The Lines We Choose... another year's Banff Mountain FIlm Festival

Once again the Banff Mountain Film Festival has left me feeling inspired and motivated and ready for the next trip/adventure.

Katie and I went on Friday night, the first of a three-night run at the Bloor Cinema.

Most years, there is a feature-length film and half a dozen shorter offerings. But this year that wasn’t the case. There were several films around the 30-minute mark and another four or five 10-minute or less films.

I’m not sure which format I prefer. This way you get to see more films, but you miss out on the longer films, which are often the most memorable.

Either way, it was still a great show this year. Two films in particular stand out in my mind.

"Committed 2: Walk of Life" was a fantastic rock climbing film. It focuses on James Pearson’s attempt to climb a massive, blank, near-featureless chunk of rock on the ocean coast of Devon, in the U.K.

He becomes obsessed with climbing this wall, and won’t rest until his goal is
accomplished.

He begins by knocking out all the old bolts left behind by other climbers over the years. “It looks like it has a new lease on life,” he says, once the hardware is all removed and lying in a huge pile at the base.

There’s a definite sense of attachment between Pearson and the cliff.

He also seems serious and determined and capable, but also humble and low-key. There is none of the death-defying heart-stopping showboating of Chris Sharma, none of the jokey charisma and character of Didier. Pearson just climbs. Even his style is humble and understated and often not all that pretty to watch.

But what he accomplishes is spectactular.

And the film itself (check out the trailer here) is shot in a way that suggests the story, the reality of this challenge, is enough. It’s simplistic in its style and grandiose in its content, which is a really rare and cool combination. It works really well.

It’s one of those films where the audience is so behind the subject, that at times spontaneous applause is irresistible.

The second film that has really stuck in my mind is “Signatures: Canvas of Snow.” It’s a snowboarding, skiing and “noboarding” (more about that later) film that feels more like a moving painting or a filmic graphic novel set in the snow mountainous forests of Japan with a wicked soundtrack.

I’m usually disappointed with the snowboarding films at the BMFF. They’re usually high on shocking jumps and cliff drops and spectacular crashes and straight-lines, but low on creativity and artistic direction in terms of the look and feel of the films.

This was different. The film, edited down from a full-length (which I. Will. Own.) is just stunning to watch.

It focuses on skiers and riders whose connection to winter goes beyond what they can do on snow but encompasses their whole lifestyle.

The film’s website describes it like this: “In Japan there is a cultural connection to the different Signatures of our terrestrial home – a sense that the rhythm of fall, winter, spring, summer, influences the rhythm of the person, their energy, their riding style, and the lines they choose.

That’s no exaggeration. The riders seem to belong in the dense forests, heavy laden with fresh snow, mind-numbing powder and winter storms that make up the canvas of this film.

One of the riders is Atsushi Gomyo, who says traditional snowboards are too restrictive, cutting off the connection to the snow. Therefore, he cuts and shapes his own binding-less snowboards, and has perfected an effortless style of carving through deep powder that looks like a dream.

It’s just beautiful to watch and reminds me of how much I miss snowboarding in real mountains.

A soundtrack featuring the mellow tones of Jon Swift makes this film that much better.

Inspired…

What's your "Lost City of Z"?

I sat down a couple weeks ago to write about “The Lost City of Z: A Tale of Deadly Obsession in the Amazon.” But I ended up getting caught up in reminisces and memories of travels and adventures and my own obsession with foreign places, and had written an entire blog entry by the time I realized I hadn’t written a word about “Z.”

I’d say that’s a pretty good recommendation for the book.

In “Z,” David Grann, a staff writer at the New Yorker, tracks the life and travels of Percy Fawcett, a British adventurer and explorer who became obsessed with finding a mythical El Dorado in the Amazon, that he dubbed “Z.”

Fawcett, with the help of the Royal Geographic Society, spent much of his life searching for the city – and the proof he needed to prove his theory that an advanced, rich civilization once existed in the region.

In the end, he disappeared into that wilderness with his son in 1925 and was never heard from again. Dozens of groups went after them, giving legs to the already sensational and wildly publicized story, and many of them never made it back either.

Whether they were murdered by hostile natives, starved to death in the harsh "counterfeit paradise" of the Amazon, or died from illness, has never been firmly determined.

Fawcett was considered one of the toughest explorers to have ever set foot in the jungle and he knew the region well. As a result the mystery surrounding his disappearance has gripped imaginations for three-quarters of a century.


A number of books and movies have been made – including a new one starring Brad Pitt (which is why he’s been sporting that ratty beard for so long). He was even a character in “Tintin and the Wooden Ear.” Herge imagined him as a grizzled old fellow who had given up on society and decided to live out his days in the Amazon simply because he liked it better.

