April 2016 book and film review

BOOKS

THE RISE OF ISLAMIC STATE, by Patrick Cockburn. In 2012, as Syria's Bashar Al Assad besieged the city of Aleppo, ruthlessly murdering his own people and converting that ancient city into a pile of rubble, the only group able to organise any semblance of support for the population were fundamental Islamists, and they won a lot of friends. Likewise in neighbouring Iraq, fundamentalists proved the most effective opposition to the corrupt leadership of Nouri al-Maliki, and a combination of a weak and demoralised Iraqi army and lavish funding for IS from countries like Saudi Arabia and Qatar ensured that their rise would be a meteoric one.

Patrick Cockburn has written on the Middle East for The Independent for many years and here has written eloquently on the terrible situation now engulfing that embattled region. If you want your truth delivered without trimmings or cant, this is for you.

MEMOIRS OF A GEISHA, by Arthur Golden. In 1930s Japan, a twelve year old girl is sold into a Geisha house. Her beauty is noticed straight away (she has large, grey-blue eyes, very unusual in a Japanese), not least by one of the senior geishas, who is so consumed by jealousy she makes it her life's work to make her life miserable. Now read on. This novel was one of the most successful of the noughties, and does convey the strange, otherworldly atmosphere of the geishas with considerable skill. But it is not an outstanding piece of writing, and once the main plot thread is resolved two thirds of the way into the book, we find it has nowhere to go for 200 pages. And another thing. Golden acknowledges the assistance of a real-life geisha in his afterword; even names her. But there is a code of silence about that world which exists to this day, and the poor geisha in question faced death threats as a result of Golden's revelation. Question: why did he do that?

THE BUDDHA OF SUBURBIA, by Hanif Kureishi. Karim is an Asian boy living in south London struggling to find his way in a world where in the 1970s he is still seen as something of an exotic oddity. His life is made no easier when his father runs off with another woman, who encourages her paramour to give lessons in how to be enlightened to the local middle class meaningfuls. Then one of his schoolfriend finds himself an overnight sensation as leader of a punk band. By hanging onto his friend's coattails Karim's own life takes off, but where is it all going?

Where indeed. Kureishi has written more tellingly than most on the subject of teenage angst and alienation, and thoroughly deserved to win the Whitbread Prize in 1990 for best first novel. To achieve such mastery of dialogue at such a young age is remarkable indeed, and the plotting keeps one gripped from first page to last. Brilliant.

FILMS

Something new this month. For a variety of reasons (films on the plane, a Saudi channel in our hotel in Jordan which showed nothing but fairly new movies) I have seen more films this month than in any other I can remember, 20! Consequently I propose to deal with them in a new way for this month only: the "flash review" Two sentences max and a rating system dividing them into two groups:
"*" indicating a good film you may wish to see yourself
"!" suggesting a dog of a movie you would do well to leave out. Here goes:

PALIO (2015) (documentary) D- Stanley Nelson. Twice a year Siena hosts the most famous and venerable horse race in Europe. The various districts fund their own riders, who negotiate between them who's going to win this time. Corrupt? Just don't say the word in Siena if you want to go on walking around. *

THE EXPENDABLES 3 (2014) D- Patrick Hughes. Arnie, Sly, Jason  and almost every other tough guy you can name in Rambo meets Commando. !

COP CAR (2015) D- Jon Watts. Two twelve year old kids steal a police cruiser and the sheriff (Kevin Bacon) is not best pleased, especially as there's a body in the trunk. *

THE TWO FACES OF JANUARY (2014) D- Hossein Amini. An attractive couple (Viggo Mortensen and Kirsten Dunst) are doing Greece when they come under the spell of sleazy tour guide Oscar Isaac.  But who is the real conman? *

PRESERVATION (2014) D- Christopher Denham. A group of young folk go on a hunting trip in the woods, but then find themselves being hunted down like wild animals. Time for Wrenn Schmidt to man up. *

MR. HOLMES (2015) D- Bill Condon. An ageing Sherlock (Ian McKellen) is slowly losing his marbles, but becomes increasingly obsessed with a case that defeated him decades before. *

SPOOKS: THE GREATER GOOD (2015) D- Tsharat Nalluri. Spooks are taking a famous terrorist in for questioning when he is lifted by his mates. Kit Harrington (Jon Snow) is called in to make things right. !

