Marrakech – An Appreciation

What is there about those magical cities that boast the magnetizing fulcrum of a central plaza – a place where multitudes in their rich diversity can merge into a many-hued whole? Think of the zocalo in Mexico, where even the Hacienda-walled galans mingle… just occasionally, with the campesinos, or the Bund in Shanghai, a place of strolling romantics and ageing Maoists, or Ipanema where size and age have no part in the selection of swimwear. New York doesn’t have it: Broadway is a place that real New Yorkers wouldn’t be caught dead in – its left for those waddling tourists with their shiny white sneakers and upturned eyes. And London? Picadilly Circus is a place best avoided.

Not so Marrakech, where the Jemaa el Fna is, if not the geographic, at least the spiritual center of an ancient city in an ancient culture.

It lies under the long shadow of the Koutoubia minaret, completed just as the twelfth century merged into the thirteenth. It is from within these ornamented walls that the urgent call to prayer starts long before shadows can be found – about 4.30am. Obeisance to an obelisk .

There are really three faces to the Jemaa, three phases to its day. The second call (who on earth answers the first I wonder), about 6.30am is the one that even Islamic dreamers cannot resist. From that moment on (cars are allowed to scatter pedestrians until 1pm), the place is abuzz with the still cool hurry of work-headed crowds: the whining scooters, driven mainly by men, who seem to feel more comfortable sitting almost sideways – a style of sitting guaranteed to make steering a challenge, and of course, a proof of skill; a modern Moroccan’s take on horsemanship.

And the young women – Moroccan women seem to have mastered the art of coy head-scarfed modesty with body-clinging jeans and tights that would make Allah blush.

And there are the horse and donkey-cart load carriers that tear through the parting throngs like a rehearsal for Ben Hur (which was probably filmed here, like everything else seems to have been).

Slower moving are the caleches and the cruse-ing pale ochre Renault taxis, eager for tourists with their ever open wallets. Eager too are the caleches – ornately decorated coaches whose horses are bridled with flutes of beaten copper and who clip clop their high seated customers around the city to marvel at its ornate entranceways and imposingly thick walls.

And the traditionalists – men and women in long woven kaftans with pointed klan-like hoods, who float across the wide bustling plaza like illustrations. Perhaps one or two might stop to buy a glass of orange juice from one of the many orange sellers standing high up in Cindarella sculpted wagons, reflecting the sunlight in their glowing, golden fruit.

The tourists are of course there, conspicuously obvious and economically vital. The Moroccans seem to accept, even appreciate these, often inappropriately clad foreigners. But this place doesn’t feel like just another holiday town so tarnished by tourism as to drain away the integrity of its culture. Apart from those – blessedly – alcoholic hot spots (Kosybar and Café Arabe to name a few) where non-Islamic indulgers can escape the sun’s sear with a chilly Sancerre, the place feels Moroccan to its very heart.

By midday, when the sun has reached a zenith of relentless ferocity, when even the shadows slink into doorways and shy away from the glare, the pace slows to a studied indolence. Better to duck for cover into the dark souks – those Alladin-rich tunnels of wonder that makes you feel as though you’ve suddenly burrowed underground, enfolded by stalls hawking, bargaining, negotiating the magic of Moroccan master-craftsmen. Here you’ll find leather bags of every shape and size, for which many a noble camel was sacrificed; earthenware pots, some glazed, many still the colour of the countryside; brass pots, knockers, jewelry, cutlery, dishes, trays and of course, in the bigger stalls, those layers upon layers of lovingly embroidered rugs – the carpets and kilims of the many loom-rich, wool heavy tribes, with their tea offering, you-just-have-to-look-and-don’t-buy, emissaries. And the spices: large sacks brimming with saffrons, turmeric, black peppers of various sizes, cayennes, cinnamon, and mixed spices – the irresistible Ras-al-hanout, all longing to be bought.

