Kontiki -- Film Review Rolling Stones Concert -- HP Pavilion, San Jose, CA 05-08-13 Deceptive Practice -- Film Review Cinderella -- San Francisco Ballet Performance
Kontiki
Directed
by Joachim Rønning and Espen
Sandberg
I never read the book, so I am taking the film as presented. It is a gripping adventure story. As it began and I realized what they were about
to undertake, I sort of wished I hadn't come to it. This kind of a movie is highly tense. There is a constant sense of imminent,
unexpected danger that could appear at any moment -- and does. I myself am scared to death of the
ocean. I don't like to go anywhere near
it. I see it as deceptively benign and
seductive, but extremely perilous, and utterly ruthless. The ocean kills people
quickly and with utter indifference. The
hazards are myriad, often hidden, subtle, and merciless. One of my most disturbing fantasies is to be
lost at sea, helpless and alone in the middle of the vast ocean. The thought of this makes me extremely uneasy,
and I don't like to dwell on it. And
that is exactly the subject of this movie.
It is very well done, well thought out, well acted, well
filmed, and well put together. It works
very well as an adventure story that keeps you on the edge of your seat, sort
of squirming nervously and gritting your teeth.
Personally, I would rather have Moby
Dick: a probing, inward looking self exploration and philosophical
search. Kontiki doesn't do very much of that. It stays on the surface level of dealing with
the immediate dramas and threats. It
does not philosophize or psychologize or ask itself what inner demons are
driving a group of men to undertake such an ill-advised venture.
Thor Heyerdahl (Pal Hagen) seems to have picked up his
accomplices as he went along. They came
to him offering their services. Some
people will jump to get on board a crazy, fantastic adventure, oblivious to the
extreme danger of the quest. But
why? The film is not so interested in
this. But this is what I was thinking
about all the way through. The academic
question of whether it is historically possible that Polynesia could have been
settled by South Americans is not enough to explain why these men undertook
this. This controversy could be settled
by other means. It is not necessary to
put one's life on the line under the adverse conditions of being on a raft at
sea in order to make this point. No
other academics would do such a thing, and it was not academics that lined up
to accompany Heyerdahl on this trip. These
men were not passion driven archeologists and anthropologists. They were just guys from a variety of
backgrounds who wanted to get away from something, and were willing to latch on
to just about any means of doing it.
We have to look more closely at Heyerdahl and the kind of
person he was to understand what led to this quest. He was a grandiose person who wanted to be
admired for his courage and daring, to be seen as someone who had the strength
and the resolve to pit himself against Nature at her most perilous and emerge
victorious. He saw himself as a
conquering hero. From an early age he
showed a willingness to risk his life in attention getting exploits, and nearly
got killed as a small boy falling off an ice floe in a pond while trying to
retrieve a stranded object on the floe.
He had a sense of invulnerability that I think the ocean tempered. He was probably not comfortable looking
inward and dealing with the mundane responsibilities of everyday life -- such
as a marriage. He needed that sense of
risk with the promise of great reward, similar to the inner torment gnawing at
the heart of the compulsive gambler. But
the gambler creates this sense of risk and reward by betting money on the
outcome of chance events, giving an artificial sense of drama and importance to
something that is otherwise meaningless.
Heyerdahl took real risks with a clearly visible payoff in view. That is the difference between the adventurer
and the gambler, and why adventurers are more interesting. Their exploits, when successful, can have
socially meaningful consequences, whereas the gambler's satisfaction is
narcissistic and strictly short term. The
adventurer mentality is rather masochistic in that it starts from the position
that one must subject oneself to these onerous trials and tribulations at the
peril of death in order to win the love and admiration that one desires. But Heyerdahl was able to fulfill his
fantasy. Many others who start from a
similar psychological position do not fare as well, and Heyerdahl himself could
just as well have ended up dead and unheard of.
Heyerdahl's marriage was touched on, but not developed in
any depth. The film did make a point of
showing him wearing his wedding ring throughout the voyage. I suspect that ambivalence about his marriage
was a significant factor in motivating this trip. That was made explicit in his second in
command Herman Watzinger (Anders Christiansen).
