Skip to main content

Free Solo - documentary review

Freedom means a lot of different things to people.  For a self confessed, bohemian, free spirit who grew up in an intellectual household, Alex Honnold wanted to soar free of his earthly shackles and go up.  As in go up climbing rocks and walls that would faze most people on earth.

The daring is not so much in climbing magnificently large boulders or rock surfaces as much as doing it without the aid of any ropes or harness or safety equipment.  Man, nature's most advanced creation scaling walls made over eons by nature grinding away in its own slow rhythm with nothing between them.

Free Solo is an amazing adventure tracing the free solo attempts of a rock climber called Alex Honnold and shot on film by director, producer husband and wife team of Jimmy Chin and Elizabeth Chai.

The culmination of Alex's journey up various challenging vertical surfaces through the film ends in his scaling a 3,000 feet slab of granite located in the Yosemite National Park in California, called El Capitan.

El Cap as it is known in the climber community is the largest monolith on earth and literally means the Chief.  Alex climbed this without any protective gear whatsoever except the shirt on his back and a powder bag hanging off his ass in approximately four hours in 2017.  That event was filmed for posterity by Jimmy and his crew of professional climber, photographers in an epic documentation event and released for audiences in IMAX.  In that it was an excellent demonstration of amazingly synchronized team work where each cameraman also had his role cut out and they all did what is unique to provide edge of your seat entertainment for audiences.

To paraphrase Bruce Willis' character in the fictional, action film franchise, called  'Die Hard', "we are not huggers" is a phrase that Alex mentions about his family growing up.  That part of Alex is remarkable and captured candidly when his girlfriend also asks about why he is doing what he is doing and he categorically discusses how he does not feel obliged to himself or anyone else to live the longest he can.  Rather he seems to live by the mantra of living to the fullest.  In that he so far has definitely managed it.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

New England is gleaming in the fall

 This autumn the weather gods cooperated as we took a family trip in the northeast to see six states that qualify or makeup what is known colloquially in America as New England. Mass, Maine, Vermont, New Hampshire, Connecticut and Rhode Island (tiniest state in the union). The outing helped tally up the states we either lived in, visited or have worked in to 47. Guess which three have eluded this intrepid traveling family. Any rate the drive was all in about 1,800 miles and included some memorable geographic wonders or points of interest.  Easternmost part of state of Massachusetts being one.  Furthest drivable road east in Mass being another. Visit to all Ivy League schools (term harkens to a collegiate athletics conference and generally regarded as elite academic institutes of some repute worldwide) is another random bucket list item of which this trip afforded the chance to knock two more of the list.  Dartmouth in Hanover, NH and Brown (and its sister institute the RISD  - school f

Searching for a lavish 'fill in the blank with other adjectives and gender' in bed

 Many of the readers of this blog have experienced this. Strange sounding messages popping up in your text or WA or emails all day long from some exotic sounding locale with an out of this world individual looking for love, sex, money or other paraphernalia to get a high. I mean granted that electronic spamming is a low cost enterprise and all but the sheer volumes and the variety in these exhortations is beyond imagination. Having a desire to engage you in some sort of sexual payola or invest in some arcane crypto scheme must be a profound algorithm that someone from Oklahoma to Odessa is cranking on through the night and watching one in a few million fall for. Otherwise this nonsense would not exist I suspect. It would be funny to watch the lifecycle of some such persona that creates said content and that of a prospect for this invite becoming an unwilling or willing participant. Then that whole thing could go on some social channel and earn likes and subscriptions for someone else a

Lakeside frivolities

 We moved to the Charlotte area not knowing where exactly our new home would be. Turns out it was by a popular lake formed by the damming of the Catawba river which flows north to south in the Carolinas. Local electricity generation utility built a series of dams along the waterway for hydro and couple nuclear plants as well to supply the state grid.  The lake our house butts into is Lake Wylie. While tract home build has picked up in the Carolinas the developer often carves out parcels that they can get their hands on leaving behind privately owned lots that the individual owner may not want to sell. Our house is part of a subdivision but backs into actual lake front yardage that has always been part of legacy family owned properties who chose to build a cabin or getaway and did not sell to a corporation wanting to build in the hundreds. As such we can see the water through the year but it does not afford actual water access.  That privilege is to our neighbors who still maintain thei