Film Review - A Colorado Daydream
A Colorado Daydream – once around the sun
Produced and directed by Bennett Scott and Charles Freyberger.
DVD, 75 min.
Reviewed by Mark Watson.
A Colorado Daydream offers a fresh angle on the bouldering movie genre by combining bouldering footage with a look into the day-to-day lives of a group of young Colorado boulderers.
Filmed amongst the boulders of six different Rocky Mountain venues the film features Jamie Emerson, Adrienne and Sean Drolet, Brian Capps and Jen Lemare among a host of others, as they crank out 25 of the hardest and most interesting problems the area has on offer. Between high quality, tightly edited scenes of climbing we are offered brief glimpses into these climbers’ daily lives as they attend college, eat breakfast and go about their business. Through a couple of interviews and some moments of clever narrative we get to hear a bit about what makes these guys tick and what keeps them interested in bouldering.
Colorado Daydream boasts some great cinematography, some split screen style shots and some great landscape and time lapse shots. Some of the cuts between the day-to-day scenes and the bouldering footage are imaginatively done and this combined with a profusion of visual effects, and a wide variety of mostly excellent music give the film a pace that mostly kept me interested. The selection of problems shown is really excellent, and many of them are likely to be appearing on peoples tick lists.
The really great bouldering movies around have carried their climbing footage (what we all really want to see) with strong storylines or themes: Ben Moon’s quest for Karma in The Real Thing, and the round-the-world mission to find quality problems in Frequent Flyers are examples. Colorado Daydream’s combination is a successful one too, though I would have been more satisfied had the ratio of climbing to other stuff been just a little higher.
With the effort that was put into the great graphics announcing each new problem, I would have liked to see grades included, I’m not sure what the directors justifications for including them at the end credits are, but it is a definite inconvenience for the first time viewer. Knowing the grade of a problem as you see someone climb it makes it considerably easier for most climbers to relate to what they are seeing.
Still, Colorado Daydream consistently delivers its promise of slick footage, and makes the Colorado Front Range look like a place well worth visiting.
To find out more check out www.codaydream.com
Mark Watson
Editor - The Climber magazine.
Produced and directed by Bennett Scott and Charles Freyberger.
DVD, 75 min.
Reviewed by Mark Watson.
A Colorado Daydream offers a fresh angle on the bouldering movie genre by combining bouldering footage with a look into the day-to-day lives of a group of young Colorado boulderers.
Filmed amongst the boulders of six different Rocky Mountain venues the film features Jamie Emerson, Adrienne and Sean Drolet, Brian Capps and Jen Lemare among a host of others, as they crank out 25 of the hardest and most interesting problems the area has on offer. Between high quality, tightly edited scenes of climbing we are offered brief glimpses into these climbers’ daily lives as they attend college, eat breakfast and go about their business. Through a couple of interviews and some moments of clever narrative we get to hear a bit about what makes these guys tick and what keeps them interested in bouldering.
Colorado Daydream boasts some great cinematography, some split screen style shots and some great landscape and time lapse shots. Some of the cuts between the day-to-day scenes and the bouldering footage are imaginatively done and this combined with a profusion of visual effects, and a wide variety of mostly excellent music give the film a pace that mostly kept me interested. The selection of problems shown is really excellent, and many of them are likely to be appearing on peoples tick lists.
The really great bouldering movies around have carried their climbing footage (what we all really want to see) with strong storylines or themes: Ben Moon’s quest for Karma in The Real Thing, and the round-the-world mission to find quality problems in Frequent Flyers are examples. Colorado Daydream’s combination is a successful one too, though I would have been more satisfied had the ratio of climbing to other stuff been just a little higher.
With the effort that was put into the great graphics announcing each new problem, I would have liked to see grades included, I’m not sure what the directors justifications for including them at the end credits are, but it is a definite inconvenience for the first time viewer. Knowing the grade of a problem as you see someone climb it makes it considerably easier for most climbers to relate to what they are seeing.
Still, Colorado Daydream consistently delivers its promise of slick footage, and makes the Colorado Front Range look like a place well worth visiting.
To find out more check out www.codaydream.com
Mark Watson
Editor - The Climber magazine.