clothes, modern hot water bottles, modern weaponry …
North
from the sun
Awwww,
this one sooo reminded me of Maggie, my sister’s ex. This is about two guys who
move to the shitway removed bay up in some arctic isle, up on the twilight
north to clear it off all the garbage the tides bring in. They makeshift a hut
and use anything the poor Pompeii-like beach has to offer: tons and tons of
terrible uncomposable waste. To keep up the morale, they surf in the zero
degrees waters or climb up and skate down the perfect slopes – unlikely anyone
will ever do that right there ever again… This was excellently shot and it gave
a strong moral.
The boy
who flies
This was
the only one I thought was really bad. I mean, the speaking part was bad - the footage was wonderful. One day a rich kid decides he will go to
the middle of Africa (because no one flies there and yet getting a glide shoot
isn’t that difficult), adopt a native young to train him into a motivational
speaker, battling poverty and depressing things of Africa, like living without
paved roads or being completely black all the time. He is offended most of the
time that people consider him to be rich and white and not the messiah he
actually is, a godwful mentor in paragliding as he never once demonstrated how
that shit is actually done and aloof as only rich white people who have never
had to work a day in their life can be. Meanwhile, his black companion is
whining, peddling behind him, in search of the only mountain in the entire continent.
Once they ascend and then glide down, they are called Jesus.
Regretfully,
I haven’t seen the Leni Riefenstahl as actress retrospective, but it’s on my to
do list. I am oddly drawn to that lady. She gave good interviews.