The other four men we do not get to know very much about. Except for Heyerdahl and Watzinger there is
not much in the way of character development.
In a short film like this you have to make choices and the film chose to
concentrate on the charismatic, attractive Heyerdahl, and the dramatic
highlights that occurred during this long, dull voyage. I wish the film had been more expansive about
the subsequent lives of the six participants.
There are only a couple of cursory sentences mentioning the continuation
of their lives after Kontiki. I did look up the continuation of Heyerdahl's
marriage, and he and Liv did divorce.
Heyerdahl was actually married three times in his life.
The movie gave me some impulse to read the book, because I
suspect -- I am sure --there is much that was left out of this film. I would like to have seen more about the
relations between the men on the raft. The
film relates a number of tense moments, but I suspect there were a lot more and
the relationships between a small group of men confined to a small space for
that long a time under the constant threat of death would have been an
interesting avenue to explore. There is
only so much you can do in 118 minutes and this journey took over 100 days, so
naturally it had to be an abbreviation.
Despite my aversion to the ocean, I do like adventure
stories and am drawn to the personalities of adventurers. I am something of an adventurer myself of a
different sort. If you have that spark
within yourself, or if you just like suspense and drama, this film will appeal
to you. If you are a thinker or a
psychologist, this film will probably leave a lot to be desired. It focuses on the immediate and the surface,
but it does so quite effectively and is very well crafted.
Rolling Stones Concert
HP
Pavilion, San Jose, California
May 8,
2013
This was my second Rolling Stones concert. The first was in November of 2005 at SBC Park
in San Francisco, part of the Stones Bigger Bang tour. I would rate them as two of the best concerts
of my life. The Stones really know how
to put on a show. They have this down
and it just feels like a class act from beginning to end.
They're definitely older than they used to be (but who
isn't?), but they can still keep a full house enthralled for two solid hours
without a break. The show lasted about
two hours and fifteen minutes without an intermission and it was the same in
the 2005 concert at SBC Park. That's
something I like about them. I hate
intermissions. The Stones just keep the
momentum going nonstop. The HP Pavilion
seats 17,496, and they were probably close to capacity. About a quarter of the seats in the
auditorium behind the stage were purposely left vacant, but they made up for it
with seating and standing room on the main floor. I didn't see any vacant seats.
I had some good fortune in getting these tickets. I had heard about the upcoming concert
probably on the radio. I checked into
getting tickets and somehow found out that the day they were to go on sale
there would be about 1000 tickets available at a drastically reduced price of
$85. A friend who wanted to go urged me
to try for them, so when they went on sale on a Monday morning I went online at
that time and managed to score two tickets at $85. I believe the next highest price was about
double that.
So I had the tickets, but they were will-call tickets. They would not send them out. They didn't want any scalping of these low
priced tickets. We had no idea where we
were sitting. I figured it would be some
sort of standing room, but it was actually a seat after all. On morning of the concert I received the
following message from them:
TICKET PICK-UP INSTRUCTIONS
Pick-up your tickets at the check-in table located
at N. Autumn St. (under stairwell) adjacent to the South Ticket Window.
The line forms starting at 6:15pm - do not
arrive early. Seating locations are pulled at random. Doors open at 6:45pm.
We will be using strict anti-scalper measures to
ensure that these $85 tickets go to Stones fans and don't end up on the resale
market with wildly inflated prices. We appreciate your attention to the
following, so that you have the best experience possible:
- Your picture ID, confirmation number, and the
credit card used to make the purchase are required for pick-up. You will
not be permitted to pick up your tickets without these three (3) items.
- You must pick up your tickets in person, along
with your guest.
- Once you have the tickets in hand, you will be
escorted into the arena. There will not be an opportunity to leave with
your tickets before going into the show.
- If we suspect any reselling or transfer of
these tickets they will be immediately voided and you will not be entitled
to any refund.
