On now. (Sunday 8pm). It's very good indeed
Superb
Thanks - some great filming there
Bugger. Caught the last 10 minutes.
Me too. Stunning.
I thought it was awful tbh, like an hour-long redbull advert but with (even) worse music. Shame, as I'd being looking forward to it.
I enjoyed it and much of the photography, but its scope seem'd somewhat narrow.
> I thought it was awful tbh, like an hour-long redbull advert but with (even) worse music. Shame, as I'd being looking forward to it.
A bit harsh, Adam, although I guess the Vivaldi was a bit cliched. I did find Willem Dafoe doing his Morgan Freeman impression got on my nerves after a while.
It's on iPlayer.
There was some absolutely stunning footage on this film, which was quite good in that the commentary was minimal and it let the action take centre stage. That initial footage of Alex Honnold jamming his chin for a hands off rest was something else. What if he had coughed! Yet again some of that skiing was trousers filling!
Enjoyed it. Never looked but guess the commentator was Willem Dafoe.
Very annoyed that C5 hasn't seen fit to put the Ben Nevis thing on catchup.
It looked pretty much like a montage of other people's films as I'd seen a good deal of the footage before (I wonder how much all the filmakers get paid). It felt overlong and a bit pompous at times in the narration and although the individual visuals were stunning the constant changes in focus detracted from the whole for me. I'd recommend it to a non climber.
> Very annoyed that C5 hasn't seen fit to put the Ben Nevis thing on catchup.
Here it is!
https://www.my5.tv/mountain/season-1/episode-2
> It felt overlong and a bit pompous at times in the narration
Partly Dafoe's portentous delivery and partly Robert MacFarlane's rather purple prose.
After a shaky start showing I think, a bit too much extreme sport. it improved as it went along, particularly the final scenes. Outstanding filming set to beautiful music - quite emotional at the end.
Thanks !
Yup, spot on. Between Friday night videos on here and climbing daily I have seen a lot of the clips. It reminded me of one of the you tube people are awesome videos redubbed classicly rather than dubstep.
I loved it. I'm reading some of McFarlane's stuff already so am getting used to the OTT poetics, you have to be in the mood for them.
First half was cool and still gave a balanced view of extreme sports becoming more popular. Second half was more interesting personally.
Great music throughout and I enjoyed Defoe as narrator.
> A bit harsh.... I did find Willem Dafoe doing his Morgan Freeman impression got on my nerves after a while.
I haven’t seen Mountain but have heard bad things about it.....but I think you might be being harsh on Dafoe here given that he was delivering moving / portentous / cheesy performances in mainstream cinema well before Freeman became a truly big star!
Notably in Platoon and The Last Temptation Of Christ. Freeman’s breakthrough came after that
I thought Dafoe was fine, it was the words that bugged me. There is a fine line between the poetic and myth building. Also I tend to rail when people tell us what we should like and dilslike, especially in the mountains. As an example in the beginning of mountaineering I wonder how much really was fear and how much was the harsh realities of life in such areas. The romantics who popularised the mountains were a wealthy class with plentiful leasure time but I'm not so sure local ordinary folk would not sometimes climb because a summit was there and possible, and then stare in wonder at the top, be they alpine goat herders or himalayan monks, or the first guides for the rich outsiders. The masses still don't go to fearful places and privilege still buys aided access.
> I loved it. I'm reading some of McFarlane's stuff
Frankly, I find his stuff unreadable; naive, poorly phrased, pretentious guff of the worst kind.
It appears a large number of others disagree, which is their prerogative and I shan't try to dissuade them. However, both for the sake of my mental equilibrium and the peace of the neighbourhood, I try to avoid anything featuring his work.
T.
I like his writing, but you have to remember he is writing literature, not a guidebook or a travelogue or a memoir. He isn't neccessarily writing a joe simpson expedition report
seems to be marmite this. i'm with the 'irritated/bored' team. it was like someone had trawled Youtube for climbing/skiing videos and stitched together dozens of clips of them, cutting between them every 4-5 seconds.
unlike some others i didnt find Defoe's delivery to be particularly the problem- i cant think of anyone who could have saved that script. Tenzing and Hillary on Everest 'the moment climbing as adventure caught the imagination of the public'- really? not Harrer et al on the Eiger in 1938? Or Mallory and Irvine on Everest in 1924? or Whymper on the Matterhorn in 1865?
i gave up after half an hour, accepted my wife's opinion it would be dull beyond endurance, and put the Yorkshire Vet on instead. hamsters with mites and men stripped to the waist covered in cow shit- now that's entertainment...
Which is my point, pretty much.
