Anomaly
Apr 20 2007 / Teton Village, WY
Anomaly is an Official Selection for the 2007 Lat34.com X-Dance Action Sports Film Festival
Deviations From The Rules: TGR’s Anomaly
Between segments in Anomaly, a series of cool interstitial computer graphics pinpoints each of the film’s far-flung locations on a green-grid map of the world. It’s a tidy metaphor for the fact that Teton Gravity Research has made its name for taking the industry’s best skiers and snowboarders to the best spots on earth on the best possible days to hit the best possible conditions. Finding the kind of snow featured in any given shot from Anomaly might be a sign of tremendous good fortune for anybody else; for TGR, it’s a science.
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Anomaly hops around from Utah to Alaska, Japan to British Columbia. There’s freestyle park and X Games footage from Aspen, and scenes from places – Morocco? Corsica? – you might not have known had snow. Whistler, Bella Coola, and Grand Targhee get a lot of play and, of course, TGR hometown Jackson Hole is as much a star as any individual rider.
Sage Cattabriga-Alosa, Jeremy Nobis, Candide Thovex, Seth Morrison, and Micah Black redefine what it means to be a skier by combining big mountain skills, racing chops, and freestyle flair, and snowboarding gets a lot of love in this outing: Snowboarder Victoria Jealouse lets it be known that the ladies are more than ready for the full-segment TGR spotlight.
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Lest you start to think TGR’s science is exact, Anomaly makes its biggest misses into its biggest hits. Perennial TGR favorite snowboarder Jeremy Jones gets a beatdown in three consecutive sequences at the start of his segment, and it’s easy to imagine his older brothers – TGR co-founders Steve and Todd Jones – getting a rise out of editing his footage together.
“Anything that could go wrong seemed to go wrong,” says Jones, narrating over footage of him getting worked repeatedly. “My first three lines of the year ended up in high-speed cartwheeling out the bottom. I’d get my confidence back up, go back out… beat down. And then, one of the worst avi cycles you’ve ever seen.”
The footage of Jones’ avalanche escape is sheer spectacle, with a huge shelf of snow cracking up all around him near the beginning of his line as he tosses a method air off the spine, and clouds of slough chasing him down as the situation rapidly downgrades from bad to worse. For a minute Anomaly starts to feel like Faces of Death, so it comes as a relief when, after disappearing into the fray, he emerges on his feet and very much alive On Behind the Run, an excellent DVD extra, he cheerily informs us that it looked worse than it really was.
Jones isn’t the only one who gets worked in Anomaly: Much is made of Erik Roner’s innovations in ski BASE jumping, with previously impossible lines like his recent run down Jackson Hole’s Cody Peak with parachute in hand, but the achievement seems small when, shortly after, Jamie Pierre drops an even bigger cliff with no such assistance.
Pierre turns his leap of faith into a tribute to his faith in God and Jesus Christ, miraculously surviving as his record-breaking 25-story drop goes bad. He dumps over backwards, slowly, like a lawn dart, plunging pretty-much-head-first into powder so deep all you see is his skis flailing as rescuers race to help dig him out. Christian faith is all well and good, we suppose, but if there’s a lesson in Anomaly it’s this: Sometimes it helps to have an actual parachute.
– Colin Bane
