Having just finished watching the documentary Man On Wire I feel refreshed and excited for several reasons.

It was enjoyable to watch a movie where there was a non-violent story is told. The story being that of Phillipe Petit; a French tight rope walker who rallied a scrum of Americans, Australians and other Frenchmen to sneak into the World Trade Centers in 1974, rig a cable from the roof in the middle of the night and then Phillipe perform his high wire act at dawn.

The director James Marsh made a documentary from archival footage and re-enactments to unobtrusively let this story tell it self. Man On Wire, in my opinion, embodies exactly what a documentary film should look like. The art of Documentary has been soiled for the past 10 years thanks in no small part to Michael Moore. When people think of a documentary they cringe at the thought of having to suffer through several hours of heavy-handed, vitriolic and snide soundbites wedged in between shaky amateur video and slow pans of news clippings with out of context phrases being highlighted to drive the producers point home.

James Marsh lets this story speak through it's characters (Phillipe and his gang) in the way a director should, by gently guiding and massaging the narrative to be clear and concise. Cutting what he must and letting breath what can breath, Much like The King Of King: A Fistful Of Quarters.

Getting to see the French do what God put them on this earth to do (which is getting us to stop and reexamine our lives, take notice of something different, be whimsical) is a carnal pleasure for a frustrated writer/director who resides in a cold apartment in the giant money machine of Los Angeles. Watching men in their mid twenties in bell bottoms and poofy hair frolic in grassy fields as if they have no care or job in the world seems kinda gay, until you realize they are just hanging out and doing some cool stuff in a very 70's sort of way.

It reminds me of my fathers VHS camera we had when I was young and how I would set up all my action figures in a high powered board room setting and would then voice over some high powered board room dialogue in as many voices as I could. For some reason Skeletor always ended up having an affair with the Strawberry Shortcake Secretary who mas married to Mr. Fantastic the struggling amateur inventor. Zooming in on Lion-O's face as he delivered his rousing monologue never really conveyed the West Wing Martin Sheene emotion I was going for but it was good enough for me at the time. I've never been racist but Roadblock did end up dying a majority of the time. That just means I had the horror movie conventions memorized correctly.