Why the Fuck Should I Watch: ICARUS (2017)?
Why the fuck should you watch “Icarus”?
• When life gets hard (basically every morning), you think: “Something something use performance enhancing substances”.
• You think that competitive sports sphere is fraud and fucked up. Remember those shot put women back in the good old days growing moustaches and talk like men. Yep, nothing weird were going on there. All clean sports!
• Because Icarus shows that sports is much more than people flexing their muscles.
• After competing in sports for 10 years with no good result, you ask yourself: “Can I beat the doping system and finally fucking win anything? Because I’m sad and cheating will make my life better.”
Last week brought some doping news from cross-country skiing (sounds boring? Yes it is and those athletes were still shit while pumpin up) and it reminded us to finally watch the Oscar-winning documentary movie Icarus (go Netflix!), which is about a HUUUGE case involving conspiracy, steroids, and also the man who likes to fish and ride horses topless (Mr. Vlad Putin). This movie shows in depth how fucked up the competitive sports industry is.
Icarus is about a rather regular everyday American guy Bryan, who likes biking. Being a pragmatic and curious first-time documentarian, he wants to find out if he is capable to cheat the doping testing system, which seems super faulty to him, and then go and win a biking competition. After contacting some specialists in the anti-doping field, he ends up with a hilarious Russian dude Grigory, who was the head of the Russian’s national anti-doping laboratory. Comrade Grigory seems to know a lot about doping (and setting up some sneaky doping schedules) so the two dudes end up working together. But then a LOT of shit surfaces and things get spicy. After a while the film turns into something more than some boring sports doc about the shitty and pointless shadow-world of competitive sports. It turns into a complex and interesting conspiracy revealing story about sports and geopolitics as well as sports and systemic cheating.
Although Icarus as a film is a lot smaller and maybe a little amateurish for its subject matter, the scope and the timing of the story is very intriguing. It’s like walking in the streets eating ice cream and then seeing famous people doing something like riding real rhinos nude and yelling Wakanda. And you can tell about that your friends later but probably nobody will believe you.
If you waste your time watching sports all day and every day instead of actually moving your fat ass, you maybe would like to see this.
Why the fuck you shouldn’t watch “Icarus”?
• Inconsistency and naivety annoy you when it comes to documentary authors. The author skips too many things to be comprehensive.
• If you believe in everything that Putin says, this movie would make you very angry.
• You have never had …performance issues.
• You don’t want to turn all the time spent on watching sports meaningless.
• You are the certain Lance Armstong and movies like this could make some uncomfortable memories resurface.