A girl drags her best friend on a daring climbing adventure to the top of a 2000-foot abandoned and weather-beaten TV tower. Of course, everything goes wrong; the film would be boring if it didn’t.

We kept postponing watching this movie for some reason, but now I’m glad we finally did. There are so few characters involved, and yet there’s so much character development. The acting was top-notch; you really felt for the girls—the anxiety, pain… even the jelly legs you get from vertigo at great heights. I felt uncomfortable in my seat throughout many scenes. I know it sounds weird coming from someone who used to go bungee jumping, but I have severe vertigo.

I’ve read on IMDb that the filmmakers had considered green screen or digital sets, but ultimately opted for the real thing. They decided to build the upper portion of the tower on top of a mountain so that the actors would genuinely appear to be thousands of feet in the air, even though in real life they were never more than 100 feet off the ground. I think this was an amazing idea, but as an actor, you must have no fear. Apparently, the two lead actresses did most of their own stunts. Respect!

During many scenes, I kept thinking that these girls are so irresponsible and badly prepared for such an adventure, but then I remembered my younger self—I was no better.

When I was 19, my mom had an accident and ended up in the hospital. At the moment of the accident, I was at school, so it was hardly my fault. Yet, I caught hell for it. I know, I grew up in a house of horrors. Instead of feeling victimized, I got super angry, wrote a “fuck you” letter to my mom, grabbed my two best friends, and hopped on a bus to Grenoble (France) to jump off a bridge. I had no luggage, barely any money; I even forgot my ID. In all my rage, I left all responsibility and, most of all, my crappy family behind.

Was that mature? Probably not, but I had the time of my life with some good friends—something they can’t take away from me. Besides, the jump and the huge climb back up went perfectly. I’ll always keep a good remembrance. Unlike those poor girls in the movie, I wouldn’t have climbed that rust bucket to begin with.

Personal adventures set aside, I loved this movie more than I thought I would. To end with a quote from the movie:

“Life is fleeting. Life is short, too short. So you gotta use every moment. You have to do something that makes you feel alive, and that shit would spread that message far and wide.” – Becky (Fall).

In 1993, I was ending my first year at university. Let me tell you, it didn’t go well. The first year of law had syllabi totaling thousands of pages, and I wasn’t used to studying such quantities. I failed the first wave of exams in June and spent most of my summer studying to give it another go in September (which also resulted in utter failure).

However, as I was waiting my turn for an exam in the hallway of the university, I met a dude who had the same family name as I do. He was super friendly and told me about a bar close to where I lived. The bar was more like a club where we could drink beer for almost nothing, and it was filled with very cool folks who were playing in bands. I brought my friends there, and we enjoyed it so much that we went twice a week for many years. It was the beginning of my grunge years, and I don’t think that it will ever end, since it’s still my music of choice nowadays.

The first of many band posters to be pinned on the walls of my bedroom was The Smashing Pumpkins – Siamese Dream. I loved the song Today and the poster was great. Also, I was drunk very often, so it may have helped me pick the one with the cutest colors…

Many years later, I met Soforah, who had a very similar music story. She also was into grunge music, she also was used to going to a pub with cheap beer and cool folks. We share a common love for pretty much all the same bands, and we regularly play them during our Friday evening beer times.

However, Soforah was much more into The Pumpkins than I was, and that’s how I discovered more songs of Billy Corgan’s band. She also told me that Billy has Belgian roots. Well, no surprise there; he seems like a cool guy.

A few months ago, in a TV show that I can’t remember, I heard “Mayonaise” and wanted to Shazam it, but Soforah already knew the song. I had the poster in my bedroom, and I’m still discovering songs from that album 30 years later. Life, sometimes…

As for why The Smashing Pumpkins misspelled “mayonnaise,” here is the reason: The band visited Japan in 1992 while touring Gish and noticed that the record company had mistranslated a lyric from Gish into a fan booklet as “mayonnaise seas.” The band thought this was funny and used “Mayonaise” [sic] as a temporary song title when recording Siamese Dream, but it eventually stuck. (Wikipedia).

That song is so dreamy…