But it seems as though no one has come as close to solving the mystery as Grann.

Through meticulous research, unprecedented access to Fawcett’s journals and papers, face to face interviews with some of his family members -- and even retracing his steps -- he has put together a fascinating map of Fawcett’s life and work. He even unravelled, he believes, the mystery of Fawcett’s true route on his final journey.

I usually get pretty bored with biographies but I couldn’t put it down. There was something about the way Grann brought Fawcett back to life, and the way he seemed to get inside his head to truly understand what it was like to be him, that was fascinating.

It was also sad. He sacrificed so much and left so many people behind in the pursuit of his dream. And I think that’s why he fought so hard in the end, even to the point where it cost his own life and his son’s. The fear of failing, after giving up so much, was worse than the fear of death, for him.

Grann brings all this in a sensitive, compelling manner. Most impressively, he even manages to uncover new, important details about Fawcett’s work, and his Lost City of Z.

It’s all “Up in the Air,” really

I really wanted to love “Up in the Air” starring George Clooney and directed by Jason Reitman. I had pretty high expectations and wanted the movie to be great. I guess I was hoping it would be one of those rare occasions when Clooney veers away from the comfortable, status quo characters he usually plays, and does something different.

I’m thinking of “O Brother Where Art Thou” as an example of what he’s capable of when he breaks the mold.

I don’t know why I thought that was a realistic possibility, since everything I had heard about UITA made it sound like his character was as close to the real Clooney as possible.

Clooney plays Ryan Bingham, a man who travels and works constantly, is smooth and successful, slick and well-dressed and has no visible attachments. He even delivers motivational speeches under the title “What’s in Your Backpack?” which extol the virtues of living an unencumbered lifestyle.

In this film, as pretty much everyone knows by now since the hype has been huge (nominated for Best Picture etc.), Clooney plays a professional downsizer. His company is hired out by other companies to swoop in and deliver bad news to employees while making it sound as much like good news as possible.

"Anyone who has ever built an empire or changed the world has sat exactly where you are sitting" is one of his favourite lines for the newly-unemployed.



While he realizes that his work is pretty low on the moral register, he strives to infuse it with as much dignity and respect as possible. He seems to truly care about the people he is firing and wants to help them deal with it – at least for the 15 minutes he is sitting across from them.

After that, he’ll never see them again and is seems clear he rarely gives them a second thought after they walk out the door.

When a young over-achieving upstart, appropriately named Natalie Keener (Anna Kendrick) joins his company and tries to do away with the road-warriors like Clooney, replacing them with call-centre style webcam downsizers, Clooney is forced to demonstrate the value of his work.

He takes her on the road and shows her why people deserve to be fired in person.

I was disappointed with this movie. While I liked the way the film was shot, with an interesting mix of documentary-style footage of people reacting to being fired and interesting airplane and airport scenes, overall it was pretty underwhelming.

While Kendrick is convincing most of the time (nominated for best supporting actress) there’s one terrible scene where she starts crying in a hotel lobby, waving her hands around in the air in a really unconvincing way. It’s pretty ridiculous.

Also, neither Katie nor I sensed the chemistry that was supposed to exist between Clooney and a fellow road-warrior (Alex, played by Vera Farmiga who also got a best supporting actress nom) whom he meets in a hotel bar, and continues to rendezvous with in meet-ups around the country.

She tells him she’s a female version of himself, and makes it clear there are no strings attached.

Seems like a good idea at the time, but this relationship ends up serving as a metaphor for Bingham’s life and the emptiness he has filled it with. In fact, what helped salvage the story for us, was the way this relationship plays out and the eventual realization that everything Bingham loves and values in his life, means nothing.

While most of the film glamourized his lifestyle, the final scenes reveal where his choices have taken him and what all those Air Miles really add up to in the end.

Camper vans and hitch-hiking...

I’ve been thinking a lot about maps lately. Well, maybe not so much maps, as what they represent – the idea of an adventure, an exploration in a place you don’t know very well.

That’s always been an exciting concept for me. I remember when I was a little kid, too young to go anywhere on my own, I’d read books like “On the Road” and lie awake at night dreaming about hitchhiking out west, travelling to Alaska or living in Banff.

I managed to do two out of three eventually. Then years later, even after I’d had some pretty awesome adventures, I’d listen to the trains rumbling by my little cottage on the Lake Ontario shore in Port Hope, and I’d wish so bad that I was on one, going somewhere, anywhere.

I remember one night a train was stopped on the trestle near my house (the drivers would stop the train and run down the embankment to KFC sometimes late at night) and I saw a half open boxcar and was so close to hopping in.