BLENDED (2014) D- Frank Coraci. Adam Sandler takes his family on a safari in darkest Africa and bumps into Drew Barrymore. Funny thing, they went on a blind date once but it turned out to be a disaster. Like this movie. !

EDGE OF TOMORROW (AKA LIVE. DIE. REPEAT) (2014) D- Doug Liman Groundhog Day meets Starship Troopers. Say what you will about Cruise, his screen presence is undeniable. *

THE INTERVIEW (2014) D- Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg. James Franco is a top TV chatshow host who has an unexpected fan: Kim Jong Un. So he goes to North Korea to do an interview. Thing is, the CIA want him to murder him while he's there. !

TARZAN THE APEMAN (1981) D- John Derek. Mr Derek thought showing his lovely wife off in a series of Playboy-like tableaux might mitigate what has been seen by many as one of the worst movies ever made. It didn't. !

JUBAL (1956) D- Delmer Daves. Glenn Ford lands a job on a cattle ranch owned by kindly Ernest Borgnine but foreman Rod Steiger don't like him. Things brew up to a nail-biting climax. *

SICARIO (2015) D- Denis Villeneuve. Emily Blunt joins an FBI raid into Mexico to take down a drugs cartel, but boss Benicia del Toro has a secret agenda: killing everyone remotely involved in killing his wife. Things get messy very quickly. *

HOLY MOTORS (2012) D- Leos Carax. A man travels around Paris changing his appearance before leaving his limo to take part in a series of bizarre scenarios. At one he has to kill someone, then be killed himself. Oddly, he's back soon to act out his next  mysterious role. *

VERY GOOD GIRLS (2015) D- Naomi Foner. Pretty teens Dakota Fanning (the palest woman in Hollywood) and the other Olsen girl (Elizabeth) determine to lose their cherries after graduating from high school. Then they both fall for the same guy (a totally wooden Boyd Holbrook) !

GIRL FROM RIO (2003) D- Chris Monger. Having lost his wife to his boss at the bank where he works, Hugh Laurie rips it off for £5 million and goes to Rio to pursue a Samba star he's lusted after for years. Then she steals the money for her drug lord BF. Can he recover the loot, or be sliced into little pieces? !

THE BAND'S VISIT (2007 D- Eran Kolirin. An Egyptian military brass band visits Israel for a concert, but gets lost in the sticks. A sultry Jewess (Ronit Elkambetz) takes pity on them and offers them hospitality for the night. One by one, the men fall for her abundant charms. *

A GIRL WALKS HOME ALONE AT NIGHT (2014) In the Iranian  town of "Bad City", people begin to turn up dead and the slow realisation dawns that there may be a female vampire on the loose... *

HOME SWEET HELL (2015) D- Anthony Burns. Serial Mom reborn in the shape of Katherine Heigl who decides the best solution to her husband's affair is to kill the interloper. And anyone else who might threaten her perfect life in the burbs. !

STAR WARS VII: THE FORCE AWAKENS (2015) D- JJ Abrams. The gang's all back, ready to save the Universe from a new foe, though it seems very much like the old one. As do an awful lot of things in this extended tribute to the original Star Wars movies. It ain't great, but it is likeable, and Daisy Ridley is a find. *

Anti-semitic- or anti-zionist?

Ken Livingstone has landed himself in the middle of a shitstorm over whether is an anti-semite, having offered support to Naz Shah. Both have been suspended by a terrified Labour party, fearful the media are going to go medieval on their ass.

