EVEREST

Directed by Baltazar Kormakur

Although this true story, brought to exceedingly vivid life on 3-D IMAX, stars A-listers Josh Brolin, Jake Gyllenhaal, Keira Knightly, Elizabeth Debicki, Robin Wright, Emily Watson, Sam Worthington, and Martin Henderson, plus many more, the biggest star turn belongs to the razoring, screeching wind animating much of the time on the world's legendary mountain, Everest.  It stands ever alluring, heartless, colossal.

A bestseller about this climb came out after these events, Into Thin Air, penned by journ Jon Krakauer, on assignment from Outside magazine.  Recall that before 1996, one in four climbers died in making the ascent.

The roar of the fierce storms at the staggered tiers of this widow-maker will keep you bone-chilled even if the A/C is out.  The deafening growl and snarl as our rugged  mountaineering, trekking, and climbing team competes to summit before other teams achieve the peak of this 29,029-foot (8,848-meter) megalith is engrossing beyond the acting superlatives of these leading lights – here all marinated in ice particles and crust-grapes impastoed on their eyebrows, beards, and lashes.

Disclosure: When I "did" Everest, years ago, we got to Base Camp, about 18,000 feet, then sensibly departed from the cold and serious threat of nausea and oxygen-deprivation impairment.  Even with the gradual acclimatization and "cocaine tea" taken prophylactically, going farther is a challenging trip.

As expected, the expedition is marred by hypoxia and anoxia, unwonted hesitancies, cramps,  worries about the well-being of pregnant wives back home, and the terrors of the 40-foot-wide crevasses without discernible bottom.

Minor quibbles: Some of the equipment and gear is more contemporary than the 1980s, when this expedition took place.  The men fail to wear their goggles in the face of bitter temperatures and bone-breaking cold.  But that fierce storm and the realism of the suffering men (and one Japanese woman who had summited the "other top six" peaks in the world), their epic effort and admirable fitness, and their nobility make this a standout.

If only those 3-D specs weren't so annoying on the bridge of your nose.  But given what Herculean labors you're watching, knuckles taut and whitened, the heavy, flat glasses are a minor distraction that fades.  We hold our breath  as the men, their sherpas, and their satellite-phone sporadic tethering to the base mid-mountain tent (the medical and support rescue team), ice-axes, all-important ropes, pitons, and steel-toothed boots ascend, cross chasms, crampons tentative on rickety metal-runged ladders,  and try to breathe in the thin air above 25,000 feet.  It hurts.  Even the rescue chopper, wildly gyrating in air too sparse to support its beating rotors, swings perilously with the chop-chop of the blades, and we dare not relax, either, lest they spiral down, out of control.

You marvel in the back of your head at the camera work, at the heavy equipment needed to capture these brilliant close-ups in gale-force weather and frigid blizzard.  Filmmaking today seems miraculous.

Now, the problem is that too many aspire to the Big One; there is no overriding authority to limit the numbers of would-be climbers.  There are, contrastingly, strict limits to those seeking to camp in the Grand Canyon, and when, and for how long, so as to preserve the environment and maintain the semblance of pristine experience.

Ever hoisting themselves skyward, the determined, tortured flyspeck straggle of the climbers on the North Face is agonizingly slow against the ferocious wind and howling storm on the monster.  The climbers' deepest selves come to grips with their utmost tolerances in force majeure exhaustion and, ultimately, energy – and, somehow, soul – depletion.

One  climber, in extremis, turning to his companion, asks, "Why do we do this?"  And don't we all, at some point, ask ourselves that, when limned against some "unattainable" goal?

A SINNER IN MECCA   

Directed by Parvez Sharma

At the opposite end of the thermometer, in blood-hot Saudi Arabia in the streets of Mecca, filmmaker Parvez Sharma sets himself a spiritual goal: the "other" jihad we hear not that much about, given the dominance of the more visible  killer jihad.  He wants to make his Islamic Hajj, the once-in-a-lifetime requirement of good Muslims.  Though he is hampered by two major hindrances, expressing conflicting thoughts about his particular problems and the sticky conundrum he poses to other Muslims on Hajj, he considers himself a wavering but, for the nonce, in Mecca, observant Muslim.