Finally around seven, the sun begins to think about maybe tempering its rage and the empty hot blaze of the Jemaa begins to change so that by nightfall, it has become a world of storytellers, snake charmers and celebration.

Now, scores of pop-up restaurants turn the hot grill of the open square into a magnet of hot grills – offering skewered meats, bubbling bowls of lentils and broad beans, steaming tagines and cous cous, sizzling snail soups and sundry offerings of (no doubt delicious) delicacies from other, more esoteric cuts of meat.

And all around, suddenly, new vendors have come alive, offering bargain bins of clothing from cheap Bangladeshi nylons to Nike.

There are people everywhere, and even the feared and fearless cyclists now have to put put putter their way hesitantly through the pulsing crowds. By now the tourist/local dichotomy is clear. The boldest of the tourists brave the vagaries of the street food (I fared well, my wife less so), others hover on the fringes of the frenzy, paying a few dirham for shots of themselves swaddled with snakes.

The locals, freed from the punctuation of prayer, who aren’t shopping or sightseeing are spellbound by the storytellers – those Moroccan Scherezades spinning who knows what fantasies to their hushed audiences.

I never found out what time all this nocturnal activity dies down. Maybe the 4.30am call to prayer isn’t. Maybe it’s just some paternal muezzin reminding late night celebrants that it’s time to go home, time to get ready to face another day.

MOVIES – the loud “Avengers”

I believe there are many ingredients that make for a great – OK I’ll accept passable – super hero movie. Joss Whedon – much acclaimed – manages to neatly avoid them all. “The Avengers” – that just opened to a whopping $200M in US box office sales continues to show that loud and dumb applies not only to the Republicans, but to much of successful Hollywood fare.

It needn’t have been so.

We’ve had lots of great examples of the craft of making a super hero engage us wonderfully well. Here’s how I think they managed to do that.

(a)   Start with characters that you actually are prepared to give a damn about.  Robert Downey Jr as Tony Stark (Iron Man) and Mark Ruffalo (Bruce Banner/ the Hulk) give it an earnest go. But the fleeting time they’re on screen is neutralized by the faulty glowers of Jeremy Renner as Clint Barton (Hawkeye. Arrows seems to be the ‘it’ weapon of choice these days) and Chris Hemsworth as Thor. And then there’s Samuel L Jackson. Now here’s an actor destined to make every part he appears in as non credible as possible. In Avengers, he struts around in a long black coat, looking like an escapee from the wardrobe of “The Matrix”

(b)  You need a really evil villain. Despite the immanence of global destruction that they all seem to have in their hands, such evil seems thin on the ground these days. They’re probably all hiding in the boardrooms of various corporate offices and big banks. Whatever happened to people who gave us such great lines as : “See that Mr.Bond comes to some harm.” Or “I don’t expect you to talk, Mr. Bond. I expect you to die.” Here we have an anemic looking Loki (who you all know is Thor’s brother). He’s charged with unleashing various supernatural alien types on a hapless New York (why always my city? Why not Philly or LA?). But really I think he’d be a lot more in place as a shoe salesman at Bergdorf’s

(c)   You need to be transported. After all, they’re spending the GNP of Greece on some of these movies – is it too much to ask that at some point, the audience is made to gasp with the sheer movie magic of it all? Remember when we first saw Peter Parker leap into space and swing across the heavens on a skein of webbing? Or Bruce Wayne, deep in what would become his bat cave as millions of bats flew at and around him? In “Avengers” it’s all generic crashing and banging and upturned cars.

(d)  Cleverness! The best of the superhero movies seemed to revel in their cleverness. As when Magneto pulls the iron from his dorky guard to break out of his glass prison. Or when Morgan Freeman scours the world for parts for Batman’s costume. “Avengers” has had a cleverness bypass operation, which it tries to mask with semi- witty banter.