The concert was scheduled for 8pm, but it actually started
around 9. There was no warm up
band. Keith Richards seemed to be having
a good time. He was smiling and really
seemed to be enjoying being out there performing. Mick's voice is still strong. He still struts and prances the whole time,
but he doesn't run as much as he did
the previous time I saw him. He and
Keith will both turn 70 this year. They
all look thin and wiry. There is no
obesity epidemic with them. They keep
themselves in pretty good shape. Their
sound is still strong and vibrant, although I felt it did not have quite the
same riveting energy and raw power that it did in their earlier years. But then, how many of you have the same
energy and vigor that you had in your twenties and thirties? But let's leave off with how old they
are. Let's just consider them on the
merits.
This concert was fabulous.
It was a greatest hits parade from beginning to end. I'll list the set, but admit at the outset
that it is incomplete, but most of it is here.
They opened with
Get off
of My Cloud followed by
Gimme
Shelter featuring Lisa Fisher, who also sang backup throughout
Paint
It Black was a very poignant choice, I thought
John Fogerty was brought out to share the lead on It's All Over Now, which I would judge
one of the highlights of the evening
Bonnie Raitt sang Let
It Bleed with Mick, which worked very well.
Keith did Before They
Make Me Run, and Happy
Midnight
Rambler, Jumpin Jack Flash,
and Brown Sugar were probably my
merit badge choices for the evening, but everything was good.
They also did Bitch,
Miss You, Start Me Up, Sympathy for the Devil, Emotional Rescue, Honky Tonk
Woman, and they brought out a chorus for You Can't Always Get What You Want.
They closed with Satisfaction,
with Mick Taylor making an appearance on guitar, as well as on several other
numbers.
I am sure there are a couple of other songs that I have left
out. I didn't keep strict track as I
went along. I especially enjoyed the
local guests they brought in to share in a few of the numbers. John Fogerty stands out in my mind. It was a totally satisfying
presentation. The Stones are consummate
performers. The music is great as it has
always been, and they went full bore all the way to the end. Hard not to like a concert like that.
Deceptive Practice:
The Mysteries and Mentors of Ricky Jay
Directed
by Molly Edelstein
This is a fascinating documentary featuring sleight of hand
artist, Ricky Jay. He is a master of card
tricks and anything related to magic. I
love magic shows, but have never had any desire to do it myself. This man is very different. He started doing magic at age four and has
been immersed in it ever since. The film
is not a systematic biography, although it does contain much information about
Ricky Jay and his life as a magician. It
is full of intriguing displays of magic tricks and a wealth of information
about the history of the practice of sleight of hand and many of its early
practitioners. Ricky Jay has been a
collector of historical materials and writings on the history of magic, and has
written a number of books himself on the subject. The film drew heavily on these resources to
offer a full bodied overview of many of the precursors and mentors to Ricky Jay
going back into the nineteenth century. The
practitioners seem to be predominantly Jewish and they form a tight subculture
wherein the craft is passed down from mentors to students. The film did not explore how the magic tricks
are done. You will not go behind the
scenes and see how the illusions are created, but what interested me is that it
is very much an artform of individual practitioners. Magicians tend keep their methods secret, not
only from the public, but also from each other.
It is a craft that one has to learn through mentoring and ultimately
through creative exploration on one's own.
I was also impressed with the virtuosity that many magicians
achieve. They are akin to top level
musicians or athletes who spend many years in total dedication to mastering the
technique of their art.
The film does
not attempt an in depth personal exploration of Ricky Jay. It tends to avoid delving into his personal
life, although we do learn that he left home at an early age and has had little
contact with his family since. He has also
been married for seven years and seems pleased with his wife, although she is
not interviewed in the film. There are
many interviews with people who know Ricky Jay and have worked with him,
including playwright and director, David Mamet.
Jay is reputed to be difficult and abrasive, but in the film he comes
off as low key, engaging and very personable.
