Hitting The Gymkata

On goes the drumbeat of "How Did This Get Made"-motivated movie viewings. The latest is a movie I've wanted to watch for years, and which I finally got to yesterday. It's the cult favorite "Gymkata", and whatever I expected, it was not exactly what I got. Somehow I pictured a silly kind of a combination of Rambo and Rocky- a Reagan-infused gymnastics-centric Bond Film. Let me tell you, there's a lot of weird stuff in this movie that those loglines don't begin to capture.

Kurt Thomas plays Jonathan Cabot, a star gymnast who is recruited to go to the backwards Eastern European nation of Parmistan and compete in a brutal game called "The Game". His father has evidently died in the same game, which has incidentally not been won (at least by an outsider) in nearly a millenium. That's what you call long odds. Still, Cabot trains (falling in love with his head trainer, a princess of Parmistan) and heads to Parmistan.

This film is baffling, absurd and amazing. It gets going real quick, and the way they did that, seemingly, was to rip out two or three scenes connecting the first one to the second one. It's very disorienting. You know it's a singular movie when the big training montage hits inside the first ten minutes. This thing got to an hour in the blink of an eye. It was over in nothing flat, and it was nearly an hour and a half long. If nothing else, this movie moved.

It didn't move to rational purpose, though. It is just crazy. The king is presented as a good, kindly guy, but he runs a Hunger Games-style competition. He looks and sounds like he comes from nowhere near his daughter. Cabot falls in love with the princess, but shows no real emotion or reaction to much of what happens.There are horrific-looking villagers, whole towns full of maniacs, ninja referees and so much more that defies description.

Clearly what I'm getting at is that you've got to see this movie. If you're adventurous, you ought to enjoy it. More importantly, I think I need to get lots of people to see it just so that the odds improve of someone seeing it and understanding it from start to finish. I didn't, but I enjoyed the hell out of it even if I did watch the whole thing with my head cocked and my eyebrows raised. Oughtn't we all have our ability to grasp what we're seeing so challenged?