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Tag Archives: Storm

Under an Arctic Sky (2017)

26 Monday Nov 2018

Posted by dullwood68 in Movies

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

Chris Burkard, Documentary, Iceland, Icelandic winter, Isafjordur, Justin Quintal, Review, Sam Hammer, Storm, Surfing

D: Chris Burkard / 40m

With: Chris Burkard, Sam Hammer, Steve Hawk, Sigurdur Jonsson, Heidar Logi, Elli Thor Magnusson, Ingo Olsen, Justin Quintal, Mark Renneker, Timmy Reyes

For six highly regarded surfers, the chance to test their skill on a surfboard in the challenging waters of Northwest Iceland is a challenge that’s willingly accepted. Their timing might seem a little off though, as they arrive in Reykjavik during the Icelandic winter, and in conditions that none of them have encountered before – let alone surfed in. Journeying along the coast to connect with the ship that will take them to their planned destination of Isafjordur, they take an impromptu detour to surf some waves, and get the measure of the experience ahead of them. Once on board ship though, the advance of a storm that will come to be regarded as the worst in twenty-five years, forces the ship’s captain to turn back. But the surfers know that once the storm has passed, in its wake will follow some of the most breathtaking swells imaginable, and the opportunity to surf in a stretch of Icelandic waters that is almost virgin surfing territory. Aided by a group of their Icelandic counterparts, the six surfers decide to travel by road through the storm to reach Isafjordur, and those majestic waves…

Although only a compact forty minutes in length, Under an Arctic Sky is an engrossing, fascinating account of how surfing can truly be thought of as radical. A romantic’s idea of surfing might not stretch to its taking place in the depths of a bitter Icelandic winter, and at a location so isolated and inhospitable that the Icelanders themselves haven’t settled there, but there is a romanticism here that lends itself to the whole crazy endeavour. There’s a genuine spirit and sense of camaraderie between the men, all friends and mutual admirers, and their decision to surf the icy cold waters of Iceland’s remote Hornstrandir Nature Reserve. They’re also modern day adventurers, literally charting new territory in terms of surfing, and literally doing what no other surfers have done before. It’s inspiring, it’s incredible to witness, and it leaves you thinking that they’re all as mad as a box of frogs – but in a good way. Each time they take to the water, you wonder how they can stand the cold, especially as they’re warned at one point that hypothermia can set in in under ten minutes. Brave, foolish, mad, heroic? All of them? You decide.

But the key strength of the movie is Ben Weiland’s incredibly impressive cinematography. This is a documentary that features an embarrassment of visual riches, from shots of the snow-covered Icelandic mountains to the steel-blue waters that nudge against the Icelandic coast, and in the movie’s most powerful and uplifting sequence, the final, post-storm bout of free surfing, where Justin Quintal is framed against a backdrop of luminescent waves, while the sky above him ripples with the eerie glow of the Northern Lights; it’s simply awe-inspiring (and if you can, see the movie on the biggest screen possible – the image above doesn’t do the effect any justice). Directed with clear-eyed passion and verve, the movie leads up to this one moment, and the wait is worth it. Inevitably, the run time means we don’t get to know the likes of Quintal and Hammer too well, but this is a small price to pay when the rewards are so beautifully presented. Even the scenes set during the storm have a magnificent, rugged, terrifying beauty to them. In the end – and like all the best documentaries about a pastime that most of us take a pass on – it leaves you wanting to grab a board and hope that you don’t get raked over before you’ve even begun.

Rating: 8/10 – even if you’re not a fan of surfing, Under an Arctic Sky remains a compelling look at how the search for greater challenges can lead to the most sublime of experiences; guaranteed to impress purely thanks to its visuals, this is also a movie about a group of men who treat each other with unstinting respect and affection, and whose passion for their chosen sport is acknowledged with an equal amount of respect, and admiration.

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Life on the Line (2015)

29 Wednesday Jun 2016

Posted by dullwood68 in Movies

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

Danger, David Hackl, Devon Sawa, Drama, John Travolta, Kate Bosworth, Linemen, Review, Sharon Stone, Storm, Thriller

Life on the Line

D: David Hackl / 93m

Cast: John Travolta, Kate Bosworth, Devon Sawa, Gil Bellows, Julie Benz, Ryan Robbins, Ty Olsson, Sharon Stone

The life of a lineman – in Texas at least – is one that is continually fraught with danger and the prospect of death. This is the message that Life on the Line reminds us of throughout its (brief enough) running time, and especially when said linemen make mistake after mistake as they go about their daily work (the movie will have health and safety experts choking on their popcorn; real linemen will either be laughing at the many, many inaccuracies the movie exhibits or shaking their heads in prolonged disbelief). But, hey, this is still the fourth most dangerous job in the world.