He is obviously highly intelligent and the absolute master of his
craft. I didn't get any profound insight
into his character or into the psychology of magic from this film. The film is not thought provoking in that
respect. It is a compendium of facts on
the history of magic, some of its more notable practitioners, and lots of sensational
tricks that will dazzle you. One cannot
help but be drawn into this film by the skill of the practitioners, the
illusions one is doomed to fall for, and the eccentric, anomalous individuals
who made this art form their life's obsession.
Seen at the San Francisco International Film Festival, May 6, 2013.
Cinderella
San
Francisco Ballet Performance
May 4,
2013
There are many versions and variants of the Cinderella story. The most popular in recent times are the
French version written by Charles Perrault in 1697 and the German version(s) of
the Grimm Brothers from the early 1800s.
The Disney animated movie version, which was released in 1950, is
heavily influenced by Perrault and is probably the most familiar version of the
story in America. The American
Cinderella has been forcefully criticized by Jane Yolen (1982) as being
"a sorry excuse for a heroine, pitiable
and useless. She cannot perform even a
simple action to save herself . . . Cinderella begs, she whimpers, and at last
has to be rescued by -- guess who -- the mice! (p. 302) "The mass-market books have brought
forward a good, malleable, forgiving little girl and put her in Cinderella's
slippers. However, in most of the
Cinderella tales there is no forgiveness in the heroine's heart. No mercy.
Just justice." (p. 301)
"Hardy, helpful, inventive, that was the Cinderella of the old
tales, but not of the mass market in the nineteenth century. Today's mass market books are worse."
(p. 300) "The mass market American
"Cinderellas" have presented the majority of American children with
the wrong dream. They offer the passive
princess, the 'insipid beauty waiting . . . for Prince Charming' . . . But it
is the wrong Cinderella and the magic of the old tales has been falsified, the
true meaning lost, perhaps forever."
(p. 302-03)
I concur with this assessment, and so it was with great
expectancy that I attended the San Francisco Ballet's performance this weekend
in the high hope that they would do something interesting and inventive with
this ancient tale and its endless possibilities. Boy, did they ever deliver! The performance was magnificent. It fulfilled the highest and best potential
of dance as an art form. It perfectly
realized my own aesthetic and conception of what dance should be. Of all the dance performances I have seen, I
would say this was the best one. It had
everything. The dancers, of course, were
superb, as always at the San Francisco Ballet, but this production was well
thought out with great intelligence. It
is a big concept. It has a broad narrative
line with numerous subplots. The story
is told in nonverbal language that can be easily followed by a viewer. The ballet was not about athleticism, or a
celebration of the physical beauty and grace of the body for its own sake, but
rather the body and its capacity for movement and communication are employed to
tell a story and create relationships between characters that evolve and change
throughout the drama. It was dynamic as
well as emotionally and intellectually challenging. The music was perfectly suited to the dancing
and to the action on stage, which I always notice and appreciate. The lighting, the sets, the staging, and the
costumes were highly imaginative, and beautifully done. It is a visually enchanting spectacle. Large bouquets to Choreographer Christopher
Wheeldon, Librettist Craig Lucas, Scene and Costume designer Julian Crouch, and
Lighting Designer Natasha Katz, Tree and Carriage Designer Basil Twist, and
Projection Designer Daniel Brodie, and the entire staff. This show is a first rate accomplishment.
The production draws more from the Grimm tradition rather
than from Perrault, but it incorporates creative, original innovations that
give it a uniqueness and individuality that in my opinion is superior to the
older versions of the tale. The San
Francisco Ballet version has complexity.
The characters have depth in contrast to the fairy tale characters,
which tend to be simplified and cartoonish.
Following the Grimm version, the story centers around a tree
growing out of Cinderella's mother's grave.
There is no fairy god mother in this story. Instead four Fates shadow Cinderella
throughout the performance, watching over her, encouraging her, and guiding her
in the right direction at crucial times.
There are a variety of wonderfully costumed fairies and animal
characters who support Cinderella. Cinderella's father remains a player
throughout the story, sometimes protecting her from the harshness and excess of
the stepmother. In the fairy tale
versions the father seems to disappear and abandons Cinderella to her fate at
the hands of her stepfamily. This tends
to gut the story of its emotional sense.
