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Like its primary narrator and star, Philippe Petit, the 2009 Academy Award Winner for best documentary film moves at a breathless pace, even though it is about an improbable and literally death-defying incident that occurred over 30 years ago, but was just made into a documentary released last year.

The most basic historical description is this: on August 4, 1974, Philippe Petit walked, danced, hopped and jumped his way across a high-wire clandestinely set up between the two World Trade Towers (yes, the ones demolished on 9/11) eight times before surrendering to police as the weather worsened.

The trailer for Man on the Wire.

It sounds, on first blush, like an act inspired by lunacy, but "The Wire" will enthrall you with Petite's dream to exercise absolute defiance of convention, show a fearlessness of death, a liberation of spirit, and lift the world above its mundane daily routine by becoming one of the original performance artists.

But not many performance artists risk falling 110 stories to their deaths in order to fulfill a personal-professional inspiration.

This was bravado, skill, courage, fearlessness and joy.

It was a public event that captured the imagination of jaded New Yorkers and the nation -- and the documentary is edited with the rapid, hold-your-seat pace of a heist thriller. (The plan to evade Twin Towers security is run like a precise military operation.)

"Extra features include a 20-minute featurette about a similar stunt Mr. Petit successfully pulled off in Australia about a year before the World Trade Center event; a 12-minute interview with Mr. Petit that seems to have been conducted after the film wrapped (as he discusses at length his impressions of the movie); and- most impressively- a nine-minute animated film that recounts Mr. Petit's World Trade Center adventure in a wonderful storybook-style aimed at children. This short cartoon is very well done."

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