The Walk (2015)

To me, this movie is perfection.

hyped garbage

A waste of 90 minutes of my life

I am only giving this movie a 1 for the great cast, though I can't imagine what any of them were thinking. This movie was horrible

The Walk was an inspirational story about a man from France who has put on many circus type acts in France for tightrope walking and comes to America in New York City to expand his talent by elaborating a scheme with his friends to hook various cables across the world trade center buildings for his biggest stunt yet. This involves walking while holding a giant stick. This is a true story from 1974. I liked it.

Joseph Gordon-Levitt is Phillipe Petit, the young man from France who walked across a wire between the twin towers of the World Trade Center when construction was almost finished in the early 1970s. Not only did he walk across, he walked across the yawning chasm four times. Well, 3.8 times. And he survived to become a celebrity for a period and earn a place in the book of world records.It's far from a stark drama. It's more of a caper movie along the lines of "Never on Sunday", a salubrious blend of comedy, irony, and suspense, a realization of one man's fantasy. Petit relates his tale directly into the camera from the torch atop the Statue of Liberty. He makes no jokes but he's amusing because he demonstrates his exasperation when something goes awry and he does it the way a child might do it. Quelle nuisance! What eece that veesitor doing op here at theece hour of the morning! The police officers who occupy the roofs of both towers while Petit is in the middle are equally amusing: "We got a couple of Frogs up here." I can understand how Petit could walk the wire between the two towers. He's good at it. It's much harder to understand how he managed to organize and pull off this stunt ("the coup") and how he managed to recruit his handful of assistants and supporters ("accomplices"). They're a varied lot, these accomplices. Half are French and half are American. Petit meets one of them for the first time in Paris, Jeff, an aspiring photographer and artist, who doesn't believe in the sanctity of art or the privileged position of the artist. "Hah, so you're an anarchist!" "Every artist is an anarchist to some extent." (That's the kind of conversational exchange you're far more likely to hear in Paris than in Dubuque.) I've been using the word "suspense" a little freely. "Tension" might be more apt. After all, we already know Petit pulled it off and lived to tell the tale. The guy is admirable, even though his obsession made him difficult to work with. And I suppose many artists want to do some Big Thing, some memorable (even if ephemeral) work of art. Gutson Borglum must have been flooded with self satisfaction when he finished the faces on Mount Rushmore. In the mid-1970s Christo built a fabric wall 25 miles long through Sonoma and Marin Counties in the San Francisco Bay area. About the same time someone tried to mount a huge rubber balloon of King Kong on top of the Empire State building but unlike Phillipe Petit, King Kong fell. Petit had the better central pattern generator.

First off, I watched this in 2-D on a TV at home and I imagine this film was a much different of experience in IMAX 3-D. I saw a preview of this film in 3D on the big screen when I watched "Mad Max: Fury Road" and that two or three minutes was the best use of 3-D I'd ever seen. The story follows tight-rope walker Philippe Petit in 1974 planning to conduct an illegal tight walk rope between the newly constructed twin towers in NYC. The first half of the film was fairly mundane backstory material, but once Petit, played by the terrific Joseph Gordon-Levitt, begins to assembly his team and hatches a plan how he'll pull off this stunt, the movie becomes a 1960s Jules Dassin jewel heist film in the best sort of way. To compliment the Dassin vibe, there's a jazzy 1960s style score by Alan Silvestri, a colorful and quirky team, fun trial and error planning sequences, and all sorts of conning and dodging to infiltrate the building, which is amazingly fun. Then there's the eventual tightrope walk between the towers and even watching it on a TV was a dizzying and suspenseful experience. I can only imagine what this must have been like in IMAX 3-D. My main complaints about the film are the dull first act, which seemed like filler, and the film's over use of voice-over, which seemed a lazy way to deliver exposition. Still, director Robert Zemeckis delivers a knockout of a film and Gordon-Levitt continues to show himself as one of the best actors currently working today.

a strange word for define a perfect movie. not only as inspired adaptation of a real case. but for something who remains out of words. the performance of Joseph Gordon - Lewitt is the first example. the music. the cinematography. the emotional storms of a character who reminds Hugo of Scorsese. emotion and French flavor and the scent of spy films. the circus and the challenges. Ben Kingsley as the perfect piece for impeccable equilibrium of a film who gives all - feelings, message, miracle, humor , tension, a magnificent fairy tale in new terms. a confession - film. this is its basic virtue. and one of the most significant motifs for see it.