The day after watching DIAMOND MEN, G-Max joined Frosty and me, and we headed south again, this time not by bicycle but by pickup truck, and not to the Madstone but to the Cheese Artist. For months we'd been in a state of excitation over the teasers for THE FAST RUNNER, the first feature film made in the Inuit language, written by an Inuit, directed by an Inuit, with an all-Inuit cast and a 90% Inuit film crew -- a 172-minute retelling of an ancient Inuit folktale shot far above the Arctic Circle in subzero temperatures with a handheld high-definition digital video camera.

G-Max wore sealskin pants and walked around in the lobby for ten minutes before the movie, grunting Eskimo-sounding words. He's the spitting image of Natar Ungalaaq, so the blue-hairs mobbed him, but the still-in-the-closet lesbian librarians kept their distance, watching intently with expressionless eyes.

And that's the way I wound up watching the movie itself -- intently with expressionless eyes. Not once did my heart rate increase, not once did I really care. Sigh...

THE FAST RUNNER 's strengths are its expert cinematography (there are some great contrasts between the eerie fire lit gloom of the igloo interiors and the brilliance of the exterior shots, with sunlit ice fields glowing like molten gold), its dramatic soundtrack (which does not consist of authentic
Inuit music, as you might expect, but was composed by someone with an Anglo-looking name), and most of all, its authentic depiction of what everyday life was like for the Inuits when they lived as nomadic hunters. For nearly three hours you're immersed in a world of raw seal meat and
snarling sled dogs, a world completely different from your own, and it's a genuine trip.

THE FAST RUNNER's weaknesses are its two-dimensional characterizations (stereotypical good guys vs. stereotypical bad guys), its reliance on corny Hollywood conventions in a number of scenes (e.g., the good guy hides underneath a pile of dried seaweed, the bad guys search for him with no
success and conclude he must be hiding somewhere else, the chief bad guy walks over to the seaweed, looks down at it as though he suspects something, then urinates into it and walks away), and the mediocrity of the acting (the members of the cast are all professional actors within the Inuit community, but several who portray bad guys ham it up, and no one gives a truly memorable performance with the possible exception of Sylvia Ivalu, who succeeds in conveying a wide range of feelings with subtle changes in her expression).

No review of THE FAST RUNNER would be complete without a comment on its key scene, a scene the critics have been raving about. To keep from being murdered, our hero must run naked across the ice with three fully clothed bad guys in hot pursuit. For about ten minutes the camera shows us this chase from a variety of angles and distances, and it's a compelling sequence. But I have some reservations. Shots of nude men running for their lives in difficult terrain have become a Hollywood cliche (NAKED PREY, which is shown on classic movie channels at least once a month, is largely responsible), and while director Zacharias Kunuk's treatment of this cliche is more believable than other treatments I've seen, I'm not ready to rave about it.

It's not easy to give THE FAST RUNNER a rating. If I were considering only its strengths, I'd give it a 6, but if I were considering only its weaknesses, I'd give it a 2, so let's call it a 4 and change the title to THE ABOVE AVERAGE RUNNER.

My rating on the Watson scale: 4