A friend of mine has dedicated years of his life to documenting original equipment climbs in Canada. Greg has made one full film and is now in the process of editing its sequel. It’s astonishing the pain mountaineer re-creationists put themselves through. Here’s the trailer for The Mystery Mountain Project (2019).

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Unz just published Jared Taylor’s great précis of the Shackleton Expedition Have There Ever Been More Courageous Men?. What caught my eye1 was Shackleton’s climb across South Georgia Island.

The men had no climbing equipment. They had salvaged two-inch screws from the Endurance, and drove them through the soles of their boots as makeshift crampons.

The crossing itself was an extraordinary accomplishment – 36 hours over unnamed mountains and glaciers, some so steep, the men had to hack steps into the ice.

Continue reading Films about Recreating Historic Climbs in Original Equipment at uncoy.

Most years I’m in Piestany for the Cinematik Film Festival. Piestany is beautiful and Cinematik is a small, personal film festival which always screens some gems from new European cinema. The documentary section is always strong and off the beaten track.

Here’s a few quick portraits from opening night.

Hard at work looking after guests and looking great, as ever, Director of Guest Relations Natalia Klenovska
Festival videographer Daniel Dluhý is a keen analogue photographer with over twenty vintage cameras including medium format which he uses to create Ansel Adams like black and white prints of his native Kezmarok.
This happy gentleman has visited four film festivals this year. The life of Reilly.
Well-dressed festival director and producer Tomas Klenovsky opens another wonderful year of Cinematik.
VSMU lecturer (aesthetics of film) Dr. Juraj Oniščenko is the longtime Director of Protocol at Cinematik.

Continue reading Opening Night Cinematik 2022 at uncoy.

Things that Go Bump in the Night has just won the 91st Oscar for Best Documentary Film, following in the glorious tradition of Winter on Fire (2015) The White Helmets (2016) and Icarus (2017) of uncovering Russian crimes across the planet.

While doping, fomenting civil war and foreign intervention are serious human transgressions, they are only the symptoms of Russian rancour not the source of Russia’s malevolence. The producers of Things that Go Bump in the Night have gone further into the darkness of Russian depravity and uncovered its source.

Remember your first frights as a child? Imagine lying alone in bed at night. That terrible feeling that something dark lurks under your bed, just waiting to pounce when you put a foot in the ground.

Continue reading 2018 Oscar for Best Documentary Film: Things that Go Bump in the Night at uncoy.

In this context, Lauretta Prevost recently put together an off the cuff clickbait article about dance film, based on the work and opinions of a certain Angelo Silvio Vasta.

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Based on his uninspired and dull showreel, I wouldn't take any of Angelo Silvia Vassa's advice on shooting dance. In particular, Vassa dismisses dancing with the dancer and handheld footage.

Continue reading Misguided ideas about dance film: Angelo Silvio Vasta at uncoy.

Tigers in the City is ostensibly an urban love story mixed with an international crime thriller. As strange as that mix sounds, the actual film is even stranger.

TIgre v Meste cast

The main story follows a hotshot young prosecutor in Bratislava, Rudolf Jazvec. This gentleman at the age of thirty has not lost his virginity, much to the amusement of his randy bon vivant zoo keeper friend Hyena who has been boffing Rudolf’s oversexed younger sister and fitness instructor Jane for the last five years. Rudolf is in love with a radio host on Bratislava’s culture channel, Marina Kuznikova.

Kristina Tothova and Diana Morova in an intimate moment,
no it’s not a lesbian love story: Tóthová plays a man

Unknown to anyone except the viewer, Marina’s Russian husband Ivan (the boxing instructor of Jane) has been brought in by Marina’s mafioso brother to eliminate a troublesome state prosecutor.

Continue reading Tigre v Meste (Tigers in the City) Film Review at uncoy.

Lóve is a deeply sinister film. There aren’t many films made these days in Bratislava or Slovakia that make it to theatres. More particularly there are even fewer films for young Slovaks to see themselves in. I’ve just survived the brutal skinhead-centric feature My Dog Killer (opening film of Febiofest) and had higher hopes for the very glamorously and heavily marketed Lóve.

Love poster Jakub Kroner

Here we have three typical student girls living in the main dormitories at Mlynskina Dolina. They sneak boys in and out of their rooms and dream of having punky guys turn up with pear spirits in their underpants. After drinking the bottle straight, some of them have sex with the said punky guys. The next week Sandra cries that Tomas doesn’t call her anymore. So far so good. The same maudlin story which French étudiantes might live through, albeit with better rooms and better liquor.

Continue reading Lóve by Jakub Kroner: Review at uncoy.

Larry Clark likes to make movies which shock. Particularly about teenagers. They fuck and swear and sometimes kill (Bully). On the other hand, William Golding’s Lord of the Flies is on the reading list in most English language high schools around the world. Nothing Larry Clark has done can outdo the horror of those kids on an island.

Marfa Girl Adam Mediano with lovely Inez Mercedes Maxwell

Homo sapiens are a brutal and savage species, probably responsible for the elimination of Neanderthal man and since then we have sent thousands of species into extinction, from mammoths, to bison, to the dodo. If there’s a bad animal around, we’re it.

Clark like Golding is busy with representing the what is, ripping off of your rose-coloured glasses and then stomping on them to boot. Yes, your girlfriend in high school betrayed you.

Continue reading Marfa Girl review: Larry Clark’s bad kids visit the Mexican border at uncoy.

Chariots of the Gods I first saw when I was nine. For those unfamiliar with that documentary, Chariots of the Gods breathlessly explores signs from ancient cultures that we have had contact with extra-terrestials. While the documentary raises more questions than it answers, Chariots of the Gods had the same effect on me as it did Ridley Scott: I remain convinced we are not alone in existence (universe is place, existence is state: the universe may be as small in existence as your kitchen is in existence, just one room in one house in one city in a single country) and it is more than likely that sometime somebody has stopped by to visit, no matter how briefly.

Ridley Scott’s Prometheus chooses to take up the same questions of alien visitation but in fictional form.

origin of life on earth disintegrating engineer in prometheus

Scott would seem to be the ideal visionary director to take us to other planets and to the future.

Continue reading Ridley Scott’s Prometheus vs Blade Runner at uncoy.

dark side of the lens whales

dark side of the lens gulls

dark side of the lens diver

This film is supposed to be about surfing and underwater photography.

For me it is about the sea and it is a paeon to this monument of beauty spanning most of the planet.

I see this and I wonder how we continue to relentlessly despoil this unrepairable wonder with oil spills, deslickers, polluted rivers, radioactive waste.

The wickedness of civilisation, at least in its capitalist extant, is to borrow the profit of today against the misery of tomorrow. Man has been at this a long time though. The folk of Easter Island expired when they consumed their entire food chain.

Even archeology has not been enough to sober world leaders apart from that fleeting glimpse of a president Gore.

Continue reading Paean to the Oceans: Dark Side of the Lens at uncoy.

Much of the story seemed to be adaptations of Stephen R. Donaldson’s Thomas Covenenant novels. In just one example, the Mord’Sith seem a near clone of the Bloodguard but with breasts.

Which set me to asking myself whatever happened to a film version of Stephen R. Donaldson’s Thomas Covenenant Trilogies (there’s three of them)? The Thomas Convenant novels are fantasy for grown-ups dealing with issues such as acceptance and exclusion via physical metaphors like lepresy.

Continue reading Epic Fantasy still not on the big screen: Stephen R. Donaldson’s Thomas Covenant Trilogies at uncoy.