Wow. This is a great telling of a great story. French dude Phillipe spent 45 minutes on a wire strung up between the World Trade Center. (Yes, THAT World Trade Center.) The film is a story told by its principals: the Man himself, his girlfriend at the time, the 4 or 5 guys who helped him pull it off. It's easy to see that people would over-dramatize events from their pasts, but it's pretty hard to over-dramatize walking on a wire 110 stories above the Big Apple; I get dizzy just thinking about it. Must have been pretty amazing to just be there, see him cross the wire, taunting the cops on the other side.
The best thing about Man On Wire is what is left out: there is no mention of anything that may have happened at the World Trade Center after 1974. I imagine that if I were old enough to have been there in '74 and remember it fondly, it may be bittersweet, but I'm just hearing of it now, and there are no towers where they were, so it just feels like a triumphant moment, an instance of joy, nostalgia for a safer time I never knew.