We’re given an example of this right at the start when the actions of cocky lineman Beau Ginner (Travolta) lead to the death of his brother, who’s also his crew boss. Circumstances lead also to the death of his brother’s wife; this leaves Beau’s neice, Bailey, in his care (what the authorities were thinking is a question the movie avoids asking altogether). Fast forward ten years and Bailey (Bosworth) is on the verge of going to college, while Beau has become Mr Safety, and a well respected crew boss like his brother. The complete overhaul and replacement of thousands of miles of electrical lines throughout Texas has Beau’s crew working flat out to meet the utility company’s deadline.

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Two new workers – Bailey’s ex-boyfriend Duncan (Sawa), and new neighbour Eugene (Robbins) – bring their own problems to the mix, with Duncan treating Bailey in an unexplained, dismissive manner, and Eugene having trouble with PTSD since returning from Iraq. He’s distant to his wife, Carline (Benz), and is away a lot due to his work. Meanwhile, Bailey is trying to reconnect with Duncan because she has something important to tell him, while also fending off the unwanted attentions of ex-con Danny (Olsson). And Beau is coming under increasing pressure from the utility company, even to the point of being asked to “take risks” if it will get the job done sooner rather than later.

By now it’s clear that all these separate storylines are likely to converge, and the movie makes it clear that this will be the case as it keeps counting down the days to a great storm. Until then the movie busies itself with some low-key soap opera dramatics mixed with random scenes such as Beau talking down an angry biker in a bar. Bailey reveals her secret to Duncan, and to Beau; Danny’s unwanted attentions escalate to the point where he targets Carline; Eugene’s paranoia leads him to climb an electrical pylon with the intention of killing himself; and a trainwreck causes Beau no end of problems, including one of his crew being injured. As the storm rages around them all, matters of life and death arise, and Beau has to make a terrible choice.

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Whatever you may think about John Travolta and his recent run of movies, he’s still an actor to watch, even if his performances border on the perfunctory these days. Life on the Line is no different to any other movie he’s made in the last few years, and here he does the bare mimimum in terms of characterisation and emoting, a situation his fans will be overly familiar with. There’s no spark or energy in his portrayal, no attempt to overcome the many implausibilities of the script, or the diffidence with which screenwriters Primo Brown, Peter I. Horton, Marvin Peart and Dylan Scott have created the part of Beau. Instead he goes through the motions, and in some scenes, comes close to looking bored (when Beau harangues his crew about safety and shows them pictures of electrical burn injuries, Travolta’s delivery lacks the edge such a scene needs to show Beau’s doing this because he cares about his crew).

But Travolta’s paycheck-grabbing performance is the least of the movie’s worries. The aforementioned script is quite a stinker, cobbled together and assembled on screen by Hackl and his production team with all the finesse of pre-school children being asked to build a rocket ship: you can give them all the directions and tools they’ll ever need, but they won’t know what to do with them. It’s much the same here, with Travolta and his fellow cast members continually left high and dry by the vagaries of the script and the vague intentions of Hackl, DoP Brian Pearson, and editor Jamie Alain. All three share an inability of purpose that ruins the movie from the word go. And some of the dialogue – straight from the Holy Land of Cliché – is so dire that no one can rescue it and make it sound even halfway credible.

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The narrative doesn’t hold up under close scrutiny, the subplots scream “Filler!”, and the denouement is so laughable and corny and hackneyed and clichéd and just plain stupid that you won’t believe your eyes and ears. As a drama, Life on the Line is the equivalent of a DOA, and should be approached as warily, as if you were, say, taking a hot dish out of the oven without the benefit of oven mitts. This is bad on a level that only low-budget movies can achieve, and while the production has attracted a reasonably talented cast, it struggles to be both interesting and dramatic, and succeeds only in giving new meaning to the word ‘risible’.

Rating: 3/10 – “no one here gets out alive,” said The Doors, and Life on the Line is a perfect example of a movie that fits that kind of doom-laden vibe; blandly executed and overly reliant on plot rehashes we’ve seen a million times before, the movie stumbles along in search of someone to steer it out of the murky backwaters of its own making, and along the way, makes you wonder if anyone associated with it could ever be happy with the way it’s turned out.

