CHICAGO – When two brothers confront the sins of each other and it expands into a psychology of an entire race, it’s at a stage play found in Chicago’s Invictus Theatre Company production of “Topdog/Underdog,” now at their new home at the Windy City Playhouse through March 31st, 2024. Click TD/UD for tickets/info.
Film Review: Not Too Many Good Reasons to Experience ‘The Walk’
CHICAGO – I am not opposed to dramatic retellings of true events from history, but I think the drama should at least be as entertaining as a PBS documentary on the same subject. “The Walk” tells the true story of a French wire walker and the twin tower World Trade Center in the mid-1970s…when he strung a wire between them, and then proceeded to walk from one tower to the other without a net more than a thousand feet in the air.
Rating: 2.5/5.0 |
While its vertigo inducing finale delivers the goods, “The Walk” can’t quite justify its own existence especially since there’s a perfectly fascinating documentary about the same subject readily available. For a movie that is supposed to be a visual spectacle, it spends an awful lot of time violating the classic rule of cinema by telling instead of showing.
Joseph Gordon-Levitt, sporting an exaggerated but not entirely ridiculous French accent, stars as Philippe Petit, a wire walker who dreams of performing the most incredible wire walk in history. He narrates nearly the entire film, and nary a minute goes by when his voiceover isn’t yapping away. And the film takes its own sweet time getting to its purpose for being.
Joseph Gordon-Levitt in ‘The Walk’
Photo credit: Sony Pictures Releasing