2 posts tagged “documentaries”
We saw "Touching the Void" the other night--an amazing documentary that describes how a young British climber survived a terrible ordeal that would have left most other people dead. Joe and his climbing buddy Simon went to Peru about fifteen years ago to scale a difficult mountain. They made it up but then on the way down Joe broke his leg badly right at the knee--incredibly painful. Simon did his best to help his friend down the mountain by lowering him down 75 feet at a time. Unfortunately Joe slipped off a cliff, was dangling there helpless and held up only by the rope connected to Simon. After an hour and a half with both of them in bad shape (a freezing blizzard was going on too), Simon decided to cut the rope or be pulled down himself.
But the story is just getting started. Joe falls into a crevasse, survives, crawls out and then down the mountain over the next three days with little water and no food. He loses a third of his body weight in the process. The documentary interviews both Joe and Simon and they give a very candid and eloquent description of what happened and what they were thinking. Joe's tenacity is inspiring. He's the Churchill of mountaineering.
Ivy and I saw the very good British documentary "42 Up" yesterday. It followed the lives of about 10 different people starting from age 7 through 42. Every seven years they interviewed each person (and any spouses or kids they picked up along the way) and it was remarkable seeing the changes that took place each time.
It was also very interesting trying to predict how people would turn out based upon seeing them at age 7 and 14 especially. About half the kids were relatively poor or lower middle class and half were privileged. Having a stable home growing up and getting a good education were all pretty crucial for how people turned out but not entirely decisive factors.
A sobering thought for me was that I'm entering the age 35 milestone in just two months!... The people in the video for the most part were looking rather middle-aged at 35....
Also, we streamed this video off the "watch now" feature of netflix and it worked very well for us--better in fact than running a dvd on our laptop (there were less "motion artifacts"/smearing going on).
I recommend this movie.
