skiing Tagged Articles at Cinematical

When I close my eyes and try to imagine a serious movie about a blind skier, I can't help my mind from wandering in the direction of a Farrelly Brothers comedy. Does this make me a bad person? Probably. But that doesn't change the fact that blind skiing sounds like an awful idea, one that is just asking for chuckles from an ignorant, politically incorrect person such as myself. Well, the people at Fox 2000 must be doing a better job imagining than I am. They have a film in the works called Into the Light, which appears to be a serious movie about a real-life blind skiier. It turns out, there are plenty of blind people who not only ski, but ski really fast.

A year ago, Fox bought the rights to the true story of Michael May, an athlete who holds the record for downhill skiing for a completely blind person (which is 65 mph for those who are curious). Now producer Gil Netter, who just so happened to produce the Farrelly's Fever Pitch, has hired Bruce Joel Rubin, who won an Oscar for writing Ghost (wait, Ghost won a screenplay Oscar?), to adapt the soon-to-be-released book by Robert Kurson.

Mani Haghighi's latest film, Men at Work, is one of the most accessible foreign films, let alone Iranian films, I've seen in a long time. Its simple story is of four middle-aged men on their way home from a ski trip who make a pit stop alongside the mountain road and obsess about a large phallic rock jutting out from the edge of a cliff. They decide that they can not leave the site until they've succeeded in knocking the thing over, and make every attempt to push it, ram it, pull it, dig it out and leverage it. Others drive by, turn around and offer assistance or make attempts of their own. The four men just keep on trying through the night.

Although steeped in allegory, political or otherwise, the film is perfectly enjoyable, and quite hilarious, in its literal sense. Its enigmatic comedy is akin to something out of Monty Python, and its most basic elements align it with Looney Tunes, and yet despite its absurdity Men at Work feels completely real and reasonable. Shot digitally, it has the impression of a home movie, as if the camera is a fifth friend who merely observes and records the endeavor.