[at-l] Touching the Void - mountaineering movie

[papabear.nyc at verizon.net (Papa Bear)]

Some of you are familiar with a newly released movie called "Touching the Void".  For those of you who are not, it is about a mountain climbing adventure of 2 young British climbers (Joe Simpson and Simon Yates) who in 1985 went down to Peru to attempt to climb one of the highest peaks by a route never before climbed.  It a word, things did not go well (although they summited the mountain).  It is based on a book by Joe Simpson.

It is somewhat on-topic here since many of us hiking aficionados are also interested in climbing and we are at least wannabe Alpinists  (I know I am).

The two climbers, now in their 40s, provide narration in this voice-over style documentary.

I got to see it on Friday and in a word it was awesome! 

The voice over, docudrama format worked very well. Even that tear in Joe's (the real Joe's) eye looked for real. I was impressed by: 

1) The photography - the mountains (both in Peru and in the Alps where the climbing scenes were shot) were spectacular.
2) The "acting" on the part of the climbers. I read somewhere that they were told "don't act, just do it". Very convincing - these were clearly real climbers. And watching the injured Joe stumbling and crawling across the glacier and moraine was agonizing. 
3) The honesty of the narrative   Joe's story was pretty unglossed though I'm sure the reality was somewhat different. 
4) The best scene was when he couldn't get some rock band's music out of his head. Almost surreal. 

The audience was very quite, spellbinding comes to mind. You really got the idea that this was like it really was. I was very moved. And I wasn't frightened by the high exposure scenes. I thought the scene of Frodo, Sam and Gollum on the long stair was scarier (especially bivouacking unanchored!) But hey, that was another movie. One and only complaint: too many fade-to-black scene changes. Nobody's perfect. 

See it. 
Pb