Touching The Void (2003)

I don't know why I waited to watch Touching The Void. I guess I felt there was no sense of urgency to watch it; maybe I felt like I knew how it would play and that it would be predictable thereby rendering it unnecessary. But when I noticed it was coming on tv, i was keen to watch- maybe out of residual bonhomie from 127 Hours - ideal double-bill partners.
Not that they're especially similar the main difference that tragic accident in that movie means the guy is completely stuck- in this movie, the unfortunate climber has to keep moving or he will DIE. The other main difference is that this movie is told in interview and narration by the real people involved, with actors reconstructing the events.
Which brings me to one of my original preconceptions - if these guys are being interviewed, then by proxy- we know they've survived and if we know that where does the dramatic tension come from? Well to highlight my naivety, as with 127 Hours, The question becomes not did they survive but how did they escape their desperate situation? And in the broad sense, what does it feel like to be in that situation and an extra dimension not in 127 Hours, what is it like leave your best friend to save yourself?
It's at these points where Touching The Void shines with Simon Yates and Joe Simpson's intense honesty about their thought processes in these life-or-death situations like Simon admitting to thinking about coming up with a different story to explain what happened to Joe to explain why he didn't make it back so he wouldn't have to say, he cut his rope loose to save himself. It's moments like this that make the drama all the more accessible because... In that situation, you know in your heart-of-hearts, you'd be thinking the exact same thoughts and there's an unspoken agreement there between them because Joe would have done the exact same thing and says as much. But then besides the gallows-mindset, when Joe had to pull himself together to stay alive; he develops this fully understandable, petty system to make himself work harder and improve his time descending the mountain, in the way, any of us would in the way we work at work everyday.
It's an admirable debut from Kevin MacDonald and certainly better than recent effort, The Eagle. MacDonald was a producer on Senna and he's certainly better with the documentary/true story stuff like Last King of Scotland . I'm not writing the guy off just yet but Kev- Stay in the yard of the last century, yeah?

I watched Touching The Void (2003) on FilmFour.
My 2011 in Movies will return with CopOut (2010)...

The Eagle (2011)

This is likely to be the solitary reference to the sub-genre dubbed 'swords & sandals'. I won't be actively going around looking ones to watch and i doubt we'll be seeing anymore new ones this year. They came back for a hot minute after Gladiator (2000) came out- there's was Troy, 300 and Kingdom of... something. Orlando Bloom was in it. It was conspicuous by its shittiness. My point is they all were and i  think maybe Gladiator wouldn't even be as good as you remember. I will say I hated history in school and this is likely a byproduct of that.
By if anyone can engage me, with history- it's gotta be Kevin MacDonald, right? The director of the superb 'Last King of Scotland'. I haven't seen Touching the Void but I'm sure that's good too.  He just seems to have a knackered for effectively photographing things in a way that makes them so vivid- the over-saturated look of '... Scotland' for example.  And this film with it's picturesque vistas of Scotland that make it seem like a rainforest in the first shot, is great.  That's not the problem.
The problem is that the dialogue in this film scans like a frigging Haynes Manual. Now some people (read:Tom Clancy readers) enjoy that sort of discourse. And I guess something like the brilliant The Wire might have a similar issue; that you have to learn a whole new syntax or dialect of English but you've got 10's of hours with a tv series like that. This film is about 100mins tops. Now I was already to lay this on the writer, Jeremy Brock but he's been involved in writing a lot of successful British films inc.  '... Scotland', Brideshead Revisited and Mrs Brown but those are adaptations and this is an original piece. It's just the story is so plodding that nothing seems interesting and when the battle scenes do come along,  they seem out of nowhere and jarring. Which is not to say they're not any good cos they are, the final one especially but I guess basically I knew what was going on but I really care.
I don't want to level this on the actors cos people like Jamie Bell and Mark Strong are solid British actors and they aren't stinking up the joint but then, the casting of Channing Tatum seems (to me) to be a cynical plot to capitalise on his fame to sell the film abroad and get the film off the ground in the first place but as I say, that script doesn't do anyone any favours.
The Eagle is just exceedingly boring. As I think back about it, I'm bored. It's also very reminicent of Centurion, the low-budget version of this from last year. It was a bit grittier and wilderness but it worked and didn't remind me to pick up milk for breakfast tomorrow....

I watched The Eagle (2011) at the cinema.
My 2011 in Movies will return with This Sporting Life (1963)...