I went to see the screening of Lost and Found from Teton Gravity Research on Thursday night. The venue was the McDonald Theatre in Eugene, which seats 700-800 people, and it was packed. There were a few booths in the entry way: local ski shop (Berg's), a raffle booth (raising money for kids ski team), Amp beverage (no thanks), and Willamette Pass ski area. I lingered for a little bit as I was there somewhat early, and then parked my butt in a prime spot in the theater. Note, if you are hardcore and want to not have any knowledge of the film before watching it, skip reading this...
Before the movie started they threw various schwag into the crowd: t-shirts, socks, stickers, etc. Then they fired up the film. The opening scene was good, and then I believe the second main segment was with Kye Petersen, who is 17 years old. I may have been biased by the fact that the kid is 17, but holy crap, this kid absolutely rocked it! He was skiing some big mountain terrain, combined with throwing stylin' airs, flips, and just nailing it. I would say this was one of the best segments of the film.
There was a lot of good footage, in particular of really steep stuff in Alaska and a few other places, shot with helmet cams. This was just awesome. I haven't kept up on ski films much, so I don't know how much helmet cam work has been done, but they had a lot here, and it was awesome. Seeing what the skier sees, especially in these far more extreme environments was just phenomenal. Amazing what these guys are doing - it really gives you an appreciation for their ability to work a line that they can hardly see half the time.
Further into the movie was the Eric Roner segment where he ski-base-jumps a 192' cliff in Jackson. I think the whole crowd thought he was actually going to huck it just on skis, and it really seemed anti-climactic when you finally watched the whole thing top to bottom and saw him pull the chute. There was this subdued utterance from the crowd denoting the let-down. Granted, it was still a sick trick, because that is a very short base jump (I think they say 150' is the absolute bare minimum, so he was real close, combined with skiing into it (which means added speed as compared to just jumping off it from a stand still), but still. The rest of his segment was good too though.
My other favorite part was some incredibly deep and light powder stuff. Sorry, I've forgotten the couple folks that were in it (Chris Collins maybe?). I would term this the most "beautiful" segment of the flick.
Oh, ya, one other fun bit - watching the heli rest it's nose on a knife edge and drop Nobis and dudes off. Way sketch for all involved, and pretty sweet shot of the heli.
All in all, fun times, and always good to see in a theater to hear the whole crowd oohing and ahing. Go check it out at a theater near you.
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