Wetass Movies–“Touching the Void”: This recounting of climber Joe Simpson’s near-death experience on a rock face in the Peruvian Andes wowed Sundance and should show up in wide release. In 1985, Simpson and a climbing buddy, Simon Yates, made the first ascent of the forbidding Suila Grande. They got up in three and a half days. So far, so good. But as so often happens in climbing, it was the trip down that became a nightmare. Engulfed by a blizzard, Simpson shattered his leg. Yates initially tried to lower Simpson down the face, segment by segment. But eventually, with Simpson dangling over a void at the end of the rope and Yates unsure whether he was dead or alive, Yates no longer had the strength to keep going. Thus, Yates was faced with a most brutal choice: stay with Simpson and likely die, or abandon Simpson and leave him hanging, in order to try and save himself. Yates opted for the latter (Simpson, incredibly, managed to survive anyhow). Here’s what Newsweek’s David Ansen has to say about the pseudo-documentary (it contains recreated scenes because Simpson and Yates were not filming):

“Ordinarily, documentary re-enactments are terrible, tacky affairs, but [Director] Macdonald avoids the usual mistakes. There’s no emoting, hardly any dialogue: just a straightforward, bone-chilling, admirably precise visualization of Simpson’s extraordinary escape from an icy death, filmed both on the mountain where it happened and in the Swiss Alps. There’s not an ounce of false piety or histrionics in Simpson’s existential account of his will to live. An atheist and a pragmatist, he knows he can succeed only by breaking down his pain-racked task into small, achievable goals. One step at a time, indeed. By the end of this white-knuckle movie, you stand in awe at the depth of man’s will to survive. “Touching the Void” leaves you emotionally and physically spent, and grateful it was only a movie, not a mountain, you had to endure.”

Get me a ticket….



Abandoned: “Simon? Simon?…..You’d better stay away from my wife, you bastard!”