Arts & Manners: Obsessions 3

Visions of Eight is a “documentary,” but not the sort that makes you want to flee the theater and return to the fetal boob tube for another re-run, Bud in hand. The wholly admirable emphasis in this beautiful, witty, resonant film is on hundreds of superb young athletes and their obsessions with performance and triumph. The Munich Olympics have been distilled here into eight vignettes, each by a master director, each assaying an aspect of the Games.

If no one else, Visions of Eight would command at least the attention of Olympics freaks who lack color TVs or who detest Howard Cosell and that interminable patter up with which we are obliged to put each time television covers sports. Here it’s capsulized into less than two hours, focusing on the most central concerns of myriad wonderful jocks and jockettes.

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David Brudnoy

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Visions of Eight is a “documentary,” but not the sort that makes you want to flee the theater and return to the fetal boob tube for another re-run, Bud in hand. The wholly admirable emphasis in this beautiful, witty, resonant film is on hundreds of superb young athletes and their obsessions with performance and triumph. The Munich Olympics have been distilled here into eight vignettes, each by a master director, each assaying an aspect of the Games.

If no one else, Visions of Eight would command at least the attention of Olympics freaks who lack color TVs or who detest Howard Cosell and that interminable patter up with which we are obliged to put each time television covers sports. Here it’s capsulized into less than two hours, focusing on the most central concerns of myriad wonderful jocks and jockettes.