Just watched "Free Solo," the documentary following Alex Honnold's successful free solo (along without rope or any gear) of Freerider on the Southwest Face of El Capitan in Yosemite Valley - rated at 5.12D. Alone - without a rope. 3,000 feet of climbing in under four hours, a route he rehearsed roped for several years, on and off, especially around 1/2 a dozen key stretches involving dicey moves a thousand or two feet above the deck. Almost too gripping to watch, the film also takes you into his life, the lives of some around him, and you get to know Alex, fellow climber Tommy Caldwell (who did the first free roped ascent of the Dawn Wall on El Cap), Alex's partner Sanni McCandless, Jimmy Chin, the lead lensman of the climb, and others such as climbing legends Peter Croft and Mark Synnott. But the mind boggling thing is that Honnold does, after one initial effort he bails on, a climb that takes roped teams several days, a climb that once Honnold is more than 100 feet up the 3000 foot, thirty pitch climb, if he falls, that's it. Amazing feat, and a gripping film. Plus its amazing to see the mental approach he has, especially as he has to compensate for a bit of a media circus filming the climb.

I used to climb, and 5.12 is the hardest moves I ever climbed - with a rope. And following, not leading, and certainly not 2,000 feet above the ground. To call this amazing is selling it short - quite simply put, the most astonishing athletic feat of our times: perhaps of any time.  I did free solo some peaks in the Sierras, some of which were easy roped routes, but this is just a totally different level of human achievements. He's soloed El Cap and Half Dome: what's next?

I'm not referring to the government shutdown; rather, the Russia-Gate corruption and collusion case. Right around the same time when the fact that Trump had five face-to-face-meetings with Putin that not only were there no others present aside from translators, the translators were instructed to destroy their notes, we get this juicy little tidbit:

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/16/world/asia/belarusian-escort-deported-thailand.html

An Belorussian escort claims she has 16 hours of tape about Putin and Trump. So from the high court to jail cells in Thailand, more potential info is coming out about collusion and potential high crimes, the latter of which is seeming more and more like reality, not just possibility.

But what's of note is the persistent presence of escorts and porn stars in the story, from this unfortunate young Belorussian woman who was just trying to make a living, to Stormy Daniels, to the infamous pee-pee tape, to others probably yet to come forward (and then to women who have been harassed, assaulted and blackmailed by Trump). Sleaze coats Trump like a Gore-Tex parka, preventing the clean rain of honesty, morality and ethics from seeping into his lizard-like brain. One of the saddest things is that he has lived his life not just of lies, but through subjugating, harassing and demeaning woman all the time.

Just look how miserable Melania looks all of the time. She also probably wonders how much longer can this go on every single day.

It's not very often that I have had to stop reading a book to cry, or because it is too painful too read more. But Svetlana Alexeyevitch's Secondhand Time is such a work, particularly the passages where her interviewees, almost always women, speak about being raised in orphanages, and the infamous gulag system, particularly the one in Karaganda, not far from where I spent five years living in Astana - Kazakhstan, for those who do not know.

People from our school would go and visit the site, now a museum and site of remembrance, but I never did, or could. I once visited S-17, the infamous prison and torture center in Phnom Phenh, Cambodia, where the Khmer Rouge tortured in killed "political" prisoners. Being a political enemy of the state, in Cambodia, just as in the USSR or present-day China, could simply be the fact of your ethnicity, or that you wore glasses, or the size of your nose.  The thing I remember the most about S-17 was not that there were still blood stains on the walls - and scratch marks from the prisoners' fingernails - or that the same wire-frame beds that the prisoners were shackled to for torture were still there. No, those were mere physical testaments: what struck me was the  palpable sense of evil, perhaps the only time in my life I have felt that.

I didn't want to go to Karaganda to feel that: I didn't need to be reminded of that, because I will never forget. The testimonies in Alexeyevitch's work have the same power: the smell of the earth in spring, a pebble, a blade of grass can signify either rebirth, or serve as proof of existence, of survival, of communion with something that it not dead, proof that there is life, proof that not all is suffering.

I suppose that, given the chance, I would go to see one of WWII's many death camps, but it is not something that fills me with anticipation. When I was done with S-17, my guide, a motorcycle driver who waited outside, offered to take me to see the Killing Fields, where the bodies were deposited. I declined, partially out of fear of diluting what I had just seen, and becoming numbed and inured to the idea of death camps as a tourist attraction. After some conversation, I asked him where he was from? He told me, "I'm an orphan. I do knot know who my father, my mother, were. I have no family. I do not know where I am from."

