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Talking Pictures: Timeless

Uncategorized

Nov 29, 2017

In mid-October, the Mill Valley Film Festival hosted an afternoon screening of the British drama Goodbye Christopher Robin. It’s the story of how author A.A. Milne came to write the Winnie-the-Pooh books, and their impact on Milne’s son, Christopher (nicknamed Billy Moon), on whose real-life toys the stories were based. The day of the screening, the theater was packed with moviegoers, split roughly between fans of Winnie-the-Pooh, fans of the film’s director, Simon Curtis (1999’s David Copperfield, 2011’s My Week with Marilyn, 2015’s Woman in Gold) and fans of movies that seem, on the surface, to be lighter than the super-serious standard fare served up at most film festivals.

The Pooh and Curtis fans were not disappointed. Those expecting a frothy light-hearted fable of some sort, however, were stunned to discover that Goodbye Christopher Robin is serious enough and solemn enough, disconcerting and melancholy enough, to satisfy the inclinations of any seasoned film festival programmer. It’s also absolutely, achingly lovely.

After a standing ovation, Curtis took the stage for a brisk Q&A with the slightly shaken audience. “I’d like to start off by saying that we had the New York premiere of the film just two days ago, at the main branch of the New York Library, where the real-life Christopher Robin’s actual toys are on permanent display,” Curtis said. “It was a wonderful place for that, and a reminder of what an amazing thing the Winnie the Pooh stories are. That Daphne Milne, this little boy’s mother, would buy a toy bear and a donkey and a piglet to give to him … that was [what] kicked off this whole amazing thing. It’s remarkable.”

Asked about the enduring popularity of the Pooh stories, more than 100 years after they were first published, Curtis surmised that the tales filled a need for readers at the time they first appeared—not long after the great international shell shock of World War I—and that they continue to fill that same need today.

“There’s an innocence and sweetness and beauty in them,” he said. “The books are a love letter to childhood, and playing and imagination. I think that we’re now in the sixth generation of children whose parents can’t wait to read these stories to them. As a parent myself, I have to say thank you to A.A. Milne for making these stories so short, wholly unlike the Harry Potter books, which just go on and on and on.”

Curtis smiled when asked why the Pooh stories are as appealing to the old as to the young. “Whatever age you are, you seem to find something different in them,” he said. “There’s a kind of wisdom in the stories that hits you at any and every age. It’s part of the genius of the Pooh books.”

In the film, Billy Moon’s father (Domhnall Gleeson) is so preoccupied with writing, and his mother (Margot Robbie) so uninterested in actually being a mother, that most of the boy’s early care comes from his nanny Olive (Kelly Macdonald), from whom he learns love, and eventually, heartbreak. It’s in response to that early loss that the real-life Milne began to write the Pooh stories, as a way to bond, if somewhat awkwardly, with the son he’s been too busy to learn very much about.

“That’s sort of the way it was with English writers of a certain generation,” Curtis pointed out. “I’m not the first to make this observation, but it’s true that some of the greatest books of English literature were written by absolute geniuses, who knew how to create these fantastic tales, but didn’t know how to say I love you to their children. It’s very typical of a certain class, at that time, that a couple would have a baby and then just hand it over to their nanny. For so many English men, their first great love—their only great love—was their nanny.

The performance of young Will Tilston as the 8-year-old Christopher Robin/Billy Moon has earned raves from critics and audiences. “It was quite something,” Curtis said of that casting. “A stroke of luck, that. I’m happy to say it’s not the first stroke of luck I’ve had in that area. The last time I cast a young person who’d never acted before, it was Daniel Radcliffe in David Copperfield. So, you know, that gave me some extra confidence.”

Food & Drink: Bay Bites

Food & Drink

Tanya Henry

Nov 29, 2017

For those of us who don’t live in Southern Marin, this nearly 1-year-old restaurant isn’t even on our radar—but it should be. Joinery beer hall and rotisserie on Turney Street (just off Bridgeway) opened on January 1 and serves burgers, rotisserie chicken, salads and soups. And given that the owners are connected to Mill Valley Beerworks and Fort Point Beer Company, the brews stand out here.

