Everest, the movie in 3 D

Everest was a big topic on old DL, but didn't seem to make the transition to here.

No Everest love at all?

Everest threads are popular during the spring, when people are making the trek to the top.

I saw the Everest IMAX movie by David Breashears. Is that the same one, OP? I don't recall that it was in 3D, but I could have forgotten. It was filmed in '96, the same year as the "Into Thin Air" debacle, and fellow climbers were Ed Viesturs and a Spanish woman, Araceli Segarra.

R3, This is a brand new film; not a documentary.

Just saw the preview of Everest in 3 D, coming out mid-Sept, staring Jakey G, Sam Worthington, and Jason (Babs stepson.) Notice the film clip highlights the female co-leads, although they actually have a comparatively insignificant role. Quite a different take on the book, "Into Thin Air," and a whole lot more realistic than the two TV movies.

Too bad they didn't cast GOOP as Sandy Hill Cuntman, she'd be perfect for the role!

So it is a drama about the 1996 disaster? I'd like to see it.

R6, Yes the drama covers a lot of details about the participants and their motivations in climbing Everest. Best is the cinematography of the beauty and sudden dangers along the climb. Also included is a visual portrayal of the overcrowded country of Nepal with young boys running up the icy mountain ledges seemingly without fear. Then you have the peaceful Buddist Temple with the ceremonies and rituals before the actual climbs too.

You know they are going to show Sandy Pittman's "espresso machine." Will they be honest, or continue the myth?

You should see the way too fancy for the setting meals that are presented. Table decorations? Aren't they supposed to be "roughing it" on a frozen mountain?

Sandy Pittman brags about the cost per minute of her electronic communications, adding some ironic humor to the story. IMHO she isn't the only immature one in the group who clearly doesn't belong on Everest. Since they've paid upwards of $60,000 to "Adventure Travel" for the climb, reaching the top takes precedence to many over personal safety and physical health. Interesting that a couple climbers had RK to improve their vision and avoid the need for glasses. In reality it was a severe detriment.

Blame this guy, r9

Are they going to show who I was fucking on the trip?

Vanessa Kirby plays Sandy Hill Pittman. Much younger than the original. Was she any good?

Okay everyone is alluding to it but no one is spilling... What's the real story with Sandy Hill Pittman. I've read Into Thin Air and know she later got divorced but that's all I know about her. Spill!!!

If you read Into Thin Air, you should know. Are you a Millennial?

Google Sandy and get articles by and about her. Read them, if you can.

Sandy Pittman is a Boomer.

I saw a screening last week. Sandy is a very minor character in the film, and alas, no sign of her espresso machine. Jake looks good and some of the scenery is amazing, but why recreate a 1990s TV movie (Into Thin Air)?

JakeyG and Brolin report they became severely depressed after going into an altitude chamber. Yeahright

R13, SPOILER ALERT. Sandy is not on screen for that long but is clearly one of several characters who have absolutely no business being there. The underlying theme of the movie is that "if you have to be carried up Mt. Everest" and can't pull your own weight plus more then you're a potential drain on everyone else's ability to complete the climb. More important if something goes awry on the descent, and you can't keep up, will Guides exhaust the oxygen supply to enable you to survive? Risk their own lives to carry you back down the mountain?

R16, The two TV movies didn't go into as great a detail as to why so many have died on Mt. Everest. It's true cinema verite IMHO.

'Everest' is a close look at 1996 disaster. Maybe too close.

Astonishing images of situations, such as fixed ladders extended over bottomless crevices and aerial shots of flimsy bridges hovering above daunting chasms, make the experience of high-altitude climbing look as terrifying as it is exhilarating, which seems just about right. "Everest" definitely puts you on the mountain, no questions asked.

But, as it turns out, Imax 3-D works better for yaks than it does for people. Enormous close-ups of actors feel intrusive instead of involving as well as having the odd effect of underlining that the re-creations of the harrowing events on the mountain are not the real thing.

Not helping is that the script by veteran screenwriters William Nicholson ("Gladiator," "Unbroken") and Simon Beaufoy ("Slumdog Millionaire," "127 Hours") is standard issue in terms of both drama and characterization, with lines like "Go or I'll cry" making frequent appearances.

Reviews are terrific.

Jake's dick?

Here is a subdued true-life drama about a calamitous attempt to climb Mount Everest in 1996. It’s a film with loads of ice, snow, beards, mountains, beards and men shouting desperate instructions at each other through their snowy beards. The tremulous womenfolk are pining and whining on the end of a radio receiver or telephone, while the heroic guys battle the elements. Jake Gyllenhaal has a role that turns out to be bafflingly peripheral. The dramatic focus is split between around half a dozen characters, and it’s not clear who we should root for or why. Jason Clarke plays Rob Hall, one of the new breed of guides who have made climbing Everest a commercialised big business: there is a virtual traffic jam of well-off middle-aged guys being conducted up to the peak. His followers include part-time postman Doug Hansen (John Hawkes), experienced climber Yasuko (Naoko Mori), and big-talking Texan Beck Weathers (Josh Brolin), who as the catastrophe unfolds has one of the most extraordinary stories of all. Maybe the movie should have been just about him. Everest doesn’t deliver the edge-of-your-seat thrills or a centrally compelling story. By the end of this, audiences may feel they have laboriously made it to the summit – without getting much of a view.

(Who is the chump at r20? Jake?)

This movie shows (mostly) selfless guides.

