Pardon our dust! We just migrated to a new host and platform, and we're still doing some fine-tuning. Broken images, URLs, etc. will be par for the course.
**½/**** directed by Samuel A. Safarian, Dirk Olson
by Walter Chaw One of my earliest memories is watching Haven Moses catch a touchdown pass from Craig Morton in the 1977 AFC Championship games against the hated Oakland Raiders; since that time, I've only missed a total of three Broncos games (preseason included). If there was ever a viewer to which a documentary was tailor-made, then, it is Dick Olson's Denver Center Media-produced Mile High: A Tale of Two Stadiums, a soft-sell documentary commissioned to ease the transition to a new football stadium in the Mile High City, my hometown. Comprising over 100 interviewees and clips from key moments and games in the history of Denver sports at the 19th and Clay Street site, which has housed a stadium of some sort from 1948 on, it's almost useless for me to try to analyze the film on its own merits. It's slickly edited and indicated by a singlemindedness that's refreshing, but its appeal is so limited that I doubt it will ever be screened, much less find an audience, outside its appearance at the 25th Denver International Film Festival. As a dyed-in-the-wool Broncos fan and lifelong resident of Colorado, however, I was shocked to learn that the first NFL overtime game was played in Denver and that The Jimi Hendrix Experience played its last gig at old Mile High. Though the picture does provide a catalyst for self-reflection wherein it's possible to wonder at the pervasive power of blood sports in uniting otherwise sprawling city-states, the content is specific to hardcore historians or those who bleed orange and blue. All others need not apply.