(e)   A story-line that has some vestige of plausibility. Hey, we’re all in this together. We’re not expecting Jonathan Franzen. But we do expect something that can offer some suspension of disbelief…something with enough of a link to reality that we can buy into the silliness. The plot revolves around the theft of the Tesseract – an energy source that can pretty much do anything (mainly destroy the world). The plot just feels like a plot device to give Whedon the excuse to execute some cool effects: all those crashing and banging upturning cars.

(f)   And it all comes together with heroes fighting against all odds and that we root after. But here, these guys spend so much time bickering and fighting each other that they simply come across as a bunch of neurotic losers in tight suits (the same problem that plagued “Wolverine”)

But all is not entirely lost. Canadian Coble Smulders (who?), shown here,  is Agent Coulson. And she’s more or less worth the price of the ticket. Come to think of it, probably not.

MOVIES – Marley

Lively up yourself and gwan down to see KevinMcDonald’s  irie documentary, “Marley”. It immerses you into the life and music of probably the greatest pop musician. Ever. The movie interweaves interviews of family, friends, fellow musicians and the famous man himself with lots of live footage of performances to create a portrait of the performer. Robert Nestor Marley was the progeny of the coupling of a sixteen year old Black child and a sixty plus year old White man. The skinny half-cast, Bob, recast reggae from his Trenchtown base to rise above the violence and poverty of his surroundings.

“A hungry man is an angry man.”

The overriding focus of McDonald’s film (he also gave us the memorable “The Last King of Scotland” and the forgettable “State of Play”) centers on Marley’s Rasta-inspired world philosophy of inclusiveness and peace.

“One love, one heart,

Let’s get together and feel alright”

But Marley’s peace and love was no mere pop musician’s channeling of the zeitgeist of the time. He lived his music totally, and brought to the – usually anodyne – simpleness of pop a clear-eyed articulation of the Black experience.

“He was taken from Africa.

Brought to America.

Buffalo soldier, in the heart of America.”

You think the Temptations or Lionel Ritchie would have had the guts to have sung that?

Marley rallied (and continues to rally) a generation to, “Get up, stand up/Stand up for your rights.”

And his one love vision (the movie shows the extent to which, as a political neutral, he worked to forge a rapprochement between the warring Jamaican armies of Michael Manley’s PNP and Edward Seaga’s JLP) was always grounded in reality.

“Until the philosophy which

Holds one race superior

And another inferior

Is finally and permanently

Descredited and abandoned,

Everywhere is war.”

But unlike Dylan’s down-beat protest songs and today’s venomous hip-hop, Marley’s music is never angry. Always uplifting.

And joyful. He had a lot to be joyful about, for he was a man of great, let’s say, fecundity. Women everywhere seemed to find him irresistible. By the time he’d died of cancer at thirty-six, he’d squired eleven children from seven of his multiple lovers.

“We’ll share the shelter

Of my single bed…

Is this love that I’m feeing?”

Yeah, baby. Clearly you were feeling a lot of love.

And it’s not too far a stretch to understand his need to pen a number like, “No woman no cry.”

McDonald keeps the interviews with Marley to a minimum. His music spoke the volumes his sound-bite seeking interviewers could never get. One interviewer, incredulous that this skinny Black Jamaican could have achieved so much, let slip the core of his own jealousy. “Are you a rich man?” he asks. “Do you have a lot of possessions?”

“Is possessions make you rich?” Marley responds, shutting him down.

For in the end, it wasn’t about the money, the fame, the women, the ganja. It was always just about the music and the way it defined the man.

“These sounds of freedom

Is all I ever have…”

OK. So the movie was a bit hagiographic (after all it was produced by Ziggy Marley and Chris Blackwell. The latter created Island Records; his mother was for years a ‘close friend’ of Ian Flemming when he lived at Goldeneye. Which I guess makes Bob Marley two degrees of separation away from James Bond.) But who cares. Bob Marley is Jah!

