The Crash Reel: It Happened in Park City

If they are smart, organized snowboarding and other extreme sports will get proactive about preventing serious brain trauma, like that suffered by Olympic prospect Kevin Pearce. Or they can just bury their heads in the sand like the NFL. Anyone care to lay odds on which course they take?  Perhaps Oscar nominated filmmaker Lucy Walker will shift the needle a bit with her HBO produced documentary profile of Pearce, The Crash Reel (trailer here), which opens this Friday in New York at the IFC Center.

Pearce was sort of the Zenned-Out Natural, who generated jaw-dropping amplitude on his runs.  His friend-turned-rival Shaun White is depicted as the Ice-Man of snowboarding, who never made a mistake, but lacked Pearce’s indefinable X-factor.  While White was a driven lone wolf (or so he appears), Pearce led a free-spirited group of competitive snowboarders known as the “Frends,” because there is no “i” in there.  Then during a fateful training run in Park City (a town which holds continuing significance throughout the film), Pearce took a fall that is truly sickening to watch.

Obviously, this changes everything.  It is a slow process, but Pearce begins to the recover physically and mentally.  However, several individuals tangentially related to Pearce are not so fortunate.  In fact, their sad intersecting stories provide some of Reel’s most poignant moments. Yet, despite these tragic examples and the objections of his family, Pearce remains determined to make his competitive return.

Walker is a talented filmmaker, who really should have taken home the Oscar for The Tsunami and the Cherry Blossom.  She skillfully broadens the Reel’s focus, without turning it into an outright advocacy PSA.  Walker and her team also culled through a remarkable wealth of archival and privately recorded video clips. Say what you will about extreme sports athletes, but they certainly document themselves thoroughly.  Unfortunately, they are not always wildly interesting as interview subjects.  Ironically, White is probably the most engaging on-camera presence, aside perhaps from another extreme skiing colleague, whose appearances take on tragic implications in the third act.

As fate would have it, Walker first met Pearce at an unrelated Sundance event and eventually premiered Reel at this year’s festival.  Yet, one wonders how the Park City snow sports industry will appreciate their unflattering role in the film.  Granted, the road-back section drags a bit from time to time, but there is clearly a reason why every scene was included.  Indeed, it would make an effective (if somewhat depressing) double feature with Steve James’ Head Games. Recommended for fans and critics of snowboarding and related sports, The Crash Reel opens theatrically this Friday (12/13) at the IFC Center.

2012 Oscar Nominated Shorts: Documentaries

It was only a matter of months after Katrina hit that a bumper crop of outraged documentaries began jostling for art-house attention. Strangely, almost one year after the devastating Tōhoku earthquake and Tsunami rocked Japan the documentary film industry still maintains nearly complete radio silence. However, filmmaker Lucy Walker recognized the magnitude of the tragic events in Japan, capturing the immediate aftermath and early rebuilding efforts in The Tsunami and the Cherry Blossom (trailer here), the clear and overwhelming standout among the Oscar nominated short form documentaries, which opens today as part of the 2012 showcase of Academy Award nominated shorts at the IFC Center.

Blossom opens with first-hand video footage that will make viewers forever foreswear Roland Emmerich disaster movies. From the relative safety of higher ground, residents watch as the tsunami slowly obliterates their town and all their neighbors left behind. Their audible anguish is haunting.

There are many stories from those who lost loved ones. Clearly, the pain remains understandably raw and immediate for them. Yet, there is no finger-pointing or ranting in Blossom. The Japanese people are contradictorily both too practical and too philosophical for such indulgences. Instead they seek to remember and rebuild. Whether it is the beautiful young photographer recording the rebirth of the town destroyed in the initial scene, from that very same vantage point, or the relief worker who always stops to salvage family photos and tombstones, their efforts are profoundly moving.

Directed by Walker, a high profile nonfiction filmmaker, whose perfectly nice and reasonably informative Waste Land was a feature documentary nominee last year, Blossom is considered the frontrunner in this category and rightly so. Saving Face is also part of the program, but has separate publicity arrangements, while God is Bigger than Elvis is not included due to licensing issues.

The remaining contenders simply pale compared to Blossom's impact. Gail Dolgin and Robin Fryday’s The Barber of Birmingham: Foot Soldier of the Civil Rights Movement is billed as a profile of the late James Armstrong. However, they show no real interest in their ostensive subject, using him only as a prop, or more precisely a mirror to capture Obama’s reflected glory. All we learn about Mr. Armstrong himself is that he participated in many of the great Civil Rights marches and presided over a barber shop filled with artifacts from the era.

Likewise, James Spione’s Incident in New Baghdad is undermined by its ideological blind spots. Former Army Specialist Ethan McCord explains how a complicated skirmish publicized by Wikileaks haunted him since his discharge. It seems an Army Apache helicopter group took out an enemy contingent armed with RPGs and AK-47’s. Soon thereafter, a minivan pulled up and was bombarded in turn. It turns out a young boy and girl were seriously injured inside the vehicle and their father was killed in the driver’s seat. Why he headed towards rather than away from the combat does not seem to intrigue McCord or Spione. However, the tremendous efforts the U.S. military made to successful save both children ought to speak volumes about the moral superiority of our troops and their mission. McCord remains bitter and that is his right. As an indictment though, Incident just does not compute.

Blossom is an important and inspiring film, highly recommended even when programmed with two vastly inferior nominees. With the anniversary of the March 11th earthquake and tsunami fast approaching, it is important to remember the Japanese people in our hearts during what is sure to be a painful time for them. Concerned individuals can still support the Japan Society’s relief fund by going here. Varying greatly in terms of Oscar worthiness, the Academy Award nominated documentary shorts open today (2/10) in New York at the IFC Center.