Whether something counts as 'literature', in the literary sense, is for others to judge, not the author. If you're a writer then taking it as read (as it were) that your work is judged to be 'literature' rather than the equivalent of stuff that Dan Brown would look down on shows you to be a pompous, self-important ass who's work is probably best avoided.
But as I said, on this, and much else, I may be in a minority of one.
T.
There is real literature and then there is ostentatious "Literature". We've discussed this before, but one of the most famous sentences in the whole of English literature, by arguably its greatest master, consists of a string of nine utterly commonplace single-syllable words, plus one closing two-syllable word, also very ordinary.
It's worth comparing with my first sentence above, which also happens to be exactly ten words long. Where I used 6 ordinary single-syllable words, 1 two-syllable word, and 4 four-syllable words, one of which is very far from commonplace.
Totally off topic, but is "question" two or three syllables? Is it qwest yun or qwest y on?
> i gave up after half an hour, accepted my wife's opinion it would be dull beyond endurance, and put the Yorkshire Vet on instead. hamsters with mites and men stripped to the waist covered in cow shit- now that's entertainment...
god. the hamster got put down. i didn't see that coming.
I'm counting it as two. I think it parses as two in an iambic whatever, doesn't it? Not sure.
> god. the hamster got put down. i didn't see that coming.
>
Such is the art of a story.
Just watched it and I thought it was absolutely magnificent.
Visually stunning. Glorious, superbly paced music. Marvellously resonant narration almost miraculously putting into words thoughts I barely knew I had, yet perfectly measured and held back to let the magic and emotion of the images and music speak for themselves.
Fantastic.
> I'm counting it as two. I think it parses as two in an iambic whatever, doesn't it? Not sure.
It’s three here and I can see you taking Griff’s side on most of these pronunciations and not just because you worked with him on another Mountain (which i bet is what drew you to this thread in the first place )
youtube.com/watch?v=SdHDrqS33EQ&
> One of the most famous sentences in the whole of English literature, by arguably its greatest master, consists of a string of nine utterly commonplace single-syllable words, plus one closing two-syllable word, also very ordinary.
Are you going to tell us what it is?
Knowing Gordon, he'll just declare that it's extraordinary that someone doesn't instantly know which sentence it is
Is that the question?
> Is that the question?
It's the Donald Trump one
Toupée or not toupée, that is the enquiry
I was a bit disappointed.
Very pretty footage but cut into annoyingly short clips that zipped from the Alps to Patagonia to Yosemite etc without much rhyme or reason.
McFarlane's text sounds pretentious when read out.
The music was cliched and, at times, annoying (quick tempo violins for skiing)
It turned into a game of name the mountain.
> Just watched it and I thought it was absolutely magnificent.
> Visually stunning. Glorious, superbly paced music. Marvellously resonant narration almost miraculously putting into words thoughts I barely knew I had, yet perfectly measured and held back to let the magic and emotion of the images and music speak for themselves.
> Fantastic.
Hang on, Mountain or Yorkshire Vet?
An unusual idea and quite well done; I enjoyed it on the whole. The images were nicely matched to the narrative themes, though I thought the skiing sequences went on a bit. I like Macfarlane's writing - it's certainly skillful - but I do agree with some other posters that it can seem a little pompous at times. A bit too much Vivaldi, perhaps, too.
The bit I found most captivating, hypnotic even, was the slowly flowing and morphing lava, set to Arvo Part's Fratres. I've never really been a fan of Part's music, but this really seemed a perfect match for the visuals and moved the whole thing into a new dimension.
In reply to toad:
Whilst I agree that the prose and commentary was a little bit over the top, the imagery was truly stunning, and a true celebration of mountains. I don't really know how anybody who loves the hills wouldn't have enjoyed it, despite its faults. Overall, it was spectacular.
But yes, it did get a bit "spot the mountain/country/range" at times...
Was that morphing lava imagary all from mountains?
Maybe it's better on a large screen. On our 30-year-old CRT TV it all looked a bit "meh"!
> Maybe it's better on a large screen. On our 30-year-old CRT TV it all looked a bit "meh"!
> Maybe it's better on a large screen. On our 30-year-old CRT TV it all looked a bit "meh"!
Maybe! I watched it on my parents modest, in this day and age, flat screen using my laptop. On my own old telly it might have been different. Still, I think the imagery would have impressed.
I'll have to watch this contentious program in order to make my own judgement, but after all it is just entertainment is it not?
> I'll have to watch this contentious program in order to make my own judgement, but after all it is just entertainment is it not?
I thought it transcended mere entertainment
Maybe I'm too cynical, partly due to seeing a mosaic of many films I've seen before and being maybe overely suspicious of myth making. The score worked for me. Glad a 'real climber' enjoyed it.