I was shocked to read of the passing of the great Italian film director Bernardo Bertolucci yesterday morning. He had seemed to faded into obscurity after a career which had gained him the reputation of one of the great film directors of the 20th century. Only after reading about his failed surgery for a herniated disc, which left him wheelchair - bound, and other health issues, did his seemingly (to me) unexplained disappearance from the world of cinema make sense.

To my thinking, he was one of the great directors of the post-WWII cinema scene, a director who created stories of compelling emotional power, cinematographic precision, color and power, and a director who plunged the depths of the human psyche.  I've watched "Last Tango in Paris" more than any other film, viewing it countless times, fascinated by its brooding majesty, perverse allure, and the great acting by Marlon Brando and Maria Schneider. Certainly the film is somewhat tainted by the accounts of an act of sexual abuse performed by Brando on Schneider, with the apparent collusion of Bertolucci. But that, and only that, is the sole taint on Bertolucci's career. Certainly it caused Schneider much mental pain over the years, and has only burnished her performance in the film, out-distancing in my eyes, that of Brando's, for her own open vulnerability and courage in this very raw film, a real turning point in the history of film. Still, the film is a masterpiece, with Vittorio Storraro's magnificent cinematography, Gato Barbrieri's soaring soundtrack, and Bertolucci's merciless portrayal of an affair bound to go nowhere.

And this was just one of his great films that influenced cinema history, at a time when film auteurs were taken seriously and influenced world film in a way that is no longer possible. He made films that mattered: "The Conformist", "1900", "The Spiders Stratagem", "After the Revolution", "The Sheltering Sky", "The Last Emperor", and his follow-up, such as it was, to "Last Tango", "The Dreamers." I think after "Last Tango," "1900" is the film I have watched the most, in part or all, owning the full five hour version. The sweeping scale of this over five-hour Marxist epic on political, cultural and psychological history of Italy from 1900 to post-WWII is a magnificent epic, rich, multi-layered, tormented and spectacular, with an amazing cast: Burt Lancaster, Dominique Sanda, Robert DeNiro, Sterling Hayden, Gerard Depardieu, Donald Sutherland, Stefania Sandrelli, and other Italian actors not as familiar to US viewers, but stars in their own right such as Laura Betti, Romolo Valli, Alida Valli and others. A critique of history, an emotional saga, and the story of class struggle unresolved through the tumultuous events of the first half of the twentieth century.

And that's just two films. "The Conformist" is perhaps Bertolucci's greatest film, his second film lensed by Storraro, adapted from the novel by Alberto Moravia, about a gay man, suppressed into conformity, who sells his soul to the Italian Fascist party, only to have it all unravel with the fall of Mussolini. This is perhaps his most structured yet powerful film, another dark and merciless film like "Last Tango," where there are no heroes, just victims and survivors. And Dominique Sanda, who was offered the role of Jeanne in "Last Tango" but turned it down due to prior commitments, is enigmatic, alluring, as the dopplenganger of the protagonist, Jean-Louis Trintignant's desires, the film a fascinating nightmare of Freudian dimensions and a damning condemnation of Italy's fascist madness - a warning to all of us living through Trumpian America.

And the revisiting of Spring 1968, Paris, sexual liberation, Marxism, the Cinematheque Francais, rock and roll in "The Dreamers," with Eva Green as an updated Maria Schneider. And "The Last Emperor", a Hollywood blockbuster which melded big 80s bio-pics with serious content and political commentary on the Communist Chinese dystopia - no wonder it was the first, and last, Western film granted access to the Forbidden City, the home of the Chinese Emperors, in Beijing. And his script writing for "Once Upon A Time In The West," Sergio Leone's 1969 masterpiece, rated by most film critics as the greatest Western ever.

A monumental talent, a man who remade cinema has passed. Requiescat in pace, signor Bertolucci. Your life has been one that has touched many, as an artist in cinema who has few equals.
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For the Big Orange Turd, visiting California today: only a disaster could compel him to visit the nation's most populous state.  And since Facebook wouldn't let me post this, here's my special greeting to him, courtesy of Jennifer Lawrence....

Writing an online exam for my Humanities class, with Darwin's endless children's TV on in the near background almost led to me writing a question such as follows:

A farmer had a dog; his name was 1) Bongo  2) Bango  3) Bingo  4) Butoh

Of course if I wrote the question like this, at least one student would have complained that, because of the way I wrote the question, he thought I was referring to the name of the alleged farmer, who in the song in question, remains unnamed. I would have pointed out the the antecedent to the pronoun "his" is clearly dog. Of course once I said antecedent, the student probably would have been lost, and the next question would have something to do with extra credit.