Part of me has always regretted not doing it. I think I would have ended up in Montreal or maybe Halifax, which would have been cool.

I’m less restless now. That’s a good thing since I’m married and all. And also because staying in one place for more than a year or two has been good for my career.

But sometimes I still get the urge to just go.

Tonight and the last couple of weeks I’ve felt that. Maybe it’s the warm weather or the thought of booking some vacation time.

Or maybe it’s that mention of the Traveling Wilburys in Matt’s blog the other day, which got me thinking about The Highwaymen (both are awesome road-tripping bands, btw).

Or it could be the conversation my friend Chris and I had about Volkswagen Westfalia vans on Monday night. We both love them and our conversations often track in that direction.

We were talking about how much fun it would be to buy a van in California, Oregon, Washington or B.C. maybe, then get acquainted with it on the long trip home to Toronto.

That would be awesome. And guess what? Katie likes the idea too. She's never done the cross-Canada drive and is pretty excited about doing it some day. Maybe it will happen. Of course, that would likely mean I probably can’t get a vintage pickup truck, which is another thing I really want…

Okay I’m just rambling now. I actually sat down to write about “The Lost City of Z,” a book I just finished reading. It’s about an obsessed traveller and explorer named Percy Fawcett. That’s what got me started writing about maps and adventures.

I’ll write a little book review about “Z” soon. It’s a good one.

"Henri-Georges Clouzot's Inferno" (Serge Bromberg, 2009)

"Henri-Georges Clouzot's Inferno" is a film about an unfinished film. And in a way, the project helps serve to complete the original film, which has sat collecting dust for decades.

The first incarnation of “Inferno” was written, produced and directed by legendary French filmmaker Henri Georges Clouzot. It was a dark, experimental project that intended to tell the story of a husband (Serge Reggiani) who becomes obsessively jealous and suspicious that his young, beautiful wife (Romy Schneifer) is having an affair.

Newlyweds, they take over a small lakeside hotel in the country, just net to a massive train trestle that spans the nearby river.

As his paranoia grows, his jealousy becomes linked to the trains that cross the bridge. The rumble from the steel structure, the whistle, the smoke, all seem to trigger his fits of jealous rage.

These moments of insanity are rendered using what was at the time, cutting edge lighting, sound and special effects techniques that Clouzot and his crew essentially invented for the film.

It’s fantastic. His paranoia is illustrated perfectly when certain phrases or bits of conversation -- real or imagined – begin to repeat themselves mercilessly in his head, the tempo speeding up and slowing down like a wind sprint.

In other moments, the camera stays on Romy for long, mesmerizing shots, where she seems to dance for the camera using little more than facial expressions. Tricks of lighting make her face appear as if it is almost changing shape in these moments.



In another long, eerie scene she is pouring sparkling water from a bottle into a glass. As it overflows she laughs and continues to pour. The scene is strange but riveting, even though nothing really happens.

That’s sort of the story of this film about a film. Despite having American backing, in the form of an unlimited budget and timeline from Columbia Pictures, high-ranking French cinema stars and the best crews available, nothing really happened.

Clouzot seemed to get lost in the details, spending endless time, energy and money on mere moments of the film, or on meticulous storyboards and technical specs for every single frame.

In the end he lost track of the story and vision that should have tied the narrative and special effects together. In the end he drove away one of his stars, frustrated the crew and drove himself to a heart attack.

The new film – I hesitate to call it a documentary because so much of it comprises the original footage – pieces together a lot of the mistakes and tracks the lack of direction and communication that seemed to plague the project, mostly through interviews with many involved with the film.

It also explores Clouzot’s brilliance through interviews with those he worked closely with and by showing exhaustively the original footage, test shots, experiments and even out-takes from the five abandoned canisters of film Clouzot left behind.

Bromberg says the inspiration for the film was borne when he was trapped in an elevator with Clouzot’s widow for several hours, by chance, and he was able to question her about the intriguing unfinished project, a sort of “Titanic” of its time.

I hope she considers the new film to be tribute to her husband’s legacy and not a criticism of it. Yes, at times the film seems critical of Clouzot’s almost maniacal directing style, which is almost a mirror image of the film’s obsessed character. But the real service is that Bromberg came as close as anyone could to finishing the film.

He even has actors script read the scenes that were never shot, helping to fill out the missing pieces – a technique that works amazingly well in this film.

This film may not appeal to a wide audience, and it’s definitely targeted at true cinephiles. But as someone who doesn’t know much about French cinema but still likes a good yarn and appreciates innovative film-making, I was pretty riveted and was glad I got to see it – if only for the crazy-weird scenes and fantastic special effects that look like they could have been shot yesterday.