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The faces around the table are dumbstruck: a perfect symphony of horror, anger, and glum acceptance.
Icarus 2017 TV-MA 2h 1m Sports Movies In his Oscar-winning film, an American cyclist plunges into a vast doping scandal involving a Russian scientist -- Putin's most-wanted whistleblower. Rodchenkov threw himself into helping Fogel cheat the system with a level of enthusiasm that probably shouldn’t be expected from the head of an anti-drugs unit, going as far as smuggling Fogel’s urine through airport security. © 2020 Guardian News & Media Limited or its affiliated companies. And as Rodchenkov wrangles the FBI, the Russian FSB, and the media, Fogel doesn’t just capture the action. Bryan Fogel stumbles upon state-sponsored doping in a sometimes clunky, but unquestionably revelatory documentaryTo help him perform this grand experiment, Fogel recruited a team of experts, one of whom pointed him in the direction of Grigory Rodchenkov, the eccentric director of Moscow’s Anti-Doping Centre. Grigory?” one of the WADA officials asks. All rights reserved. At the same time though, there’s an inescapable slipperiness to Rodchenkov’s character that makes his testimony slightly hard to swallow. He becomes Rodchenkov’s advocate and defender, meeting with lawyers, finding him housing, and enabling the Russian’s efforts to disperse the significant evidence he’s gathered.The scale of the cheating Rodchenkov helps expose is clearest when Fogel meets with scientists and officials at WADA in 2016, and explains that they have spreadsheets detailing every athlete on the state-mandated doping protocol at the London Olympics, and how many of them were implicated.
An anti-doping scientist at UCLA introduces Fogel to Rodchenkov, an instantly endearing and offbeat character who croons at Fogel’s dog over Skype and has a strangely encyclopedic grasp of doping itself—what Fogel should take, and how he’ll feel as he starts his new regime.
Release Calendar DVD & Blu-ray Releases Top Rated Movies Most Popular Movies Browse Movies by Genre Top Box Office Showtimes & Tickets Showtimes & Tickets In Theaters Coming … It premiered at Sundance Film Festival on January 20, 2017, and was awarded the U.S. TheAtlantic.com Copyright (c) 2020 by The Atlantic Monthly Group. It's streaming on Netflix. Picked up at Sundance for a lot of money by Netflix, “Icarus” is a crackling documentary, the kind of piece that gets subscribers talking, and that’s exactly what the company needs. Fogel, while conducting a human guinea-pig experiment in which he took performance-enhancing drugs to prepare for a race, was connected with a Russian doctor who ended up blowing the whistle on a state-sponsored doping scheme that had been ongoing in Russia for decades. Business Menu. “And he’s sorry? Icarus: A Doping House of Cards Tumbles Down In the new Netflix documentary, a filmmaker accidentally captures how one of the biggest scandals in … Bryan Fogel stumbles upon state-sponsored doping in a sometimes clunky, but … A major Olympic cheating scandal is uncovered by accident by an American documentary filmmaker and a Russian scientist, when they realize their combined knowledge points fingers at … The doping documentary "Icarus" details a fledgling filmmaker's unlikey friendship with the man who oversaw Russia's sports doing program. Rodchenkov is a cheerfully game accomplice, and at some point Fogel starts to wonder—why is a lab director in charge of anti-doping efforts for the Sochi Olympics showing a relative stranger how to take performance-enhancing drugs and get away with it?The answer comes in November 2015, when Rodchenkov is heavily implicated in a report by the World Anti-Doping Agency that ties him to state-sponsored doping efforts in Russia. And just like that, the movie switches course, following Rodchenkov’s efforts to travel to the United States and blow the whistle on his involvement in what the movie paints as staggering, systemic corruption.Rodchenkov is a dream subject—eccentric, garrulous, frequently shirtless, and immensely charming—and the movie’s most obvious flaw is that it fails to fully parse his motivations. “Bryan, it’s a disaster, they’re killing people, cutting heads,” he tells Fogel over Skype. Is he sacrificing his life in Russia and his family left back home to bravely But Fogel, too, is an intriguing character in his own film, who says he wants to cheat to highlight cheating itself, but who clearly has some of the professional athlete’s compulsion to win at all costs. Even more extraordinarily, Rodchenkov openly admitted on camera that similarly nefarious methods were used to enhance the performances of his home country’s athletes at the Sochi Winter Olympics, where Russia took home 13 gold medals.When, a few months later, the World Anti-Doping Association (Wada) released a report revealing the full extent of Russian state-sponsored doping and Rodchenkov’s involvement in it, and Fogel received a panicked Skype call from Rodchenkov saying that he feared for his life and was going to flee to the US, Fogel’s gonzo experiment had become a front-row seat to one of The resulting film, Icarus, gamely attempts to lash together this multi-stranded shaggy dog story into something approaching a coherent documentary-cum-conspiracy thriller. If it’s not entirely successful, you can at least forgive its deficiencies given the access Fogel manages to acquire. But it’s hard to deny the power of Icarus’s message and the remarkable nature of its delivery.
Fogel doesn’t quite seem to have the critical distance to ascertain what might be the true position.There are other failings too: at two hours, the film sags a little in the middle and certainly could have done without the clunky conceit in its second half, where Rodchenkov’s testimony is bookended by him reading aloud from Orwell’s 1984. And that’s when things got really interesting.