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STUFF – Book Review

I find it’s always weird how you stumble onto the books you read – recommendations from friends, book reviews, cool covers, whatever. About a year or so ago, as I was wilting in the white heat of a swimming pool in Trinidad, I chanced upon an interview on the American radio station, NPR. The interviewer was chatting with one Noah Charney about his recently published book, “Stealing the Mystic Lamb”. It sounded interesting and lead me to stumble into this grippingly told story of art, theft and the heart-stoppingly near end of the Western canon.

Jan van Eyck, back in the 1426 was one of the first adopters of the radical new style of painting – using oils instead of tempura. This new type of paint brought a glossiness and life to art as had never been seen before. Its crowning glory was what would become regarded as the most important painting in the world (not sure who makes these kind of pronouncements): a twelve panelled masterpiece created for the cathedral of Ghent – “Adoration of the Mystic Lamb”; a painting that Erwin Panofsky described as “one that made man privy to God’s view of the world”

The story of this actual painting is itself fascinating. These kinds of religious paintings were usually the result of inputs from multiple scholars. They had to ensure that the location of heavenly doves, the choice of decorative flowers, the delicate curl of adoring hands and the relative size of people to saints were exactly right according to religious doctrine. Apparently, in painting it, van Eyck used such thinly, delicately hammered gold-leaf to adorn the rich folds of his Madonna’s gowns that to get the gold onto the painting, he had to rub his brushes in his hair (his fingertips were too oily and would immediately cause the gold to disintegrate) so that the static electricity generated would levitate the metal into place.

But that’s not the half of it. Point is, this painting had been stolen and recovered thirteen times. Now this is no wall painting that you can sneak under your coat. This monster weighs two tons. The book is – ostensibly – the story of the people and processes used to protect and purloin it. But it’s a story about art theft in general and Hitler’s crazed belief that one of the panels contained a code that would lead him to the Arma Christi (you know the Arma Christi: Christ’s crown of thorns and the Spear of Destiny). He believed that it would give him supernatural powers. It all sounds like “Raiders of the Lost Art”

Indeed, Hitler had a special department of scholars dedicated to finding this. Not so far fetched when you consider that he also had a department searching for Thule in Iceland (You know Thule – it’s where there is a band of telepathic faeries.) But where was the damn Altarpiece? It had actually been stolen by the Nazis and secreted in a chateau in Paris. But then it disappeared. Poof, into thin air. Rumors at the time was that a group of priests, in the dead of night, moved the large cloth wrapped panels in mule carriages to a secret location and then managed to persuade the Nazis that the English had taken the paintings to England for safe-keeping.

Art theft for the Nazis was at times almost as consuming a mission as world dominance. Hermann Goring in particular, was ravenous, stealing even from his fuhrer.

It was Hitler’s dream (he did after all see himself as an artist) that he would build the ultimate museum of art in Linz, his hometown in Austria. That place would be the repository for the Western canon (or at least those that passed the test of Nazi purity). His greatest prize would be the Ghent Altarpiece.  As a result, as the war and theft proceeded, his staff catalogued (the Nazis were great cataloguers) and collected vast hordes of stolen art, stored in a variety of sites – castles, monasteries, mines. The largest of these sites (some 12, 000 works, including Michaelangelos, Titians, da Vincis) was six stories underground in a heavily guarded Austrian salt mine – Alt Aussee.  Problem was, as the war began to wind down, as Hitler fled into hiding and as the storm-troopers began to give themselves up in clots of surrender, one fanatical guard – ex-concentration camp commandante, August Eigruber, took it upon himself to channel Hitler’s unspoken wishes: destroy the art! He booby trapped the mine and only in the nick of time (when last did you read a book about art history that has the page-turning excitement of a thriller?) was the art saved, thanks to a small army of Austrian miners turned saboteurs and a group of allies called the Monuments Men (which is the story of my next book review)

“Stealing the Mystic Lamb” is the kind of book you close and heave a sigh of relief – that we still have the art; much of which is of course now housed in the Louvre (which, as the book shows us, was itself a chateau that had been stolen from its owners during the French revolution and given over to house and display – to the ‘people’ – all the art stolen during that period. Indeed, the height at which art is hung in museums even now was set by the curator of the time to suit Napoleon’s height.)