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X-Men: Apocalypse (2016)

22 Sunday May 2016

Posted by dullwood68 in Movies

≈ 3 Comments

Tags

Action, Angel, Apocalypse, Beast, Bryan Singer, Cyclops, Drama, Evan Peters, Havok, James McAvoy, Jean Grey, Jennifer Lawrence, Kodi Smit-McPhee, Magneto, Marvel, Michael Fassbender, Mutants, Mystique, Nicholas Hoult, Nightcrawler, Oscar Isaac, Professor Xavier, Psylocke, Quicksilver, Review, Rose Byrne, School for Gifted Children, Sci-fi, Sequel, Storm, Superheroes, Thriller, X-Men

X-Men Apocalypse

D: Bryan Singer / 144m

Cast: James McAvoy, Michael Fassbender, Jennifer Lawrence, Oscar Isaac, Nicholas Hoult, Rose Byrne, Evan Peters, Sophie Turner, Tye Sheridan, Kodi Smit-McPhee, Lucas Till, Olivia Munn, Ben Hardy, Alexandra Shipp, Josh Helman, Ally Sheedy

It’s okay.

Rating: 6/10 – an average sequel that offers a muddled storyline complete with yet more disaster porn, the best thing you can say about X-Men: Apocalypse is that it’s competently made; without a strong emotional core to help the audience care about the characters, or a real sense of impending apocalypse to make the stakes all the more gripping, this is a sequel that fails to build on the good work achieved in the previous two instalments.

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Everest (2015)

14 Monday Sep 2015

Posted by dullwood68 in Movies

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

Adventure Consultants, Baltasar Kormákur, Climbing, Drama, Emily Watson, Himalayas, Jason Clarke, John Hawkes, Josh Brolin, Keira Knightley, May 1996, Mountain Madness, Review, Rob Hall, Scott Fischer, Storm, True story

Everest

D: Baltasar Kormákur / 121m

Cast: Jason Clarke, Josh Brolin, John Hawkes, Emily Watson, Robin Wright, Keira Knightley, Jake Gyllenhaal, Sam Worthington, Michael Kelly, Martin Henderson, Thomas M. Wright, Ingvar Eggert Sigurðsson, Naoko Mori, Elizabeth Debicki

The brainchild of New Zealand mountaineer Rob Hall (Clarke), Adventure Consultants is a company that takes people to the summit of Mount Everest. In April 1996, Rob and his team, led by base camp manager Helen Wilton (Watson), plan to take eight clients to the summit. Among them are Texan climber Beck Weathers (Brolin) and Doug Hansen (Hawkes), a postman seeking to inspire the pupils at an elementary school where he lives, and Jon Krakauer (Kelly), a journalist from Outside magazine that Hall has persuaded to write an article about them in return for a gratis trip. When they arrive at base camp, Hall regales them with the necessary rules and warns them all of the dangers of ascending to a height where their bodies will literally begin to die.

The group make three acclimatisation climbs before starting off for the summit on the morning of May 10. They are joined by a group led by Scott Fischer (Gyllenhaal) of the rival company Mountain Madness. Together they aid each other in climbing the mountain, making it to each Camp in good time. The camaraderie between the climbers helps them to keep going the further up they climb, but after they leave Camp IV, they begin to encounter problems. Fischer becomes unwell and starts to struggle, while Weathers develops an eyesight problem that causes him to remain on the side of the mountain until the other climbers come back down. As they near the summit, they reach the Balcony and find there are no fixed ropes; and again when they reach the Hillary Step. With time being eaten away by these delays the strain of the climb begins to tell on more and more of the climbers, including Hansen who lags behind everyone else.

The two groups persevere though and the first person to reach the summit – from Fischer’s group – gets there around 1pm. With everyone needing to start back down by 2pm in order to make it back to Camp IV, Hall finds himself ignoring his own rules and helping Hansen reach the summit. Now over an hour late in leaving, and with Hansen getting weaker and weaker due to a lack of oxygen, Hall is faced with an even worse problem: a terrible storm rushing in from the southwest. With the blizzard making the effort to descend even harder, Hall and Hansen make it back to the Hillary Step, while Fischer’s group and the rest of Hall’s group find themselves battling the blizzard and struggling to stay alive. With no help available from the base camp, all anyone can do is hope that the storm abates soon, and gives them all a chance to get back down.

Everest - scene

Based on a true story, and with a script by William Nicholson and Simon Beaufoy that’s been collated from various sources, Everest is a disaster movie that highlights the natural beauty of the Himalayas, and the ever-present danger that lies hidden and waiting for the unwary (or even the experienced). It’s an intelligent, cleverly constructed and judiciously maintained tale of unexpected tragedy that is also unexpectedly moving. And thanks to the decision to film as much of the movie on location as possible, it allows the viewer to become embroiled in the effort to reach the summit and then to stay alive against the odds.

Much will be made of Everest‘s stunning vistas and gasp-inducing scenery, and while this is entirely appropriate, they’re still the backdrop for a tragic endeavour that was doomed from the moment that the groups found that there were no fixed ropes in two sections where they were needed. With the climb having gone so well up til then, this presentiment of doom adds a chill to events that augments the sub-zero temperatures, and makes the rest of the movie dreadful and fascinating to watch at the same time.