Husband-and-wife team Tyler and Yella Catalana have taken over the space that was previously Wellington’s Wine Bar and given it a serious remodel. Though minimally designed, the large room opens to the outside with views of the bay. Plenty of seating is available both inside and out—communal and picnic tables make it a great spot for groups and families.

Just inside the front door, one entire wall is dedicated to the menu, denoted by wooden plaques that can be subbed out with seasonally changing items. Rotisserie chicken is front and center and offered whole or half. An arugula salad with squash, pepitas and hemp seed is a highlight. Pulled pork tacos, fried chicken sandwiches and a burger filled with grilled onions, tomatoes and pickles are just a sampling of the current offerings. During Thanksgiving week, the restaurant offered a heritage Diestel turkey dinner. Diners could pre-order an entire holiday meal that served 10-12 people ($300). Joinery will likely do something similar for the December holidays as well.

While Yella handles the food side (quite capably), Tyler manages the beer and wine selection. Always interesting selections currently include a Flemish Red Sour, Easy Up Pale Ale and Black Lager, to name a few.

Prices are not low here, but for my money, a juicy burger, garlic fries and a Belgian beer with views of the bay is money well spent.

Joinery, 300 Turney St., Sausalito; 415/766-8999; joineryca.com.

Theater: Whodunit

Theater

Charles Brousse

Nov 22, 2017

It’s Christmas Eve, 1936. While the nation struggles with the Great Depression, popular Broadway actor William Gillette invites his fellow actors from a sold-out Sherlock Holmes whodunit to his palatial “castle” on the banks of the Connecticut River in East Haddam. They arrive expecting to celebrate the holidays, but he has other plans.

Earlier that week someone standing in the staff area at the rear of the theater shot and wounded him in the shoulder while he was performing onstage at New York’s Palace Theatre. Now, assuming that the shooter had to be a person connected to the show because the doorman would not have let a stranger in, he decides to carry his Holmes role into real life by investigating the cast, their husbands and wives. The mystery soon deepens when the stage doorman and a party-crashing New York theater critic are also murdered.

Who was responsible for all of this mayhem, and why? That, in a nutshell, is the plot of Ken Ludwig’s The Game’s Afoot, currently onstage in a lively and entertaining production at the Ross Valley Players’ (RVP) Barn Theatre. You might think it sounds like a typical Agatha Christie logic-based mystery, but you’d be wrong. Although Ludwig styles his play like a “comedy thriller,” the blatant punning of his subtitle, Holmes for the Holidays, reveals that the author of Lend Me a Tenor is up to his old tricks. Game is a pastiche in which anything goes—melodrama, satire, parody, broad farce—with only the slenderest thread of mystery and some judgmental remarks about personal immorality to bind it all together.

That can be a slippery slope, of course. Too much nonsense, too much silliness, too many unexpected twists and turns, and you risk losing the audience’s involvement. On the other hand, it provides a director who knows what he or she is doing and actors who are uninhibited enough to shed all semblance of acceptable behavior, the freedom to shed normal constraints as they mine the script’s numerous comic situations. Although RVP’s director Christian Haines and his acting ensemble occasionally stray into over-indulgence, the decision to play the text as broadly as possible mainly succeeds.

Case in point: Near the end of Act 1, Rachel Kayhan as Daria Chase, the snarky theater critic who has the dirt on everyone, has a knife driven into her back during a storm-induced power blackout. Her monumental death struggle is ignored at first by the uncomprehending William Gillette (Robert Molossi), who is joined moments later by fellow actor Felix Geisel (Tom Hudgens). When the two men finally realize what has happened, to avoid scandal there is a frantic debate about what to do with the body. Different locations are tried, without success. The process reaches a feverish intensity with the arrival on the scene of wacky Inspector Harriet Goring (Pamela Ciochetti). It is all played at breakneck speed, to great comic effect.

Isabelle Grimm and Elliott Hanson are well-cast as newlyweds who may have something to hide—the former’s multimillionaire husband died in a mysterious skiing accident a year earlier, leaving her his entire estate. Sumi Narendran is a strong presence as Madge Geisel, and Ellen Brooks (William’s mother Martha) is fun to watch as she gradually reveals that she is not exactly the sweet little old lady she appears to be.

