Free Solo / Minding the Gap

I recently watched two documentaries that are on the Academy Awards Best Documentary shortlist for 2018, and they are at the moment two of my three favorite movies of the year (alongside Alfonso Cuaron's stunning Roma).  Free Solo I saw on the big screen - which I would highly recommend for its breathtaking visages, while Minding the Gap is on Hulu (who picked up distribution).  Both movies did well at the box office, in a year of documentary surprise hits that reached the $10M+ mark (led by Won't You Be My Neighbor, RBG, and Three Identical Strangers).  And both were amazing.

Free Solo is the story of a mountain climber named Alex Honnold, who is famous for climbing mountains in a "free solo" style - by himself without the aide of any ropes or other devices, just his hands and feet up these steep cliffs where any slip means instant death. There's a reason very few climbers "free solo".  Very few of the greatest free soloists are still alive.  The film was produced by National Geographic and is directed by a fellow climber Jimmy. Chin and his partner E. Chai Vasarhelyi (“MERU”).  The two of them chart a year in the life of Honnold as he prepares to free solo El Capitan, the 3,000 foot sheer-faced cliff in Yosemite National Park.  No one has ever done this before -- no one has even attempted it (as far as we know).  So the film focuses on the sheer bravery / stupidity / athleticism required to take on such a mission, and why.  The film is fascinating both for its technically brilliant cinematography of man on mountain, through all his roped-in training runs charting out the course in necessarily intricate detail, but also for its study of the man - this clearly eccentric and somewhat anti-social young man who starts the movie living in a van (not for lack of money, but just lack of effort to find a place to live) but manages to get a girlfriend during the filming who becomes a big part of the story because she wants to -- you know - have him return alive.  It's just a really great character study in the middle of a breathtaking edge of your seat thriller when he actually attempts the Free Solo in the second half of the film, a life and death struggle that was so suspenseful it was almost tough to watch.  But so very much recommended.

Minding the Gap is definitely smaller in scope.  It's ostensibly a skateboard documentary, following the lives of three skate kids in a forgotten suburb in Illinois, one of whom spends a bunch of time filming their tricks and eventually, years later, begins compiling the videos and subsequent interviews into a movie that has literally nothing to do with skateboarding at all.  Seriously.  It's like if Boyhood were filmed with real people (not actors) and followed a group of friends around to find a story, and the story the director finds is truly amazing. The cinematography here is almost as brilliant as that of Free Solo and all told in close shots of skating in empty parking lots of this abandoned city and the lives of these now young men, each of them affected strongly by violence in their lives from parental figures.  The story finds its truths in the way it tackles the life of the leader of the skate kids, the enigmatic Zack, who goes from goofball who doesn't want to grow up and get a job, dto father himself, and the way the filmmaker parallels Zack's story with his own is nothing short of brilliant.  It's so real, it's so true, and it's so terribly heartbreaking.  Just a stunning piece of filmmaking, a debut that won awards at Sundance this year and deserves all the accolades you can find.  It's available for streaming right now on Hulu.