So, all very fascinating, thanks to sitting by a pool and listening to NPR.

MOVIES: Headhunters

Nailbiting. A few years ago, who would have thought that the Nordics would become the undisputed masters of the modern thriller. First (to uneducated me) there was Stieg Laarson with his Millenium trilogy with the extraordinary ‘Lisbeth Salander. And now there’s Jo Nesbo. “Headhunters” is one of Nesbo’s many, increasingly famous, thrillers. Already, apparently Hollywood is production mode to turn this grippingly directed movie into it’s own sub-title-free version, re-cast for American audiences.

The one we have here is just fine. This is one of those edge of the seat thrillers where you just know things are going to go from bad to worse and where, really, there are no good guys, simply ones who are less bad.

The baddest of them all is Nikolaj Coster-Waldu as Clas. He’s the actor most of us know as the scheming, villanous Jamie Lannister from “Game of Thrones”. He’s an equally nasty piece of work here. And even though you know (because after all, it’s a movie) that he will get his comeuppance, you never quite see it coming, because, really, his foil is such an unattractive slimeball that it takes a while for one to become sympathetic to him.

Aksel Hennie is Roger, the slime-ball. This is the eponymous headhunter who uses his clients to scope out their whereabouts and (because I guess most headhunters work with unemployed clients who happen to have famous works of art lying around) where there’s art, there’s a neatly executed theft. This is the way the movie begins – like another slick heist movie. But pretty soon, the mood darkens, the plot, as they say, thickens and the bodies start to pile up.

Slime-ball begins to win us over after he’s been bitten by a pit bull, stabbed (literally) in the back, beaten up, and slammed into by a ten ton truck. Only John McClane (“Die Hard”) has been able to withstand as much punishment and still keep walking.

As always with movies of this type, I marvel at the intricacy of plotting. How on earth will they resolve all the loose ends and seeming red herrings (and this being Norwegian, there are a lot of those)? Well, they do. And once you get through the gore (“Headhunters” isn’t for the feint of heart), it’s all very satisfying.

ART REVIEW – David Shrigley’s “Brain Activity” at the Hayward

At the entrance to David Shrigley’s first major show in London at the Hayward, there’s a full-sized taxidermy stuffed headless ostrich. Clearly he’s buried his head in the sand and can’t find it, because I’d assume, his head is buried in the sand. Indeed, the piece is called ‘Headlessness”, which is both just a funny play on the cliché of burying your head in the sand and a nice physical expression of “mindlessness”. A nice way to ‘start’ and exhibition.

We then walk through some wrought iron gates, in which the words, “Do not linger at the gate” have been carved. The words of course transform the object from a gate (there to keep people out) to an invitation (“do not linger…”) to a piece of everyday life re-imagined into something resembling sculpture (the way Jasper John’s painting of flags resembled flags and the way Andy Warhol’s Brillo box resembled a Brillo box). But here, we don’t have a piece of art resembling everyday reality (the Brillo box), but everyday reality resembling a piece of art.

The image shown here is that of a hanging sign that say’s “hanging sign”. This – like the gate discussed above – is of course a semiotician’s dream. It’s also a nicely sly discussion about the extent to which we need an artist’s words or explanations to understand his/her intent. Do we need the words, “hanging sign” to know that what we’re looking at is a hanging sign? But of course, the fact that it’s in a gallery has transformed it as a signifier of some sort of art, since hanging signs are meant to signify things other than themselves (hairdressers or banks or whatever the sign should be advertising). Only art can be thus self-referential as a route to leading viewers beyond their own insular world views.