He faces a few obstacles.  Biggie: he is living in New Jersey with his "husband," Dan.  Also biggie: he is going to film Mecca and the pilgrims, the Kaaba and the entire swerve of roiling humanity that is forbidden to photograph or film.  His orientation, as they say, would merit a penalty of death if it were to become known in Saudi Arabia, the strictest of the strict.  Aside from that, no prob.

Though some of the other reviewers expressed the sentiment that the film was maybe "boring," we found it fascinating.  There are telling moments  in every frame, if you look carefully.

Interspersed in his long jiggled takes of Mecca and oddities such as Mickey Mouse backpacks and an incongruous tote reading NYC CENSUS 2010 are lavish and colorful scenes of his Indian natal city, to commemorate his departed mother  (whose yellowing letters he carries with him), an earnest Muslim woman who hopes he will find a nice Indian girl "and settle down."  The Indians are of a different order, their saris and relaxed postures and smiles a welcome sensual element onscreen, their singing and dancing in revelry a far cry from the sober faces and behavior of the Saudis and their mahabharat police force, or the motorcycle riders who offer lifts to the visitors to their nighttime resting sites, for a fee.

Sharma shaves his normal  grungy facial hair to achieve a neater, more Sunni disposition, and knowing filming in the sacred city of pilgrimage of 1,400 years is haram, forbidden/profane, where no non-Muslim is even permitted entry, he uses two small film cameras hidden somewhere (we don't see where) and his trusty iPhone.

Most of us will never be permitted inside the vast marbled space surrounding the Kaaba, the square, black-draped top of the forbidding structure Muslims encircle seven times, joined by Sunni and Shi'a from all over.  The African Muslim women are decked in gorgeous yellow, diaphanous capelets covering their heads and shoulders to the waist, their garments gilded with thread and appliqués of shiny gold.  Groups of women traveling together wear bandannas of dusky red, like errant Boy Scouts afraid of getting lost, or uber-pistachio, across and over their abayas or burkas.  Muslim women from Indonesia have bared faces.  The Saudi women, of course, are fully and completely blacked out with full body-bag coverage, slits for eyes.  The vast mass of visiting pilgrims surge and swirl dizzyingly, as Parvez captures them from a balcony above.  And among them, below.

The Hajj swirl around the big cube is, interestingly, the only place where women and men can intermingle as they circle and circle.  One man complains bitterly near Sharma that he got separated from his wife, and he worries that she will be approached or touched by men surrounding her.  Irony-challenged people won't appreciate the close-by huge mega-mall selling all manner of tchotchkes, T-shirts, consumery non-religious stuff – like the extravagant air-conditioned, eye-glazing malls at the foot of the Burj Khalifa we browsed in Dubai, and Abu Dhabi, some months ago.  Nor will Muslims welcome his coverage of the filthy areas for sleep in Minah, with garbage, boxes, and plastic wrappers strewn knee-high.  Ignored.  People sacked out all over – as well as, one reckons, in hotels nearby.

Parvez kneels, along with thousands of other pilgrims, all solid backs, one vast football audience but without picture placards, forehead to ground or prayer mat, and reinvigorates his faith.  Despite his secrets, his wriggly cameras, his all-seeing lenses.  Despite some rough treatment, police officials remonstrating when they spot his camera or phone, Parvez inhales a dollop of spiritual serenity from this effort and the aspirational, all-consuming pilgrimage.

A worthy excursion, if only to see the contrasts among icy New Jersey, then steamy, erotic India, and finally sweltering, forbidding, banned-in-non-Umma territory, ancient-with-modern Saudi Arabia.