Why ‘Ski Time’ is Obviously the Best Warren Miller Movie Ever
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If you’re an Outside+ member, you get free access to our new archive of Warren Miller movies, dating back to 1961. If you’re not an Outside+ member, why aren’t you? Plus, movie tickets are available now for a showing of “Daymaker” coming to a screen near you!
I don’t know about you, but what I want from my Warren Miller movies is pretty straightforward: old-timey fun that helps me appreciate how rad skiing is now while reminding me that the most important things about the experience are timeless. And that’s why Ski Time is obviously the best Warren Miller movie ever.
By the time Warren made Ski Time, he was over 30 years in the game, and he’d turned his art into a science. The balance between action-driven and humor-driven segments is surgical in its precision: Powder chasing in the Monashees, followed by yokels trying to put on tire chains, followed by four minutes of inverted aerials set in slow motion to a Knight Rider soundtrack.
The goofy zingers — ”At over 3,000 vertical feet, this run is so long you can start it as a beginner and, by the bottom, you’ll either be an expert skier or a very tired skier” — are vintage, groan-inducing knee slappers. And the ideas, like the fact that any time not spent skiing isn’t ski time and therefore is wasted time, ring as true today as they did in 1983.
You could combine every ski in this movie and still not have as much underfoot as a new pair of Atomic Bentchetlers. You could harvest every mustache and house all the priced-out Aspen locals in huts of thatched facial hair at the base of the gondola. Ski Time makes about as much sense in 2021 as sedan trunk ski racks or rear entry boots, but that’s exactly why it’s so good.
If you need a little escape — and, it’s Month 12 of the pandemic, you need an escape — don’t settle for just virtually skiing at a different mountain. Go virtually ski where everything from the clothes to the turns are from a completely different time, the best time, Ski Time.
Movie tickets are available now for a showing of “Daymaker” coming to a screen near you!