As the resulting tragedy unfolds, it becomes an agonising experience as the various climbers we’ve come to know and empathise with, face terrible hardships brought on by the brutal weather, and find the limits of their endurance pushed beyond measure. The inclusion of Hall’s partner, Jan (Knightley), and Beck’s wife, Peach (Wright), both removed from the action but still linked to their men by tremendous love and commitment, allows the movie to show how the events on Everest had a wider consequence. Jan is pregnant with hers and Rob’s first child, while Peach moves heaven and earth to ensure her husband has a chance of returning home. Their fears and concerns add an extra layer of tragic drama to proceedings, and in the capable hands of Knightley and Wright, both women show fear, strength, determination and sadness with admirable clarity. And they’re matched by Watson, who puts in yet another faultless performance.

Amongst the men, Clarke plays Hall as an altruistic, methodical leader whose love of climbing defines him the most. When Hall decides to help Hansen reach the summit, his thoughts are writ clearly on his face: it’s the wrong decision, and Clarke shows Hall’s understanding of this with such resignation that it heightens the impending tragedy, and makes their twin fates all the more affecting. Hawkes gives another low-key yet determined performance as the most unlikely climber in the group, while Brolin’s cocky, bullish attitude soon reveals a deeper layer of insecurity that Weathers would rather keep hidden. Gyllenhaal and Worthington have minor roles in comparison and we don’t get to know their characters as well, but with so many to keep track of, it would be unfair for the script to try and focus on too many at one time.

Making his most complete and effective movie to date, Kormákur ratchets up the tension as the storm hits and survival becomes everything. But he never loses sight of the human will to overcome and conquer adversity, and as the treacherous descent is begun, most viewers are likely to have at least one character they’ll want to see reach Camp IV. Whether they do or not is another matter, and it would be fair to say that billing is no guarantee of survival, but again Kormákur keeps the viewer on the edge of their seat as to just who will make it and who won’t, and each death carries with it its own devastating emotional “punch”.

The production is handsomely mounted and is supported by Salvatore Totino’s superb photography, Dario Marianelli’s subtle, non-intrusive score, and Mick Audsley’s fine-tuned editing. With only a few dodgy green screen shots to break the illusion, and some confusion as to what’s happening to whom once the blizzard hits, Everest remains a compelling, gripping account of an unfortunate, avoidable tragedy.

Rating: 8/10 – whatever your views on the mistakes made on May 10 1996, there’s no doubting the courage shown by all those on the mountain that day, and Everest is a tribute to all those who perished, and the survivors as well; with an emotional core that steals up on the viewer, it’s a movie that reaffirms the risks of climbing “the most dangerous place on Earth”, and the sense of profound achievement that it provides.

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Mini-Review: All Is Lost (2013)

26 Wednesday Feb 2014

Posted by dullwood68 in Movies

≈ 3 Comments

Tags

J.C. Chandor, Lost at sea, Review, Robert Redford, Sailing, Storm

All Is Lost

D: J.C. Chandor / 106m

Cast: Robert Redford

All Is Lost is that cinematic rarity: a one-man show that really is a one-man show. Redford is in nearly every shot in this compelling movie about the courage to survive when a sailing trip goes from bad to worse to terrifying. Waking to find that his sailing boat has collided with a shipping container, and it has punched a hole in the side, Redford – whose character is simply known in the credits as ‘Our Man’ – patches the hole but finds himself unable to call for help, his radio having suffered water damage in the collision. Alone, but determined to get help or get home, Our Man finds himself next dealing with a terrifying storm… and the dreadful aftermath. Over the course of eight days, and as his situation becomes increasingly desperate, Our Man’s resourcefulness is put to the test, until even he begins to despair of being rescued.

All Is Lost - scene

This is an acting tour-de-force by Redford, who shows that despite recent efforts such as The Company You Keep and Lions for Lambs, he is still one of the best actors around, with a screen presence and a command of material that most younger actors can only hope to achieve. Every emotion, every surge of hope and slough of despair is projected perfectly for the audience to bear witness. The character’s pride and resolve is clearly referenced, and the sheer physicality of the character is heightened by his battle with the sea and the elements (it’s worth bearing in mind that Redford is now 77 – this must have been a very demanding shoot for him). With confident, focused direction by Chandor (from his script), All Is Lost holds the attention throughout and makes for riveting viewing. Filmed partly in the same tank at Baja, Mexico that was built for Titanic, All Is Lost is a fantastic piece of filmmaking, beautifully shot, and perfectly edited; there’s not a wasted moment in the whole movie.

Rating: 9/10 – a gripping, enthralling piece of filmmaking that gives Redford his best role in years; an incredible achievement all round.

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