Length: 12:49
Written by Des Dillon & directed by Adrian McDowell and Finaly Pretsell
Genre: Documentary
Date: 2007
Rating: ★★☆☆☆
Logline: A portrait of Olympic cyclist Craig MacLean against the classic Odysseus story.
This film takes a subject I not overly interested in and manages to make me care even less about it.
Iain Agnew narrates the story of Odysseus over a montage of shots featuring Olympic track cyclist Craig MacLean. This probably looked good on paper but on screen it feels like a bit of a cop out. The pounding heart beat and fast paced cycling shots in the pre title sequence gives us false expectations as it quickly dissipates into a sedated collection of poorly composed shots (MacLean does one one squat, wow) accompanied by Agnew's monotonous voice over.
We do get intermittent temptations of something exciting and possibly attention holding but it always goes back to the hindering narration which is easy to tune out. There's no inspiring insights about motivation, adrenaline, or sheer competitiveness from MacLean either, though they do let him play on a set of drums, instead, the filmmakers have simply applied someone else's story to him which kind of prevents and disengages us from the 'truth' that documentary proposes to give us.
This is an incredibly long thirteen minutes of watching people cycling, members of the crowd and MacLean sitting about. We do finally get to see him race, right at the end, but after no real tension building. I'm not even sure he wins, it cuts away too quick.
I found this film hard to engage with felt uninspired by it. The pairing of Olympic athlete and Greek mythology seems like a natural combination but on this occasion didn't work for me.
Best Bit: Lycra covered crotch shots.
Worst Bit: The Odysseus story and long length.
Final thought: Of course all I was really interested in was the chafing problem.
Read a condensed review of this film on Twitter here.
No comments:
Post a Comment