After watching Sasha at the Play Circle theater on the UW campus, we had thirty minutes to hoof it all the way into town to the Bartell theater on the other side of cap square to see Weather Gazers. I’m pretty sure we’ve done more walking these past five days than we have in the last five months.

I’m still not sure how much I liked Weather Gazers, a documentary about the old geezers in an isolated valley in Switzerland who foretell the weather by looking at the fuzz on caterpillars and the like. On the one hand, I loved the soaring mountains and verdant forests of the Swiss scenery. I could watch quite a lot of video of that. On the other hand, listening to geezers talk about the weather for two hours gets a little … long.

The weather prophets, as they are called, get together twice a year to make prognostications in flowery prose. After they’re done, a prize is given away and then they drink beer and party. I was sort of hoping the movie would spend more time on the flowery forecasts that the weather prophets are famous for, but no luck there. Right before the big public gathering for their forecast, the weather prophets gather in a local tavern and rehearse what they plan to say. That looked really very interesting, too, but the movie didn’t spend much time on that, either. Bummer.

What we did get an awful lot of was scenes of rural life in the mountains of Switzerland, which were breathtaking, and strung-together vignettes of the men talking about ants and clouds and dry wind and cold wind and what it all meant. And glaciers and tree growth and pine cones. And when the hay gets harvested and how the sun shines and when the snow fell last year as compared to this year. And how to write it all down in a loose-leaf booklet. And so on and so on and oh my goodness on and on and on. I mean to say, how long can a guy talk about ant activity as a signature of the weather? A lot longer than you might think.

Three out of Five.