127 hours - To chop your own arm off.

[Political Lurker]

Ok folks - just watched this movie tonight and was trying to make sense of it.
I honestly think its the first time I have been to a movie were almost everyone clapped enthusiastically at the end. So its obviously struck a cord with a lot of people.

that said - i (and I dare say most of the audience) have done a fair bit of hill walking and climbing - so the audience may not be typical of those watching say Avatar or a Harry Potter movie.

Basically its about a guy who gets his arm jammed in a rock while climbing.....
and - after going to hell and back a few times while staying in exactly the same place - he eventually cuts his own arm off to get free.
During the interim he hallucinates wildly seeing all kinds strange people from his life etc... the film is quite surreal - and made me think of DMT which Joe Rogan talks passionately about in the second clip.
DMT is a very powerful drug created by the brain which appears to be often produced during sleep or times of trauma... especially it is also claimed when we are dying.

anyone else catch it?

jamie





127 Hours (15)

Starring: James Franco, Kate Mara, Amber Tamblyn, Treat Williams

Reviewed by Anthony Quinn
Friday, 7 January 2011
Wrist taking: James Franco in Danny Boyle's 127 Hours

Consider yourselves warned: there will be blood. Danny Boyle's minimalist survival yarn has at its centre an act of almost inconceivable self-mutilation, yet its gruesomeness resides not so much in what we can see as the level of pain we are obliged to imagine. Just thinking about it makes you go... meeyaargh.

Is there anyone who still doesn't know what happened to Aron Ralston in the Utah desert one day in April 2003? If there is, here goes: this 28-year-old adrenaline junkie was out hiking in the wilderness without having told anyone where he was going.

While trying to negotiate a tricky crevice he slipped and fell, trapping his right forearm immovably between a boulder and the canyon wall. His predicament is fiendishly simple. He cannot cry for help, because there's no one around for miles. He has for company a videocam, a bottle of water and a small Swiss Army knife. What is he to do? And what is the film to do, with Danny Boyle, the most kinetic of modern directors, having chosen to lock his story in chronic isolation? Somehow he finds a way to pass the time, recreating the ordeal (from Ralston's own memoir, Between a Rock and a Hard Place) as a kaleidoscopic blur of hallucinations, reveries, flashbacks, or, as the poet had it, "fears, havings-to, faces". Shots of curving sunlight, or of a raven passing overhead, interrupt the lonesome vigil.

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James Franco does his darnedest to resolve a performative conundrum: how to play a static action hero. It's not quite a one-man show – the early scenes involve Ralston frolicking with a couple of women backpackers – but for the most part it's just the camera on his face. Amazingly, he keeps his head amid the darkness of the canyon, and by that serene refusal to panic braces us for what we know will be coming. His fate, a dot in the distance at first, gradually looms into view. He has already drunk his own pee; now he must prove his mettle before dehydration and starvation undo him completely.

The cumulative intensity of this is never boring, but it is not quite enlivening, either. One never feels the horrific absurdity, for instance, of Ryan Reynolds trapped in a coffin in Buried, another film that dares to telescope isolation into an hour and a half.

The film posits an existential teaser – what would you have done in his place? – but doesn't deliver the smack of appalled satisfaction we should feel at its denouement.
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Any day you wake up on "the right side of the dirt" is a good day.

[Prezbucky]

I remember the story. It's amazing how far a person will go -- the pain, struggle, fear he'll overcome -- to survive.
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Billie Jean is not my lover. Hee.