"The Lost Season" review and spew
What a fantastic film. 3.5 stars of 4. Only in murphy's stuff do i see some sicko throw a huge whippy lincoln off a 40(?) at squaw or a kid taking off switch over a big table, and minutes later, he's talking (not just a 5 second blurb) about the other best shit i love about skiing besides speed and air: the friendships we come to find in it. This mang's a maggot for sure. He gets it.
A quality film. A different film. cinematography ain't the quality of Bill Heath (a ridiculously high standard, admittedly), but the length's better, the soul's the same, as seen in the stories the characters and pros tell.
the perfect amount of porn/stoke, a good dose of meaning, I thoroughly enjoyed myself.
Even talked with Josh after the show! [/shameless hero worship]
About promotion of the sport, of his work, and of defining tele identity. Definitely not the perspective i'd come up with, as i feel there is a collective identity out there at least here on the Front Range.
Josh believes the sport can't progress to quite the level he's looking for until the new tele identity has been defined and can be found everywhere. I believe he's probably right, but i what i don't know is how important it is to me that teleheads have a collective identity. there's racer heads who've never touched the BC, dirtbags scouring lines far from civilization, science types into all the avi awareness and "proving oneself" outside the boundaries of the area in they're created super-worst-case-scenario-land (ever seen teletips?) and curious alpiners looking for a new challenge.
He spoke of pockets of this new collective tele identity. Squaw, Boulder/Front Range, and in Burlington but thought that those big spaces in between need some attention. No harm in that, I guess. What would bring that about though.
We also talked about the difference between his vision for ski film versus what's currently being put out. I'm not going to bash the industry too much for a glut of films out these days, and to be clear, Josh didn't either, b/c hell it feels like the first ten or 15 years of snowboarding, when the market was saturated and everything was going gangbusters, awesome enthusiasm, but i will say I agreed with a lot of what he saw. In reaction, he wanted to make a film that had a wider audience than just skiers. One with which others could identify. so, "lost season" came about. and it's no classic like the genius of "Blizzard of Aah's" but it's definitely making a statement about what's important in skiing. It's almost unfair to compare those two, really, on second thought.
anyway, from what i understood, he wanted to make something bigger in meaning than the current film out there which he finds to be largely "skiing music videos". Lots of supeficial identity, the bling and steez factor, etc. Lord knows it's definitely out there at tahoe, (where Unparalleled Productions is based).
well, those are my thoughts. i dug the film. plus there's all this fantastic porn, some medium to tough lines, a couple straightlines, and great cliff lincolns, gap backflips, collins' brothers-like cliffy spinny rodeo 7's (i think), plus a telejibber winning 7th place at a rail jam in a field of 200 alpine jibbers! Impressive. He was there competing right along with CR Johnson and crew.
A good show.
So, thoughts, anyone who's seen it?