And so it goes throughout the exhibition. The crudely executed cluster of drawings/doodles that follow are really just blips of Shrigley’s train of thought – a series of random associations that seem to have no organizing principle… other than the fact that they’re his train of thought. It’s as though he is trying to externalize consciousness, and by so doing, displaying a self-portrait which is as accurate (more accurate?) than the painterly idea of a portrait, which, of course is some sort of image of a face.

Pretty much everything in the show (which is a mix of sculpture, drawings, stuffed animals, video animations and – bizarrely – a glass globe filled with his clipped toenails – I guess all artists put so much of themselves into their art, that the subject becomes its own object.) twists and re-invents ‘convention’ in ways that are at times laugh out loud, funny.

Movies: The Pirates! Band of Misfits

Whatever happened to Aardman – the happy bunch of geniuses who gave the world all those wonderful Wallace and Grommit shorts? “The Pirates…” is their latest claymation extravaganza. It’s beautifully executed. Quite frankly, the team at Aardman have reached such a perfection in style that it’s difficult to imagine anything better.

The problem is the story… and the humor. They suck. “The Pirates…” is full of frenzied action, but it never rises above a yawn. And the sharp, laugh out loud cleverness of the Wallace and Grommit wit has, well, walked the plank. Wallace and Grommit brought a delightfully silly, uniquely skewed point of view. It offered an uncompromisingly cultural kind of humor – one that you either got (in which case, you were a fan) or didn’t (in which case you saved your money for something else). Now that’s a pretty simple proposition.

Then Hollywood came a callin’ via Dreamworks, with whom they produced their last piece of movie magic (and their first full-length feature film), “Chicken Run”. Back in those days we were all prepared to root for Mel Gibson. This was before he revealed he was the Nazi’s version of a Hollywood Manchurian candidate. “Chicken…” was funny…made the kids laugh, kept the adults entertained…and for those of us old enough to know its provenance (“The Great Escape”), the fun was magnified. But then, after ‘creative differences’ lead to a divorce between Aardman and Dreamworks, they began to drift. First with “Flushed Away”… not too bad; still quirky; still reasonably funny; certainly visually stunning. After that, the humor was flushed away.  ”Pirates…” seems to me to represent a full, 100% sell-out by Aardman to the dictates of Hollywood. The result is a movie that has had any hint of quirkiness totally erased; all edge is gone; the appeal is to the four year olds in the audience, and I suspect even they wouldn’t be very pleased.

Even more disappointingly, the movie showed a huge lack of real imagination. There were scenes robbed from “Raiders of the Lost Ark” and most of the Indiana Jones movies (without the nudge, nudge, wink, wink contextualization that would clue us in that it’s a pastiche they’re opting for). The director put so much effort into getting the sets right and the set-pieces flowing nicely that the qualities that made this style of animation great just went down with Davy Jones into his locker.

Spend yer money on something else, matie

Theatre: Moon on a Rainbow Shawl

Errol John’s 1953 play, ‘Moon on a Rainbow Shawl’, is now back on at the National Theatre in London. The production is tremendously powerful with a cast of thoroughly credible, immensely engaging actors (even if only one of them got the Trinidad accent right), spearheaded by an outstanding Martina Laird. Set in a Trinidad tenement yard just after the war, it tells the story of the interconnecting, and very publicly lived, lives of the struggling residents who reside there.

At the center of the action – the ‘goings on’ – is Sophia Adams (Ms Laird), who is the story’s moral compass, a sort of one-person, fully fleshed-out  Greek chorus. It is through her eyes – her emotional responses to her neighbors and to her own dire situation – that the pervasiveness and inescapability of despair is expressed.