That would be the current resident of the White House, and his show of petulance, ignorance and stupidity at the World War I ceremonies over last weekend in Paris and France. His inability to show even a modicum of respect and recognize t the gravity of the moment. His laziness, and unwillingness to travel in the rain to acknowledge thousands of dead Americans who perished so that he, and his Nazi father and all of their miserable relatives, could prosper and sponge off (and rip off) the American public. And for that matter the millions of combatants from all over the world who perished in the name of democracy, a form of government that he is attempting to eradicate. His slimy bro-mance with Putin, winking and nodding at each other, Trump oblivious to the fact that Putin will spill the goods on him whenever the Russian tyrant finds it convenient, when his little pimp has outlived his usefulness.  How did this putrid fart of a human being become president?

And who is stupid enough to vote for him?

Some things take a while: few stories seem to have begged to be turned into films more than the kidnapping of J Paul Getty III, grandson of the wealthiest man in the world (at the time). It has all the key elements: a dramatic plot with the possibility for conflict and twists galore, wealth, decadence, drug use, beautiful people, 60s and 70s hedonism and Eurotrash contrasted with upper-crusty British banking wealth, exotic locales, British country homes, and on and on. Yet it took over thirty years, and now, finally, two excellent productions, different in their own ways but both eminently watchable, have been released this year: All The Money In the World, on the big screen, and Trust, a 10-part series on FX.

All The Money In The World, directed by Ridley Scott, has both the benefit of concision, relatively speaking, and suffers from it as well. The kidnapping of JPG III forms the spine of the drama, while subplots concerning his possible complicity in the crime, the Italian Mafia, his grandfather’s unrepentant stinginess (even when his own flesh and blood is concerned), the dysfunctionality of the Getty brood, JPG III’s mom and her unwavering commitment to freeing her son, and other elements are squeezed into the 90 minutes or so that make up the film. Christopher Plummer plays the tight-fisted patriarch, as a replacement (!) for the Kevin Spacey. Its hard to image casting Spacey over Plummer – he even has something of a resemblance to J Paul Sr., and Plummer’s take on the domineering, callous industrial baron deserved better than a mere Academy Award nomination. Plummer’s long illustrious career gives him a kind of gravitas on screen that can’t be learned, only earned. Michelle Williams is excellent as JPGIII’s mom, divorced from JPGII, but the headscratcher among the actors is Mark Wahlberg as Getty senior’s fixer.

Wahlberg, I find, is one of the most vanilla actors out there. A lot of sound and fury often, signifying well you know what, he just never seems to bring much to the table. Like Tom Cruise and other H-wood actors, he is better known for who he is than what he does. So its curious in flipping through Rotten Tomatoes reviews that one reviewer from the Hindustan Times, Rohan Nahar, gives kudos to Wahlberg while giving a thumbs down to Brendan Frazer in the same role in Trust. Now let me preface this by saying that I chose this critic somewhat randomly. I was flipping through the reviews, saw one that was somewhat negative, so then checked it out. I found it interesting, but also revealed a critic somewhat out of his depth in material that clearly was unfamiliar to him, one of the dangers of our globally connected media community. The ability to access all material globally can lead to a sense of familiarity that might be unfounded.

Back to Brendan Frazer, whose acting is a comedic revelation, with serious moments to leaven the mix. Created as West Texas, Bible-quoting (thankfully not too much) PI hired by Getty to fix his problems, Frazer is a pleasure to watch. Like Carey Grant, Frazer has that rarest of screen qualities: likeability, a quality notably missing from Wahlberg, who always seems to be pressing his acting ability onwards, perhaps as a reminder that he doesn’t have as much to work with. Nahar also pans the excellent Hillary Swank (as Gail Getty, JPGII’s ex-wife) and Donald Sutherland as JPG senior, as well as Frazer. Here’s the quote:

the performances of Sutherland as Getty, Hilary Swank as Paul’s penniless mother and Brendan Fraser as Getty’s fixer, are nothing like their cinematic counterparts’ - Plummer, Michelle Williams and Mark Wahlberg. They seem to know that they’re in a piece of entertainment. Sutherland is almost moustache-twirlingly cunning, and Fraser speaks in an exaggerated Texan drawl as he breaks the fourth wall…[1]

Perhaps the Hindustan Times critic has never met West Texans: the drawl is not overdone, just as it is not representative of all West Texans. But writing off Sutherland’s performance as a caricature is a gross under-appreciation: Sutherland’s Getty is every bit the equal of Plummer’s, albeit different, a reminder of how great actors can give the same role alternate takes, emotions, and characteristics. While Plummer is icy, aloof and cruel, Sutherland can be somewhat more personable, and sarcastic, but always with a leering cruelty just below the surface. Sutherland’s Getty reminded me, in more ways than one, of another one of his great roles, in one of the great films of the 1970s Bernardo Bertolucci’s Novecento, where Sutherland played the decadent, morally corrupt head foreman (and Fascist) of the Berlinghieri estate, the padrone played by Robert DeNiro (and his father by Burt Lancaster).  Given that the real life JPGIII kept what amounted to a small harem in his English country manor, the jaded and lascivious aspect that Sutherland brings to the role - the harem is not part of Scott's film - is all appropriate, and true to biographical accounts of the old lecher.

