“North Face’’ is a dramatic reenactment of a historically grueling mountaineering expedition

Of particular interest to rock climbers and others who know their way around a carabiner clip, “North Face’’ is a dramatic reenactment of a historically grueling mountaineering expedition, the 1936 attempt to scale the North Face of the Eiger in the Alps. 2012 fleece jacket for girls Both visually stunning and dramatically half-baked, the film is at its most powerful when it puts us next to the four climbers as they inch their way up - and then down - through blizzards, avalanches, and sub-zero temperatures. It’s a literal cliffhanger and the next worst thing to being there.By 1936, the “Nordwand’’ (its German name) had already acquired a legend as a widowmaker; two years before the movie takes place, a pair of climbers had frozen at a spot sensibly renamed “Death Bivouac.’’ Mountaineering is not about being sensible, though - at best, it’s a form of pragmatic, well-planned recklessness - and the North Face brought out the “because it’s there’’ defense among Europe’s young men. In addition, the Nazi regime, north face havoc jacket on the eve of the Berlin Olympics, was loudly agitating for German climbers to make a successful conquest of the “last problem of the Alps’’ before the auslanders got there first.The focus of “North Face’’ is the two-man team of Toni Kurz (Benno Fürmann) and Andreas Hinterstoisser (Florian Lukas), who set out before sunrise on July 15. They’re dogged by a pair of Austrians, Edi Rainer (Georg Friedrich) and Willy Angerer (Simon Schwarz), and eventually the two teams join forces, but Toni and Andi are our heroes, and the former is the heart of the movie: modest, cautious, enduring. Fürmann plays him with stolid magnetism.Andi is the risk-taker, the daredevil; it’s he who devises the wall-crawling Eiger crossover still called the Hinterstoisser Traverse. Both men are apolitical and after establishing the Reich’s interest in the first few scenes, the movie backs off from current affairs. The closest “North Face’’ comes to a villain - aside from the weather and Fate - is an arrogant sleaze of a newspaper editor (Ulrich Tukur) camped out at the lodge below, waiting for triumph or tragedy. It doesn’t matter which; both sell papers.Working for the editor as a photographer - and occasionally subject to his creepy flirtations - is Luise (Johanna Wokalek), a demure young woman who has loved Toni since they were kids frolicking outside the biergarten in Bavaria (all right, I’m making that last bit up, but not by much). Initially a shy mausburger, north face sale Luise gains confidence and mettle over the movie’s long haul, to the point where she’s an active instigator in the rescue efforts. Romance in “North Face’’ is restricted mostly to longing looks, though - the real femme fatale here is the Eiger.And, too, everything except the climb feels vaguely boilerplate. Five writers were responsible for the script, and the characters consequently have one or two generic characteristics and no inner life of their own; they’ve been committeed to death. The exception is Toni, who the writers and director Philipp St?lzl revere as a natural ubermensch, a man so capable and so at one with himself that he’s a little dull. But only a dull man, the film implies, would resist the kind of stunts that get other men killed.Most of “North Face’’ deals with the assault on the mountain and the mountain’s assault back, and it is harrowing. See this movie on a big screen, where the sense of harsh physical vastness - and of man’s insignificance within it - is palpable. Not being a climber, I can’t speak to the film’s technical aspects, but the gear looks lived-in and the characters use it instead of gassing on about it. Right there is the strength of “North Face’’ as well as its limitation: It believes that what happens outside the struggle between man and mountain just isn’t very interesting.