A Healthy Helping of Crow
We sure stuck it to Warren last week. Oh yes, we warned you. Go see Tangerine Dream by Teton Gravity Research, it will no doubt totally rule (as the kids are saying these days).
Sadly, the movie didn't live up to the hype. Nor did the event as a whole. It felt like every other snowboarding/music event we've been to in the past. Granted, we missed the rail competition held in the left lane of 2nd Ave just outside the Showbox beforehand, which might have been fun to watch, but the rest was par for the course. Not very well organized, a hard-to-follow prize giveaway before the movie, the movie itself, a mass exodus, and then a very lackadasical Blue Scholars show. Ho hum.
The movie should have been the diamond in the rough, but it fell short of nearly every other TGR flick we've seen. Horribly cliche shot after shot that all looked too similar, and no consistent thematic or visual thread throughout. The relatively dull evening was broken momentary by disbelief at them capturing some insane combo skiing/BASE jumping. They even managed to short Victoria Jealouse, our favorite female big mountain boarder and TGR "It Girl", giving her far less time onscreen than she deserved, and offering up footage that didn't even come close to doing her justice based on what we've seen from her in the past.
The other two bonafide highlights were seeing 14-year-old Kye Peterson launching a 720 over a 90-foot gap jump in Utah (he was going about 50 MPH at take-off), and Chris Collins throwing double back flips off 60-foot cliffs. That's twice around in either direction before they landed, people. We stopped boggling about double back flips, the film ended, and 2/3 of the crowd just up and left. Blue Scholars rolled onto stage to the most lackluster crowd we've ever seen, and we were part of the problem. We lurked in the back by the bar, having run into some folks we've biked with locally and at Whistler. That's right, at a season-opening ski/boarding movie premier, we ignored the live show and talked about mountain biking.