It makes it seem as if stepmothers and stepsisters are inherently evil
or hostile toward their stepsiblings, and this is not necessary the case nor
inevitable, particularly if the father is absent or dead. It also leaves one wondering how the father
could simply abandon his natural daughter from his first wife to the cruelty of
his new family. However, once it is
realized that the hostility between Cinderella and her stepfamily is rooted in a
sexual rivalry for the father, then the whole story makes perfect sense -- but
most versions of the story will not deal with this. Cinderella becomes sanitized and
desexualized.
I liked the San Francisco Ballet's concept because it moves
in the direction of keeping the story emotionally and sexually alive by
retaining the father as an involved player throughout the story. He is at the ball with everyone else and
dances with all three of his daughters.
It would have helped if this had been a little more overtly sexual, but
it worked. The conflict and the
implications could be discerned.
When the father remarries and the stepmother and her two
daughters are brought to meet Cinderella for the first time, they offer her a
bouquet of flowers which Cinderella contemptuously throws on the ground. This action seems to set up the antagonism
between Cinderella and her stepfamily. On
the other hand, was the bouquet a genuine gesture, or a cynical act of
hypocrisy? This was an interesting twist
that contrasted with the usual the versions of the fairy tale where the
animosity between the stepfamily and Cinderella is attributed to the inherent
cruelty of the stepsisters and their mother, which is rather simpleminded. In the San Francisco Ballet's conception the arriving
stepfamily appears to reach out to Cinderella and she rejects them. Why?
Obviously, because she had her father all to herself and their arrival
brings her exclusive possession of his attention and affection to an end. This involves Cinderella in creating her own
predicament.
If anything, I think Cinderella should have been even more
of a bitch. This is a nasty, ugly sexual
rivalry and should not be cast as a struggle between Good and Evil, as it
traditionally is. The San Francisco
Ballet moves a long step in the right direction, but I think it could be emphasized
even more. I liked that in this
performance the sexual attraction between the father and the step sisters as
well as Cinderella was evident, and Cinderella's relationship with the Prince
has palpable sexual overtones. During
the ball they disappear several times from the stage as if going off for a
tryst and then return for more dancing. This
Cinderella was not a sanitized, innocent, passive player being helplessly
pushed around. She had some character
and some strength of her own. Nor are
the stepsisters and their mother uniformly evil and cruel. Cinderella is able to form a somewhat
friendly rapport with the younger sister, Clementine. The Prince also becomes more interesting in
this retelling. He is not an idealized
Prince Charming devoid of personality, but is something of a rogue who causes
his parents, the King and Queen, consternation.
He has a companion, Benjamin, who takes a fancy to the step sister,
Clementine, and in the end, they, too, marry in a sort of double wedding.
At the end of the first act when the animals dress
Cinderella in her gown for the ball there was no pumpkin carriage (that comes
from Perrault). Instead Cinderella
disappears into an opening in the trunk of the tree -- which looks remarkably
like a vulva -- and shortly emerges transformed by the forest animals into a princess
in a splendid carriage being whisked off to the ball. It is a very powerful,
effective scene.
In the final scene the reconciliation between Cinderella and
her stepmother is very modest. She
plants a small kiss on her stepmother's cheek, but it shows considerable
restraint. It is almost
perfunctory. However, it is less
grotesque than having the birds peck out their eyes as in the Grimm
version.
Altogether the San Francisco Ballet's recasting of
Cinderella goes several steps beyond the Grimm Brothers in quality and
emotional sophistication. I hope it
replaces the Disney version in the popular consciousness. It was truly a privilege to see it. As far as dance performances go, this is as
good as it gets. It makes me grateful to
be living San Francisco where it is possible to go out in the evening and see a
performance of this high quality. If you
can go out in the evening and see something of this caliber and imaginative
power, you know you are in one of the best places in all the world to be. This is why we live here.
Yolen, Jane (1982)
America's Cinderella. In Cinderella: A Casebook. Edited by Alan Dundes. Madison, WI:
University of Wisconsin Press. pp. 294-306.