Tag: expedition

Categories
Documentary Features Live Action Movies

Mountain Queen:
The Summits
of Lhakpa Sherpa

Director – Lucy Walker – 2023 – US – Cert. 12a – 103m

***1/2

A Sherpa woman climbs Everest ten times and escapes an abusive marriage to one of her fellow climbers – out in UK cinemas on Friday, July 26th and on Netflix from Wednesday, July 31st

Amazing what you can learn from documentary movies. From this one, I learned that all of Nepal’s Sherpa people have the same surname: Sherpa. One of them, a woman named Lhakpa Sherpa, had always wanted to climb Mount Everest. A series of meetings led her to the Nepalese Prime Minister, who, impressed with her determination, put her in charge of a year 2000 expedition to conquer the summit. Unfortunately, she was not the greatest of leaders, preferring to go on ahead at her own pace. Many of her fellow climbers gave up or returned to camp, but she kept going and became the first woman to both make it to the Summit and return alive.

Bitten by the Everest-scaling bug, she went back on her own the following year and did it again. This time, she went with a Romanian climber named Gheorghe Dijmărescu, who she had met the previous year. A romance ensued, and she went back with him to Connecticut and had a child by him before the couple married in 2002.… Read the rest

Categories
Features Live Action Movies

Il Buco

Director – Michelangelo Frammartino – 2021 – Italy – Cert. U – 93m

**1/2

A Calabrian cowherd nears the end of his life while a group of explorers journey down a deep hole to find out how deep into the ground it descends – out in cinemas on Friday, June 10th

Literally, ‘The Hole’. Frammartino again brings to the cinema the style that made his earlier Le Quattro Volte (2010) so special. He sets up the camera, often at a great distance from the action, then leaves it there to record whatever happens. The narrative of Il Buco is actually pretty simple, a recreation of an expedition by a group of young, amateur speleologists into a hole in the ground in Calabria. (Speleology is the branch of science involved in mapping and measuring the interiors of caves, natural underground systems, and the like.)

It’s 1961. We’re first introduced to the place in a shot looking out of the ground at the edge of the hole as, eventually, the heads of two bulls come into view over the ridge. An elderly cowherd watches over the grazing cattle from a position halfway up a forty degree incline hillside. As the bus leaves the rich, urban developments of Northern Italy for the still unspoiled Southern region of Calabria, we watch it slowly make its way along rounds, through a small rural town where the party stops for the night to bed down in sleeping bags in the local, Catholic Church alongside statues of monks and the crucified Christ lying on his back, across open country until it arrives at the vast plain where the explorers will set up camp.… Read the rest

Categories
Animation Features Live Action Movies

The Lost World
(1925)

Director – Harry O. Hoyt – 1925 – US – Cert. U – 110m

*****

Review of PAL VHS release originally published in Starlog UK, mid-1990s.

£12.99, Original Aspect Ratio (Academy), Mono (Golden Age Films)

Before Michael Crichton and Steven Spielberg purloined the name for their Jurassic Park sequel, The Lost World was Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s first Professor Challenger novel. In the book, the bombastic scientist leads an expedition to a plateau deep in the Amazon cut off from the rest of the world which he claims to be populated by dinosaurs.

This 1925 silent Hollywood adaptation (here released in 1993’s restored, untinted, black and white print with piano accompaniment) features prominently in any serious shortlist of live action movies featuring dinosaurs along with King Kong, The Beast From 20,000 Fathoms, Godzilla, One Million Years BC and Jurassic Park. Indeed, leaving aside 1954’s Japanese, man‑in-a-rubber-suit entry Godzilla, the remaining titles are The Lost World’s descendants via their use of optical trickery and stop‑motion animation.

The Lost World’s miniature model dinosaurs and their incorporation as fully articulated giant beasts into live action cinematography was primarily the work of stop-frame animator cum special effects genius Willis O’Brien, later to put the dinosaurs into 1933’s King Kong and win a belated special effects Oscar on the back of 1949’s Mighty Joe Young.… Read the rest