Sunshine Superman

Director Marah Strauch started her documentary "Sunshine Superman" with the right main ingredient -- hundreds of hours of 16mm archival sky diving footage wrangled together over many years by a passionate and very peculiar man, Carl Boenish.

This visually thrilling and ultimately touching documentary begins as the story of Boenish and ends as a thought provoking look at his wife Jean and her startling response to tragedy.

When the interviewees in a documentary talk about the protagonist in the past tense, and that person has dedicated his life to the death-defying sport of fixed-structure parachuting, you know he did not leave this world in one solid piece. So watching Boenish create the BASE jumping movement (an extreme sport that is significantly more dangerous than leaping from a plane) we can't help wondering which of these countless yet brief falls was this man's last.

The acronym BASE jumping (building, antenna, structure, earth) was coined by Carl and Jean Boenish and some of their friends to publicize the fringe sport/stunt that Boenish had been capturing on film with a camera strapped to his helmet.

This spellbinding footage, as well as the na�ve and childlike enthusiasm of its recorder, seized the imagination of the young Jean. She not only married Carl she jumped right alongside of her husband on his most dangerous leaps, recording all of the phenomenal events on celluloid.

Due to the fact that they were jumping from national monuments and privately-owned buildings without permission, the footage was a way to prove that they were boldly breaking the law with their outliers' adventures.

When media outlets began publicizing the outlaw heroes and giving them the opportunity to make legitimate jumps and break world records, Carl efforts were finally legitimized. But this Christian Scientist, who believed that everything in life happened for a purpose and that his parachute was like an angel that kept him from plummeting to the ground, may have ended up falling a little too close to the sun.

The short making-of feature on this Blu-ray disc answers all the questions you were dying to ask: How did the filmmakers shoot the recreations? What cameras did they use? Etc.

Also included on this disc are two short films by Carl Boenish that feature mesmerizing footage and offer further insight into the personality of their bizarrely optimistic and goofy filmmaker.

"Sunshine Superman"
Blu-ray
$29.98
www.magpictures.com/sunshinesuperman