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Extreme

1999, Movie, NR, 44 mins

Extreme: Review

Let's face it: The success of an IMAX film depends entirely on whether or not the subject matter can fully exploit the format's gargantuan proportions. (The screen towers eight stories over the audience, and stretches some 101 feet from side to side). In this case, director Jon Long, a team of fearless cameramen and the folks at IMAX have come up with a lulu: the sheer terror of extreme sports. Whether surfing 40-foot swells, scaling frozen cascades of ice without a rope, or skiing down vertical slopes of virgin powder, this globetrotting documentary about seemingly sane people who brave insane odds for fun will pretty much leave you breathless. First stop: Waimea Bay, HI, where El Niño has created magnificent waves so huge, extreme surfers like Ross Clarke-Jones need to be towed by jetski to even get close to them. Then it's off to Canada, where Barry Blanchard and Catherine Mulvihill slowly pick their way up the dazzlingly tall Delphine Glacier icefall, and then to Alaska, where extreme skiers and snowboarders plummet down 50 degree slopes amid a cloud of sloughing snow. Long and his crew capture radical windsurfing in Maui (a bit of a letdown after seeing Clarke-Jones swallowed by a 20-foot curl), and close out the film among the spectacular rock formations of southern Utah, where world-class rock-climbers Lynn Hill and Nancy Feagin do what they do best. Each athlete offers his or her reasons for tempting fate — addiction to adrenaline, pushing the envelope of personal achievement, reestablishing a proper relationship with nature with a reminder of our puny, mortal insignificance — but with visuals like these, who's listening? leave a comment --Ken Fox