It was an interesting week in the climbing movie space with the release of Wizard’s Apprentice and Park Life in quick succession. These two movies in particular provided an interesting juxtaposition of styles. On the one hand you had the LT11 crew psyched and feeding off each other’s energy as they bouldered as a group in Yosemite, while on the other hand you had Adam Ondra climbing almost exclusively by himself to achieve his incredible goals. Both approaches have their positives and negatives, and it was interesting to have that contrast in such a short time period.
It was also interesting to see the different reactions to the Ondra movie. I posted my thoughts on Monday, and throughout the week others have posted theirs as well. Andrew Bisharat takes things a bit too far in his review in my view, but I think he makes some valid points. Certainly the movie could have been improved in some aspects, but overall I would tend to side with Jamie Emerson’s response to Bisharat which acknowledges some of the faults but focuses on the overall merits of the film.
the mistake that AB and JE are both making is thinking that Ondra is an emotional equal to them as adults. he isn’t. he is barely not a child. a freakishly strong, motivated, focused child, but a crying whiney, self absorbed child nonetheless.
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Unless you actually know Ondra, how could you possibly know that he is self-absorbed? And I have seen a lot of footage of Ondra, but I have never seen him cry. So how do you know he is a crying whiney?
He is always unnecessarily upset in the moment, but also always seems level-headed and light-hearted about climbing when he hasn’t just fallen. So again, unless you know him, you have no idea whether he is “an emotional equal to adults” or not.
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I agree. It seems like everyone is judging Adam in some way or another. Unless you know him, then you should only judge the video(s) of him and/or his reported accomplishments.
AB judges Adam by his tantrums in the film. Perhaps the filmmaker accentuated this to show the raw emotion and AB should have judged the FILM this way instead of judging Adam.
JE does a similar thing with his film review, focusing on Adam’s importance to the climbing community rather than on a review of the film itself. In his defense, I think his “review” was more a response to the negativity being directed personally towards Adam.
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What many people seem to overlook — but that seems patently obvious — is that it may well be that the level of emotional commitment to climbing required to climb at Adam’s level means being really really upset when you fail. The very forces that drive him to try again and again as hard as he possibly can (which is probably the deciding factor in many of his greatest achievements) are going to make him extremely upset when he fails. A climber who doesn’t get pissed when she fails isn’t trying hard. Adam gets more pissed more frequently than the rest of us; he’s also trying a hell of a lot harder.
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I think he’s a boss, and one day he’s going to try so hard he will actually turn into the Hulk.
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