Reviews

Snow Walker

Stephen Osborne

Snow Walker, the film made from Farley Mowat’s book of stories (directed by Charles Martin Smith), contains much cornball scripting, some wretched dialogue and a ponderous, bellowing soundtrack that equals the worst excesses of Cecil B DeMille’s Bible epics. Nevertheless, you won’t want to stop watching this simple story of a pilot and his Inuit passenger, a young woman suffering from TB, as they struggle for survival after crashing in the Arctic tundra. The cinematography is superb and the two protagonists, as given to us by Annabella Piogattuk and Barry Pepper, are fully alive. The land itself is the great antagonist in stories of the North, and Smith knows it. The dvd contains a hilarious record of the making of the movie (on location at Rankin Inlet, Churchill and Merritt, B.C.) and shows you how to appear to kill caribou with a spear without actually harming any animals.

Tags
No items found.

Stephen Osborne

Stephen Osborne is a co-founder and contributing publisher of Geist. He is the award-winning writer of Ice & Fire: Dispatches from the New World and dozens of shorter works, many of which can be read at geist.com.


SUGGESTIONS FOR YOU

Columns
Stephen Henighan

In Search of a Phrase

Phrase books are tools of cultural globalization—but they are also among its casualties.

Reviews
Michael Hayward

Vanishing Career Paths

Review of "The Last Bookseller: A Life in the Rare Book Trade" by Gary Goodman, and "A Factotum in the Book Trade" by Marius Kociejowski.

Dispatches
David M. Wallace

Red Flags

The maple leaf no longer feels like a symbol of national pride.