The Hindustan Times critic further shows just how far off-base film critics can be. He also derides the Trust subplot, a very considerable part of that shows 10 episodes, which explores the idea that JPGIII staged the kidnapping in order to pay off his drug and partying debts in Italy, funded by (of course) the Mafia. JPGIII did bandy this idea around, so that when the actual crime happened, the Gettys were not sure if it was for real. And this is the main fault with Danny Boyle’s spin on the event: in stretching the show to almost nine hours, the mafia-side of the story takes over, so that the much more interesting story concerning the many generations of Gettys, the drug-fueled 60s scenes in London and Rome which involved JPGII and III, Talitha Pol and others, is overtaken by what eventually becomes the Godfather Part IV. And this godfather is no Vito Corleone in New York, but an obscure and unsuccessful don in Calabria, the Arkansas of Italy.  Perhaps Nahar should stick to more familiar fare.

Both versions are worth watching, not the least for the remarkable acting by two leonine Canadian octogenarians as J Paul III. Entertaining, and both with commentary on how absolute wealth can corrupt absolutely, the story of John Paul Getty III’s kidnapping makes for fascinating, and sometimes remarkable, watching. That two versions of the story were released within months of each other, well that is perhaps even more remarkable.


[1] https://www.hindustantimes.com/tv/trust-review-danny-boyle-s-new-show-is-like-a-slumdog-millionaire-apology/story-5pSWMnnqLFPKTvHxIj5UVL.html

 Some more theatre reviews from the online site I write for - takes them forever to publish them. The PR companies who are kind enough to give me free passes have complained.  But at any rate here they are - would write more about it now, but here are the links with the copy afterwards  ....

"Walk On The Moon"

https://stagebuddy.com/theater/theater-review/review-walk-on-the-moon

It’s been almost fifty years since Neil Armstrong set foot on the lunar surface. Those heady summer days of 1969—Woodstock, Vietnam, protests, Nixon, and the first human landing and walk on the moon—still reverberate today. Especially in San Francisco, with last summer's 50th anniversary of the Summer of Love still being milked for nostalgic value as well as commercial profit. ACT’s latest musical, A Walk on the Moon, directed by Sheryl Kaller, music and lyrics by Paul Scott Goodman, with book by Pamela Gray, has been adapted from Gray’s script for the 1999 film of the same name. The musical sticks to the script, creating a nostalgic look at the late ‘60s and one woman’s (Kate Brayben as Pearl) realization of long-suborned sexual yearning, her breaking of tradition and rebelling against the family, and the eventual decision she must make, between reverting to the norm, or breaking away an exploring a different universe of adventure and love. Hence the title, as the song “Walking On The Moon” and other tunes from the show highlight, all in the context of a family vacation at a Jewish family summer camp in the Catskills in July and August of 1969, near Max Yasgut’s farm, the site of Woodstock.  When the festival happens, it trips the light fantastic for Pearl, the housewife in question, as well as for other characters, throwing the camp into an uproar.
All the right elements are at work in the production. The cast is excellent, particularly Brayben, her character torn between a dull marriage to her over-worked, conventional and chauvinistic husband (Marty, played by Jonah Platt) and her attraction to the almost stereotypical “free love” hippie (and traveling blouse salesman in a van) Walker, played by Zak Resnick. Brigid O’Brien shines as Alison, Pearl’s rebellious daughter who also yearns for an alternative, as does Kerry O'Malley as Lillian, Pearl’s mother-in-law, who divines trouble in the making.  Three generations of women give voice to their desires and frustrations, opening up a generation conflict. Other characters including Rhoda (Monique Hafen) as friends of Marty and Pearl lend to the local color of the summer camp—references to latkes and knishes abound, and the camp loudspeaker chips in as well. Feminist musical, 60’s sexual awakening tale, 50’s Jewish doo-wop, a cautionary tale on male chauvinism: A Walk On The Moon brings all these elements into the mix, with mixed results.
These various components never really gel. It almost feels as though this is painting by numbers. All the right elements are here: emotional solos highlighting the housewife’s dilemma, check. The weary wisdom of the mother-in-law, check. Adolescent angst and the Age of Aquarius, check.  Male chauvinism, check.  Catskills Jewish humor, check. The score and lyrics, by Paul Scott Goodman, serve the occasion, but rarely stand out. The book, with these different aims in mind, errs on entertaining with local color, while Pearl’s journey often feels underserviced, resulting in one-dimensional male characters (except for Walker), and a story that clicks on by without really engaging the audience. However, production values are outstanding: the lush forest and homey cabins of the camp, with a moon and stars of many moods and shades in the background, almost steal the show (designed by Donyale Werle). Similarly, Tal Yarden has designed excellent projections by Tal Yarden. Shifting stars, the vibrant moon, the psychedelic festival, scrims that descend for more projections: the light show stands out. And herein lies the problem: when the stage design and light show steal the show, Houston, we have a problem.