The situation of the characters, framed as a slice of Trinidad in 1947, is one where there’s a kind of depressing predestination. Poverty, race and background conspire to ensure that the girls will get pregnant, the women folk will forever struggle to make ends meet, the intelligent will remain under-educated, the men will slip into petty crime and the ease of abuse – either through prostitution or patronage – will forever be  commonplace. There can never be any escape! Except…except… maybe there can be. The amoral Ephraim (Danny Sapani) ignores the young girl he’s just impregnated and with what is seen as an enormous existential pull, manages to suck himself away from his fate. He is the only one who manages to drag himself away (to England, as so many did then) from everything he knows to what he hopes will be a better life; one that’s an escape from the inevitability of working class destiny.

As a piece of theatre, the play is visually extremely accurate. Apparently, working only from photographs (at least that what’s Danny Sapani told me), designer Soutra Gimour has faithfully re-created a tenement yard, right down to the (working) stand-pipe in the weed cluttered, mud packed yard. I felt as though I had been transported back in time. This was the time when, as the calypsos playing reminded the theatre-goers, ‘brown skin girls’ had to ‘stay home to mind baby’ and when the GI’s injected sperm and cash to the cash strapped society, or as Sparrow sang, “Rosita and Clementina, round the corner ‘posing, bet your life is something they selling.”

‘Moon…’ was pretty much an instant hit for new playwright Errol John who won an Observer award inaugurated by theatre critic Kenneth Tynan (the judges were Tynan, Peter Hall, Peter Ustinov and Alec Guinness… not a bad group of judges). Though rooted in that post war world, the play feels as relevant now as it was then. The relentless cycle of the lives of so many poor – mainly Black but also White – people (sadly the escape Ephraim had hoped for to London still hasn’t really been realized) – of pregnancy, poverty and the police – remains unsullied.

Movies – The Hunger Games

An exercise in Lazy Film-making

You all know the story by now. But just in case you’ve been too busy to read Young Adult Fiction, here’s the synopsis: every year, two young representatives (the modern version I guess of vestal virgins) are chosen from the twelve districts of post apocalyptic Panem (as in ‘panem et circenses’ or bread and circuses) to represent their district, entertain the masses and essentially kill each other, to the awe and entertainment of the people. The omnipotent elite watch from a series of (seemingly) limitless cameras, and, when necessary, manipulate the action, like Olympian gods.

The movie has been a huge critical and financial success (no doubt a weight off Hollywood’s shoulders as they’ve finally found a successor to Harry Potter). And you can see why the money has been rolling in: immensely popular book, attractive personable stars, great marketing and buzz and perfect timing. After all, the closest we’ve had to breaking the long post-Oscars drought has been “John Carter”.

I don’t get the ‘critical success’ part of the equation.

Here’s a story about a talented and innocent girl (called Katniss, which – cute – is a kind of plant from a genus commonly called ‘arrowhead’; the talented Jennifer Lawrence from “Winter’s Bone”) driven to desperation, battered and bruised and surviving through relentless determination. But this is no Rooney Mara (Lisbeth Salander in “The Girl With The Dragon’s Tattoo”), who brought an edge of the seat intensity and credibility to her performance. Rather, we’re meant to believe in Jennifer Lawrence who never seems to break a sweat even of she’s rolling down hills or being shot at. Jen seems to be more on a sort of fun school outing rather than in a desperate fight to save her life. Her hair – and it’s very pretty – always remains wonderfully coiffed; and her expression stays unvaryingly bland from start to finish. I guess it must take skilled acting to offer such unidimensional expressionlessness for all of the movie’s two and a half going on twelve hours.

Director Gary Ross is master of the harmless movie (“Big” with Tom Hanks and “Sea Biscuit”). Here he manages to stage fight scenes (come on – twenty two kids are killed in the story) with a kind of blurry decorousness, as if he’s afraid of wounding our precious sensibilities. We hardly hear a thud from knife or stone on bone; there’s virtually no blood, and most of the time we never even quite see the lethal accuracy of Katniss’ arrows. He prefers to focus on the shooter; no time for the shot. Ross seems to be so concerned about the ten year olds who’ll go to the movie, that I half expected to see a scrolling disclaimer at the bottom of the screen (“No kids were killed during the filming of these scenes. Do not try this at home. Is your mother there with you?”)

