'Everest' gets the Venice Film Festival underway with a key Dallas player

Culture critic Chris Vognar is at the Venice Film Festival participating in a panel discussion on the Biennale College, 

a higher-education training workshop for the development and production of micro-budget feature-length films. He will be reporting from Venice for the next week.

To get to Venice Lido, the sandbar where the Venice Film Festival is based, you take a 30-minute water taxi ride from near the airport. Cruising the Venetian Lagoon shortly after 9 a.m. Wednesday, motoring past neighboring islands, I was struck by how long Venice has been here, by the palpable sense of place in the old brick buildings.

This is my first time in Italy, and after one day I've already sampled some of the best espresso, pizza and gelato I've ever tasted. I've also tried, with varying degrees of success, to adjust to the seven-hour time difference. This post will go up late afternoon in Dallas, while here it's almost bedtime. The nap probably didn't help.

During the 15-minute walk down to festival hub I noticed that everyone here rides a bicycle - old ones, new ones, fast ones, slow ones. And nobody seems to be in a hurry as they navigate the narrow streets with little congestion (the vast majority of Venice is car-free). actually the only . These were my thoughts as I groggily made my way to my first press screening of the festival, Everest (which officially opened the public portion of the festival Wednesday night.

Everest has a local connection: Josh Brolin plays Dallas resident Beck Weathers, one of the climbers who tackled the mountain on the ill-fated 1996 expedition that Jon Krakauer chronicled in his book Into Thin Air.  It's got a killer cast: In addition to Brolin there's Jake Gyllenhaal, Jason Clarke, Keira Knightley, Robin Wright, John Hawkes and Emily Watson. It makes majestic use of mountains real and computer-generated. It also has the haunting tone of a story you know will end badly.

It's a story of good people cursed by pride and driven to tempt death as a means of feeling alive. Of course, sometimes, death takes the bet. Clarke is particularly fine as the empathetic expedition leader who picks the wrong time to get impractical. Even when it gets a little sentimental Everest closes on you like an ice cold set of pincers. You want to do more, but all you can do is watch. The movie is slated to open Sept. 18.