UKC

On now. (Sunday 8pm). It's very good indeed

In reply to toad:

Superb

In reply to toad:

Thanks - some great filming there

In reply to toad:

Bugger. Caught the last 10 minutes. 

In reply to Chris Harris:

Me too. Stunning. 

In reply to toad:

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.

In reply to Adam Long:

I enjoyed it and much of the photography, but its scope seem'd somewhat narrow.

In reply to Adam Long:

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.

In reply to Chris Harris:

It's on iPlayer. 

In reply to toad:

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!

In reply to toad:

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.

In reply to Adam Long:

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.

In reply to Tom Valentine:

Here it is!

https://www.my5.tv/mountain/season-1/episode-2

 

In reply to Offwidth:

Partly Dafoe's portentous delivery and partly Robert MacFarlane's rather purple prose.

 

In reply to toad:

In reply to Robert Durran:

Thanks !

In reply to Offwidth:

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.

In reply to toad:

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.

In reply to Dave Garnett:

 

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 

 

In reply to Blue Straggler:

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.

In reply to hbeevers:

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.

In reply to Pursued by a bear:

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

In reply to toad:

 

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...

 

In reply to toad:

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.

In reply to toad:

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.

In reply to Gordon Stainforth:

Totally off topic, but is "question" two or three syllables? Is it qwest yun or qwest y on?

In reply to no_more_scotch_eggs:

 

god. the hamster got put down. i didn't see that coming.

 

 

In reply to toad:

I'm counting it as two. I think it parses as two in an iambic whatever, doesn't it? Not sure.

In reply to no_more_scotch_eggs:

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.

 

In reply to Gordon Stainforth:

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&

 

In reply to Gordon Stainforth:

Are you going to tell us what it is?

 

In reply to Robert Durran:

Knowing Gordon, he'll just declare that it's extraordinary that someone doesn't instantly know which sentence it is

In reply to Robert Durran:

Is that the question?

In reply to Adam Long:

It is!

In reply to Robert Durran:

It's the Donald Trump one

In reply to Robert Durran:

Toupée or not toupée, that is the enquiry

In reply to toad:

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.

In reply to Robert Durran:

Hang on, Mountain or Yorkshire Vet?

In reply to toad:

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:

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...

 

In reply to Ratfeeder:

Was that morphing lava imagary all from mountains?  

In reply to Offwidth:

No idea. Does it matter?

In reply to Mal Grey:

Maybe it's better on  a large screen. On our 30-year-old CRT TV it all looked a bit "meh"!

In reply to Simon Caldwell:

I watched it on a laptop and it was so good that I think I may set up my projector and screen at the weekend for a gloriously indulgent full cinematic experience

In reply to Simon Caldwell:

 

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.

In reply to toad:

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?

In reply to veteye:

I thought it transcended mere entertainment

In reply to Robert Durran:

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.