Even the CGI scenes of Panea and the agog crowds are so staged and artificial that never for a moment does the director work hard at creating the willing suspension of disbelief. It’s basically lazy film making. I think the overall creative rationale was a simple one: “OK kids, you’ve read the book, you know the story; here’s the illustrated version.”

So, if you’ve read the book and your imagination isn’t enough, here’s a shoddy attempt to re-imagine things for you.

An Appreciation: Wistawa Szymborska

Wistawa Szymborska was a Polish poet who was awarded the Nobel prize back in 1996 and who died last month (February). I thought I’d write a few words (OK paragraphs) of appreciation. Maybe one of the two persons who actually read this blog might wish to dip into her work themselves. She didn’t publish much – only about 250 poems (about the same as T.S.Eliot’s actually). When she was asked why she published so little, she told the interviewer it was because she had a waste bin in her office. Her work spans a life that began in Russian occupied Poland (her first book was rejected by the censors for failing to “meet socialist requirements” – a fact that I suspect influenced her style of hiding in plain sight) and ended in a country much changed.

But her themes and preoccupations remained very firmly focused – an unwavering cynicism about politics and the duplicity of political promises; and an investigator’s eye for continually peeling back layers of accepted knowledge. (In her Nobel acceptance speech, she spoke of those – the politicians, the dictators the…fill in the blank here – who “don’t want to find out anything else, since that might diminish the force of their arguments”. In ‘On The Banks of The Styx’ she writes that “…only doubt/can make you, sorry soul, a bit less wretched.”)

As with all poets – all art for that matter - she offers us a distinctive way – her way – of seeing things, with a charming, almost story-telling style that invites you in, usually with some disarmingly simple thought or image. But watch it – you know she’s gonna get you.

in ‘Coloratura’ the romantic image of a whistling bird quickly becomes the siren song of a politician’s seductive cant that will “twitter nothing bitter” with a “voice so thin it sounds like air”

And ‘Clouds’ begins with an almost Wordsworthian romanticism:

“I’d have to be really quick

to describe clouds -

a split second’s enough

for them to start being something else.”

Pretty soon this pleasant image – with which we can all identify – twists into the poet’s perception. Said clouds are…

“Unburdened by memory of any kind,

they float easily over facts.

What on earth could they bear witness to?

They scatter whenever something happens”

And with that simple twist can we ever see cloulds the same way again or will the idea of them as “floating over facts” forever identify them with the Bushes and Blairs of the world? (Damn. I can no longer wander lonely as a cloud.)

The theme of memory as witness is one she returns to again and again. For her, memory is the thing that roots us in actuality – it is in the forgetting, the often deliberate desire to escape memory that we let the horrors happen.  In ‘Notes From a Non-Extstent Himalayian Expedition’,  she writes:

“We’ve inherited hope -

the gift of forgetting”

And this is a gift to which she heaps ironic praise in many of her poems. In ‘May 16, 1973′ she writes:

“One of those many dates

that no longer ring a bell.

Where I was going that day,

what I was doing – I don’t know”

This lack of memory, she observes was “Not a bad trick/to vanish before my own eyes”. The poem ends with a desire to re-engage, to escape from escape as it were:

“I shake my memory.

Maybe something in its branches

that has been asleep for years

will start with a flutter.”

Probably one of her most famous poems (that you can apply to anything that’s happening these days, especially now with a Republican drum beat to attack Iran) is ‘The End and The Beginning’.

It starts:

“After every war

someone has to tidy up.

Things won’t pick

themselves up, after all.”

It ends:

“Someone has to lie there

in the grass that covers up

the causes and effects

with a cornstalk in his teeth

gawking at the clouds.”