i just saw a movie in a real theater. it's been a while since i've done that. why, i think it was lotr return of the king. that was, oh, back in november?
i have two colleagues who live in san luis obispo. they work two days in office and three at home. monday nights they spend in sb usually camping and partying. this week, they wanted to do some mountain climbing. they asked me to join them and i thought, why not? three married people displaced from their spouses should stick together.
we saw touching the void. i forget if movie titles are all caps or bolded or what. since i just learned html for underline, i'm using it. i had heard the main character interviewed on npr months ago but i didn't know that they made a movie from his book. it's more or less a documentary with actors playing out the story line. for some reason i remembered that there were three climbers and one died. turns out there was only two. the third character was a non-climber who kept camp. the movie was just one despondent and hopeless scene to another. i mean, we all knew they survived to tell about it but, man, it was heart breaking.
the playas: joe simpson and simon yates.
can't believe you cut my cord, mate
so there we were, three of all eleven movie goers in the entire theater. it reminded me of the indie theater in san luis osbispo. plaza de oro is like the palm of santa barbara. smut shoved a full bottle of rum down his pants and snuck it in. they tried to get me a soda so they could spike mine up but i knew better. so they each got half a bottle. through out the first half of the movie, smut kept mumbling "dig a cave dig a cave," which was exactly what i was thinking. had those fuckers dug a snow cave and sat through the blizzard, they wouldn't have gotten in half the trouble. well, they wouldn't have books and movies about them either. but, being who we are, we just have to be logical about spilled milk.
hand+smut (note bottle of rum in cup holder)
for the second half of the movie, smut kept trying to verbalize joe's thoughts.
hm, i'm still on the mountain?
or
oh, fuck, i'm still in peru!
etc.
meanwhile i kept sighing aloud each time something else went wrong. it's a good thing no one sat near us. we were being way obnoxious especially with the two clowns all liquored up. i guess i tolerated it because i know smut. he gets all worked up about potentially dangerous situations. he was a ball of nerves when we hiked to the top of half dome. granted we weren't climbing alpine style through cravasses and over glaciers. but, trust me, it was just as harrowing to hike a 17 mile roundtrip in 12 hours. 7 am to 7 pm. 8,200 feet of total change in elevation. and a man died on our trail right in front of us!
so, go out and see this movie tonight if you can. it's worth 100% of $8. or listen to cordless joe's interview on freshair. it's about the extraordinary survival of two brave foos.