"A Lesson From Aloes"

https://stagebuddy.com/theater/theater-review/review-lesson-aloes

Apartheid and succulents might seem like odd bedfellows, but centuries of racial oppression and violence can make metaphors reverberate. Athol Fugard’s 1980 three-character drama, A Lesson From Aloes, now playing through June 29th at San Francisco’s Z Below in the Mission, provides a searing view into how politics and race can inject suspicion, fear and madness into our lives. As a piece of theatre, it’s a must see, relating not just to South Africa and its horrible history of apartheid, but to the same deeply ingrained racial injustice which plagues our country.
Perhaps no playwright since Strindberg or O’Neill has mastered the craft and art of turning the single-set play, with a minimum of characters, into a pressure-cooker. In the two-act A Lesson From Aloes, Piet Bezuidenhout, a retired Afrikaner bus driver who now devotes his time to collecting and tending aloes, and his wife Gladys (played by Victor Talmadge and Wendy vanden Heuvel respectively) live in a simple home on the edge of Port Elizabeth, a mixed-race community where many of Fugard’s works transpire. They’ve prepared an outdoor buffet for guests, Steve Roberts and his family. Roberts, a black friend of Piet’s, recently released from jail, was imprisoned for anti-apartheid activities with Piet and others. Barred from working in his profession as a brick-layer, Steve decides to obtain a one-way exit pass for the family and emigrate to the UK. Arriving late, Steve arrives solo with a score to settle, as the friendless Piet is suspected of being an informer—a belief shared by Gladys, who suffers her own trauma. When the Security Branch seized Steve, they also searched the Bezuidenhout residence, rifling through and seizing Gladys’ diary. In Glady’s mind, her ensuing breakdown and hospitalization result directly from his culpability in the crimes of the state.

Adrian Roberts as Steve and Victor Talmadge as Piet in A Lesson From Aloes at Z Below in San FranciscoAn aloe that Piet tends to serves as a critical metaphor in the play. Tough and spiny, able to survive in the parched South African veldt just as people do, Piet cannot fit its identity into the known species. People’s racial make-up was clearly demarcated under apartheid, just as all species of the aloe genus were. But this aloe’s identity, like those of the three characters in A Lesson From Aloes, eludes easy identification. Like these prickly plants, Steve, Piet and Gladys each have their own roots—background and memories—which they draw upon to survive the rough times, with decidedly different trajectories and outcomes. But in the end—especially in the tumultuous second act when Steve arrives—the central conflict remains. Did Piet really inform on Steve? Is Piet the cause of Gladys’ madness? And what will become of Steve and family in exile?
Director Near has shaped a compelling show, with excellent performances from all three actors. Scenic design by Deb O fashions a comfy modest bungalow terrace with assorted patio furniture and plenty of aloes, a partially visible bedroom stage-left, and a scrim behind a cinder-block wall, showing the slowly changing afternoon and evening skies, marred only by a few wrinkled in the scrim and some rather abrupt lighting changes. Talmadge gives a controlled performance as a man who has invested himself in a cause, given his all, only to come out at the end as a suspect and a failure. Vanden Heuvel’s turn as the neurotic and scarred Gladys (shades of Mary Tyrone in Long Day’s Journey Into Night ), like Talmadge and Roberts, reveals layers of psychological complexity, years of doubt and perseverance turned, in her case, into something like personal nihilism. And Roberts provides a jolt in more ways than one when he arrives: the subaltern come to confront his past, before leaving for a new future. One senses that the three actors are still finding the moments in and rhythms of the production: from my point of view, they are just inches away from providing Bay Area audiences with one of the most enthralling and intense shows of the year. This is a show that cannot be missed as theatre that matters, a production that bravely explores the human heart, on issues of race, prejudice, violence and oppression that matter now just as much as ever—if not more.