I rushed home from work yesterday to find my package from bouldering.com had arrived, the 2 climbing dvd's I ordered. So I called up some friends and invited them over for the Olympia premiere of the most eagerly awaited climbing movies of the year, King Lines and Committed.
We decided to watch King Lines first. What a movie! Straight off the bat, our jaws were on the floor. Amazing cinematography, stunning routes and Chris Sharma! What more could you ask for? It was obvious that this movie had a large budget, from the private planes with bids eye views of the crags, and flashy camera effects. But I didn't realize how much of a sharmafest this movie was going to be. It is all about Sharma, it even has him doing trad! They show a few other climbers but only breif clips when they're climbing with him. Not that I mind that being a big Sharma fan. Going into the movie i was a bit worried it would just be another dosage movie cut to fit together, but that wasn't the case at all. The theme of Sharma searching out 'King Lines' worked well and it was really smooth. But it does lead to some awkward moments. There's one part where it looks like the filmmakers told Sharma to stand up on the podium next to the winners of bouldering comp in Spain even though it looks like he didn't win. And when Pringle tops out on the FA of a Butermilk highball ahead of Sharma, you almost feel like he didn't read the script to the movie. The only 'fast forward' part might be the Venezuela section which dragged on a bit. It seemed like they put so much money and effort into going there then when it rained they felt they had to use the footage anyway. One part of the movie I thought didn't really fit was the blatent advertising for Evolve half way through when they try to show Chris helping design new climbing shoes, but it comes accross as fake, and just put in there to please the sponsors. But apart from that the rest of the movie was first class. The highlight of the movie for me had to be the footage of Sharma working his project at Mt Clark, its really mindblowing. When the credits came we burst out in aplause. A sign of a good climbing movie is if you can watch it over and over again and still get psyched, i've already watched it twice and I've barely had it for 24 hours. Its definately up there with West Coast Gimps as a contender for my favourite climbing movie.
I almost felt it a bit unfair to watch Committed straight afterwards. But we were psyched so we put it on. The contrast between the two movies was obvious. The energy level went down when we watched Committed and there was a lot of conversation going on while we watched it which shows it wasn't really engrossing. When compared with King Lines it seems in a totally different league, it didn't have the polish of a high budget movie, but even simple things like not having the whole climb in shot took away from my enjoyment of the movie. I think the biggest detraction though was the poor commentary. In King Lines Sharma did narration where necessary but it was kept to a minimum, whereas in Committed the narration almost gave it a documentary-like feel, and at times it felt like they were dumbing it down explaining some climbing terms. It also became a bit of a distraction at times, in King Lines they would just show Sharma screaming his way up a climb with good music in the background whereas in Committed you've got a rather dull commentary that makes it hard to get psyched even though the footage was gripping. There was some great footage captured for the movie. James Pearson on The Promise was awesome, but it was over too soon. And my favourite scene was of Jude Spanken onsighting the E6 in Wales. One aspect that the hotaches guys did well in E11 was showing the buildup to the climb and a bit of the background of the climber. But in Committed that was missing, it would have been more interesting for the climbers to describe the the climb themselves in their own words rather than the over the top narration. For all this criticism i did enjoy committed a lot, i just don't think it lived up to my high expectations, especially with such a great trailer. I'm glad i bought the DVD and I'm already eager for the next installment of Committed.
Oh and the extras are pretty good on both DVDs. The 'Keen Youth' extra on Committed is really cool, too bad there was not more like this. And on King Lines you get to see other people like Dave Graham and Jibe Tribout climb hard in the Additional Footage section. And the outtakes are pretty hilarious especially the part with Dave Graham rambling on about being a climbing superhero or something like that.
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