2005 SKI MOVIE REVIEWS: Don’t Get Mad…Get Rad
Tough Guy Productions – Sessions: Total Telemark V
toughguyproductions.com
Cost: $30
TGP founder Nat Ross is intently focused on growing telemark skiing and showing that it deserves the same respect as its alpine counterpart. He does this by organizing telemark freeski competitions and producing movies that showcase all of the sport’s finest attributes: the powder, the turn, linking burly lines on freeheel, and the athleticism of tele jibbers. Sessions certainly succeeds in highlighting the grace of skiing powder on a bent knee and in some of the best freeheel Alaska footage ever compiled. That alone is worth the $30. Where it falls short, though, is with a clichéd Yosemite segment about hut tripping, too many cliff hucks where the skier just drops like a sack of potatoes, and a jib session where the rails are hit too slowly to be taken seriously. The unfortunate result of Sessions is that in trying to demonstrate that telemark skiers can do everything their alpine brethren can do, it simply highlights the various shortcomings in telemark skiing. Very few tele skiers can do everything their alpine brethren can do—in particular skiing out of cliff hucks and sliding giant rails at speed—but too often on film it just looks like a struggle. And until freeheelers focus on what they do better—the turn, the powder, the unique style—rather than on proving what they can do the same, movies like Sessions only serve to keep it second class.
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KGB Productions - Sanctified
kgb-productions.com
Cost: $15
Mixing backcountry ski and snowboard footage with an environmental message, Sanctified is best characterized as a wake-up call to skiers about the pressures facing public lands. The movie from Jackson Hole-based KGB Productions, led by Chris Kitchen and Sam Pope, is decidedly slanted against current public policy initiatives—on a local and federal level regarding global warming, national park values, and resort development—but most of the information is pretty basic. The most important aspect of the film, and one in which Kitchen and Pope succeed to convey, is that skiers shouldn’t take wilderness for granted—because the future of these lands is tenuous at best, and it needs defenders.
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PW05 - POWDERWHORE
powderwhore.com
Cost: $22
Medium: Digital video
PW05 is a movie for viewers, namely backcountry tele skiers, who might be disgruntled with big production ski flicks that seem more concerned with the image of their athletes than actual skiing. With the Wasatch as the primary setting, PW05 is an all telemark movie with a low-budget grassrootsy feel. Production is not the best and some segments seem a smidge too long, but Noah Howell and his fellow Powderwhores make no attempt to hide the fact that this movie is an amateur work produced by a group of friends. It is what it is, and it more than succeeds as the best telemark movie the year. As well as having some of the deepest pow shots of any release this season, there’s an entertaining segment with Andrew McLean (“Master Piste Theater”) and another with some hippie stoner dude living in a backcountry shelter with his dog.