This story would make a better movie, if one wanted to stop the glory seekers:

In May 2004, a 69-year-old pathologist from Alexandria, Virginia, reached the summit of Everest via the Southeast Ridge. It had been a long, arduous climb, and Nils Antezana had hired a guide named Gustavo Lisi to help him. But on the way down, Antezena became disoriented, perhaps suffering from the onset of cerebral edema, and collapsed near The Balcony, several hundred feet above the highest camp. Though two sherpas attempted to revive him, they, and Lisi, eventually left the doctor in the snow and continued to camp. Lisi, who claimed he was "dead tired," failed to inform anyone else at Camp 4 of his client's condition. When climbers ascended the ridge the next morning, Antezena had vanished. While the guide-client relationship on Everest has endured scrutiny and skepticism, this was one of the first instances where the accusations went beyond mere negligence to claim criminal behavior. An investigation from the family finally petered out, but Lisi's reputation was ruined, and the story has cast a pall over commercial climbing on Everest ever since.

The director ended up making Jake an afterthought.

Saw this afternoon. If you must see it, do so in IMAX 3D -- the land- and mountain-scapes are breathtaking. But the script is by-the-numbers blandness and the director ramps up the sound effects so much that I gave up trying to understand the dialogue halfway through. When the big storm hits, everything is a gray blur, so you have no idea what is happening to who. Of the large cast, only Emily Watson makes an impression as a base camp coordinator, effectively registering her sense of powerlessness to do anything to save these people.

Yeah I don't get why Jake G would play a character so insignificant to the story that his part could have been cut and the movie would have been relatively unchanged. His meatier scenes must have ended up on the cutting room floor. There was, however, a nice scene in which he is sunning himself at basecamp wearing nothing but shorts and boots. Seeing it in IMAX/3D, I just wanted to pounce on top of him.

Hard to feel sorry for people who do stupid things and die doing it.

'It's total bull': Jon Krakauer hates 'Everest'

screen. In “Prophet’s Prey,” a documentary about Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, he’s seen as a hard-hitting reporter who helped put polygamist sect leader Warren Jeffs behind bars. And in “Everest,” the feature film about the infamous 1996 disaster on the world’s highest mountain, he’s the writer who stays in his tent while his climbing teammates are marooned in a blizzard.

Take a guess as to which he’d rather filmgoers see.

“It’s total bull,” Krakauer says of “Everest,” which he saw upon its debut in IMAX cinemas last weekend. “Anyone who goes to that movie and wants a fact-based account should read ‘Into Thin Air.' "

“Into Thin Air,” of course, is the 1997 bestseller Krakauer wrote about his experience on Everest, when eight climbers died after getting trapped in an unexpected storm. The new Universal Pictures film about that fateful day, directed by Baltasar Kormákur, is not based on Krakauer’s book. He sold the memoir’s rights to Sony Pictures just as the book was published, and the studio went on to make a poorly reviewed television movie about the tragedy that same year.

“People told me, ‘Movies never get made. Take the money. What do you have to lose?’” the writer, now 61, recalls. “I curse myself for selling it at all. What I learned from the TV movie was that dramatic films take dramatic license, and when you sign a document, you can do whatever you want with me. It wasn’t worth the money I got.”

Krakauer hasn’t soured on Hollywood altogether. After all, he’s in Los Angeles this week promoting “Prophet’s Prey,” which he produced and appears in as an expert because he wrote a book on the Mormon sect, 2003’s “Under the Banner of Heaven.” (A feature version of the book is currently under development with Ron Howard.) He also plays a prominent role in another documentary out this month, “Meru,” about climbers attempting to scale a 21,000-foot Himalayan mountain. And he was pleased with the way Sean Penn handled a 2007 adaptation of his “Into the Wild,” the tale of how outdoorsman Christopher McCandless ventured into Alaska and eventually starved there.

“I only went on the set on the very last day and said, ‘Sean, if you [screw] this up, I don’t want you to say I was there,’” says Krakauer, who advised Penn in an unofficial capacity because the McCandless family was in charge of the film rights. “And he didn’t [screw] it up. When he showed me the rough cut, I wanted to kiss him, I was so happy.”

But then there’s “Everest.” No one asked for Krakauer’s input on the story, and he says he was never approached by Michael Kelly, who played him in the film. In fact, he considers the film a personal affront from Kormákur himself. He’s particularly aggrieved by a scene in which his character is asked to help with the rescue by Russian guide Anatoli Boukreev but replies he cannot because he is “snow blind.”

“I never had that conversation,” Krakauer says. “Anatoli came to several tents, and not even sherpas could go out. I’m not saying I could have, or would have. What I’m saying is, no one came to my tent and asked.”

“Our intention in the tent scene that Mr. Krakauer mentions was to illustrate how helpless people were and why they might not have been able to go out and rescue people...” says Kormákur in a reply sent to The Times through his publicist. “They were not malicious. They were helpless.” The filmmaker said he had access to a number of books written about the 1996 events on Everest, as well as “all the radio calls that went on in the Adventure Consultants camp.” (Krakauer was embedded with guide Rob Hall’s Adventure Consultants team on Everest, gathering material for an Outside Magazine article.) Furthermore, the director says, four advisors who were “present on the mountain during that disaster and participated in the rescue” worked on the movie. “The writers and I tried to look at things from a fair point of view without choosing sides,” Kormákur says in his statement.

Cranky

bump

Rob Hall was an idiot thanks to him hauling Doug Hansen up there. Anatoli Boukreev correctly got all his clients down but was none the less very unfairly castigated by the traumatised Jon Krakauer.