Storm Over Everest
Climber David Breashears was filming an IMAX documentary about Mount Everest in 1996 when disaster struck. A brutal storm trapped no less than tree separate climbing parties high on Everest on May, 11 1996 as the same parties pushed for a summit attempt on the world's highest mountain. During the two day storm Doug Hansen, Andrew Harris, Yasuko Namba, Rob Hall, Scott Fischer, Subedar Tsewang Samanla and Lance Naik Dorje Morup would perish on Everest with some bodies never recovered. Others, such as Beck Weathers and Makalu Gau, would survive enduring massive injuries. In Weather's case he would be left for dead not once but twice during the ordeal.
Breashears' interviews the parties involved with the notable exception of Jon Krakauer who was climbing that day with Rob Hall. Krakauer, an author, would later write the article Into Thin Air and a book of the same name sometime later (an excellent read, by the way).
In the end few answers are presented other than climbing Everset is no "yak trail" where any person with $60,000.00+ can pay a guide to literally drag them to the summit. It's a dangerous place, probably best left to the professionals.
Survivors Lopsang Jangbu Sherpa and Anatoli Boukreev would both later die in seperate avalanches.
Red Without Blue
A documentary following the lives of two identical twins over a three year period. Both brothers are homosexual and one decides to live as a male-to-female transsexual and debates the possibility of sexual reassignment surgery.
While this sounds interesting enough for some reason I failed to "connect" with this documentary. In fact I did the neigh unthinkable (for me) and skipped about 35-40 minutes of the movie and skipped to the end.
Don't get me wrong, the movie is well-made and the characters interesting but I just could not seem to "get into" the movie. Perhaps it was a timing thing.
I'll watch any documentary about any subject so it's not unheard of me to watch an alternative-lifestyle documentary, after all, everyone has a story to tell, right? That said, in this genre of films I found Small Town Gay Bar to be more engaging.
I might might this film another try another day. Someone spent a lot of money to put this film together and beyond that the real-life persons as the center of this story boldly bared their souls for all to see and judge and doing so is a lot harder than you might think it would be so don't discount these people immediately. The movie is well-made and I wonder about the specific production aspects of this film having had a 36+ month production period. What cameras were used? Was final production done with Final Cut or on a PC? For the record the only computers shown in use during the film were PCs (unless I missed something when I skipped forward).
In the end, *** out of *****. I did not dislike this film though I did not particular care for it either.
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