Nordwand (The North Face)

So, a German film (well, obviously), all about an attempt to climb the North Face of the Eiger by two German soldiers in the mid 1930's. Based on a true story, though not told in documentary form like Touching the Void a while back. (In fact, there has already been a documentary about the attempt, on Channel 4 I think... safe to say that the less you know in advance, the more gripping you'll find the movie.)

Also, wie war's?
Sehr gut, by and large. I knew the story going in, which did ruin a fair bit of the drama, but all the same it's quite a tale. They have embellished the story here and there - indeed, they have embellished the hell out of it as far as the putative love story element goes - but that's understandable. Efforts are also made to shoehorn (matterhorn?) in some comment on the rise of Nazism in Germany, which doesn't really work terribly well. But overall, this is gripping fare, and you'll come out of the cinema wondering why in hell's name anyone ever wants to climb a mountain, ever. Bizarrely enough, I saw this at a small cinema which seemed to be heaving with mountaineers - I guess this not so much because they were all bearded and fleeced, but because most of the audience kept excitedly chatting away during the climbing sequences, in what seemed to be an informed (yet still annoying) manner.

So, all in all, worth catching. 3 and a teeny bit out of 5.

Wie ist der Mathematik?
Well, there's a lot of rope work going on, so you could Pythagoras your way round any number of triangles on the way up (or down) the mountain. But the main, important message in the film is all to do with the need for accuracy. Oh yes. I mean, a maths teacher might give a pupil 4 out of 5 for a maths question, even though the answer is wrong, because only one error has been made. But sometimes errors are costly... Put it this way: there are times when a rope has to be 60m long, and nothing smaller will get you any marks at all.

Und gibt es einige Frage?
Ach ja. Hillwalking is famously used a great deal by maths teachers desperate for a bit of real-life application for trigonometry. And, of course, there's nothing stopping you from throwing in one of those famous contrived contexts - to wit:

The North Face of the Eiger is modelled by the equation f(x)=x^3-3x^2+5x-1 , where x is the time in cinematic minutes from the start of the movie, and f(x) is measured in cinematic credibility. Use differentiation to find the turning point(s) of the movie and determine whether they indicate a happy ending or not.