The White Stadium

This is an Olympics film which did not turn out like I expected: it was shut off after I saw no Olympics in the first 20 minutes!

Well, at least St. Moritz, Switzerland looked lovely in 1928...

This will be a different sort of review for me. You see, I applied a random rating to a movie I shut off after about 20 minutes! I feel awful this happened-the main reason why it was watched last night was that a Letterboxd mutual left a comment which in part mentioned that they thought I'd seen this already, which I hadn't-yet I have to be honest. This mutual will likely be disappointed and bumfuzzled by my decision... but I'll explain why I did not waste my time when there were other things I did, such as preparing to be gone all day Friday (meaning that I won't be back until Saturday).

It started off fine; a co-director was Arnold Fanck, a German known for his “mountineering movies”, a unique subgenre which were actually set and filmed in the Alps. The White Hell of Pitz-Paul is a late silent worth seeing. This is also a silent, with the interesting phenomenon of there being German and French intertitles at the same time w/ English subtitles at the bottom. Everything looked lovely as there were staged scenes and fancy camera tricks involving the residents of the area. Problem was, the first 20 or so minutes was solely these scenes (including a snowball fight between children) and I was wondering when in the hell I would see any Olympics footage in this Olympics film. There was no actual competitors, no look at people prepping the venues, no competitions, no opening ceremony, nothing.

I finally got fed up with all this filler and there was no reason giving to me why this journey should continue; there's no clue as to when they finally got to the 1928 Winter Olympics. I heard somewhere that the weather may not have been great during this time but this was over 2 hours in length and who knows how much nonsense like this was present. Honestly, I have little time for such nonsense anymore-life is too short and while apparently there's more patience with movies on my behalf than many do these days, yet The White Stadium was just preposterous. I'll just shrug my shoulders, move on, and sometime next week I should see another one of these... something that should actually be watched from beginning to end.