Best Of The West

Mid-2000s bouldering filmmaking at its most unfussy, and that is a recommendation. Michael Call follows Chris Sharma back to Hueco Tanks in early 2005, seven years after his last visit, with a deep cast of the era: Boone Speed, Steve Maisch, GP Salvo, Jason Kehl, Mike Beck and Tim Kemple. It is the first of two films from largely the same crew, with Big Game shot in New Zealand.

This is for anyone who wants the Hueco footage and the sight of Sharma dropping back into a place that made him, several careers into the sport. It is also for people who like a crew that clearly likes each other. Skip it if you want a project or an arc. Fifty minutes is a session, not a story, and the Fugazi track on the soundtrack does a lot of the structural work.

What works is the cast. Speed, Kehl and Kemple are climbers people should know, and the film gives them problems rather than cameos. What it gets wrong is the same looseness. Without a thread, fifty minutes of Hueco starts to blur into one long block.

Rampage is the film this one answers. In 1999 Sharma drove the West as a teenager in an RV. In 2005 he came back to Hueco as the standard everyone measured against, and Best Of The West shows what that looks like from inside the crew.