The Game’s Afoot is not a play for everyone. Some may find it too confusing. For others, the incessant shtick may wear thin after awhile. But for those who enjoy watching actors who have been directed to extend themselves to their outer limits do their stuff, this RVP production is pure joy.

NOW PLAYING: The Game’s Afoot runs through December 10 at the Barn Theatre, Marin Art & Garden Center, 30 Sir Francis Drake Blvd., Ross; 415/456-9555; rossvalleyplayers.com.

Wellness: Eco-Friendly Burial

Uncategorized

Maria Grusauskas

Nov 22, 2017

From the hurricanes of September, which caused unprecedented damage and displaced hundreds of thousands, to a fire season that brought the largest firestorms in California history and is now 50 days longer than it was just a few decades ago, the latest news in climate change has crescendoed to an apocalyptic chord. We’ve reached a point where neglecting to adopt greener, more sustainable behaviors is not just ignorant and dangerous to future generations, it’s self-canceling.

But to reduce our individual footprints requires making daily decisions to live more organically—and that includes dying more organically.

Cremation, long considered to be the “greener” alternative to traditional burial, requires the natural gas equivalent of driving 500 miles, notes Caitlin Doughty of the “Ask a Mortician” web series. Or, about two SUV tanks of fuel per body. Cremation also doesn’t fit into the desirable concept of returning to the Earth from whence we came, to enrich the soil and push up wildflowers.

“In a traditional cremation, the ashes that are left over, inorganic bone fragments, form a thick chalky layer that, unless distributed in the soil just right, can actually hurt or kill the tree,” says Doughty in an April TED Talk.

In traditional burials, the body is pumped full of carcinogenic formaldehyde and rubbing alcohol, placed in a hardwood or metal casket with rubber sealant and lowered into a vault of concrete or metal. Not only does this use a lot of resources, but, “When you choose burial at the cemetery, your dead body is not coming anywhere near the dirt that surrounds it,” says Doughty, so you are not food for worms. The expensive process of embalming with chemicals for sanitization reasons is also moot, she points out, since a dead body is only dangerous if it has been consumed by a wildly infectious disease like ebola.

“Human decomposition is perfectly safe,” says Doughty. “The bacteria that causes disease is not the same bacteria that causes decomposition.”

Whether they mean to or not, she says, the multibillion-dollar funeral industry, with its sterile, out-of-sight, out-of-mind practices, promotes this idea of human exceptionalism—that it doesn’t matter what it takes, how much it costs, or how bad it is for the environment, because humans are worth it.

Doughty, who runs a funeral home in Los Angeles, is among a new wave of funeral directors and environmentalists looking for a more eco-friendly way of dying. One such new option is composting, or “recomposition,” which people have been doing with cattle and other livestock for years, says Doughty, and which is being put to the test at Western Carolina University’s outdoor human decomposition facilities—one of just six in the country. Bodies are laid in a nutrient-rich mixture that reduces the body, bones and all, to soil. “In those four-to-six weeks your molecules become other molecules. You literally transform,” says Doughty.

Another option on the rise is green burial. There are 93 registered green burial sites in the country. Since 2004, Mill Valley’s Fernwood Cemetery has been offering green burials of un-embalmed bodies. Most choose to be wrapped in a cotton shroud or provide their own pine box, and stones or simple Global Positioning Systems (GPS) are used to mark the plots, which run from $6,500-$9,700.

Perhaps the greenest prospect, though, are conservation burials, where large swaths of land are purchased by a land trust.

“The beauty of this is that once you plant a few dead bodies in that land it can’t be touched, it can’t be developed on. It’s the equivalent of chaining yourself to a tree, post-mortem,” Doughty says. It’s a way for the dead to blend seamlessly into dedicated green spaces in both rural and urban areas. “Most importantly, they offer us once again a chance to just decompose, in a hole, in the ground,” says Doughty. “The soil, let me tell you, has missed us.”