I cannot bring myself to believe Ken is really anti-semitic. His credentials as a humane, committed socialist are unimpeachable. But he is, like me, an anti-zionist, as anyone with any vestige of a conscience should be.

These atheists, who nonetheless love quoting their holy texts to justify their apartheid policies against the Palestinians, should be exposed at every opportunity. But just try it in this country, or America, or even France, where open criticism of the Jewish state has been made illegal. The Zionists have very powerful supporters in this country and around the world, and they make it their business to discredit anyone challenging their disgraceful behaviour towards the unfortunate Arabs who share their land.
"We're just trying to protect ourselves against a band of terrorists who would throw us into the sea if they got a chance", they say, and we, through the establishment media buy their line without any questioning.

So let's make this clear: I am fervently opposed to the Zionists- but not the Jews- and I think Ken would agree with me.

Warming equals greening: Gaia at work?

The BBC revealed statistics yesterday indicating the extraordinary fact that as CO2 levels have risen, the Earth has experienced a corresponding increase in the growth of trees and many other plants.
Biology 101: plants take carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere and through the process of photosynthesis give off oxygen as a "waste" product. Hence the description of the Brazilian rainforest as "the Earth's lungs", though I found out only the other day that simple algae actually produce more oxygen than the whole of Amazonia.

Don't get too excited, climate change sceptics. The effect will diminish over time, and the benefit will still be outweighed by the negatives in the medium to long term.

But it is encouraging news, and to me at least suggests that the "Gaia" principle is real. Gaia was one of the primordial Greek goddesses: the great Earth Mother. James Lovelock is responsible for re-introducing this ancient concept in 1979, in his Gaia Hypothesis. He suggested, if I may summarise, that the Earth, the biosphere, is a living, breathing entity capable of self regulation and compensating for changes in its environment.

Some say the last Ice Age ended when a crop of dark coloured flowers began to grow on the tundra, absorbing heat instead of the ice fields which simply reflected it back into space. Some might cry coincidence, but to me these latest findings show that Gaia is alive and well. But beware, even Gaia has her limits, and while we continue to pump 40 billion tonnes of CO2 into the atmosphere every year these compensating mechanisms simply won't be enough. Since the Kyoto protocol was agreed by most countries (though unfortunately not the principal offenders, China and the US) this figure has increased by 60%- and that isn't sustainable, despite the best efforts of Mother Gaia.

Nice one Obama

I said recently the British public might not take kindly being told how to run their country by the leader of a country not exactly possessing an unblemished record in foreign or domestic affairs.

Last Friday it happened. The U.S. president reminded us how our position in the world will be significantly diminished should we cut ourselves off from Europe. And while we may fly into a rage at his presumption (as BoJo did, idiotically), the uncomfortable truth is he was right.

I can't remember anything like this happening before. I was 24 when we last held a referendum on the "Common Market" as it was called then, and I don't recall any high profile interventions coming from our friends, either inside or outside Europe's domains. Then, as now, the "No" campaign was headed up by bastions of the right, Enoch Powell among them, the only notable exception being Tony Benn. Whether he would be part of the "Leave" group now will never be known, though his son Hilary is one of the more articulate campaigners to remain.

So thank you Mr Obama. You have given us a timely reality check, and we'd better damn well listen if we don't want to screw ourselves completely.

Farewell Prince, Victoria Wood and Zaha Hadid

Yesterday we were all stunned by the untimely death of Prince, without doubt one of the most gifted individuals to emerge from the rock scene in the last 40 years. Dancer, singer, musician, writer- he was a genuine tornado of talent. A friend of mine saw him live in Birmingham nearly 30 years ago. Between numbers he produced a basketball and tossed a two-pointer into a basket at the side of the stage placed at the regulation height. Then he picked up his guitar again and went on with the music. Wow!

Victoria Wood was not always to my taste. I didn't really like her songs, and Dinnerladies never really came on my radar. But some of her creations will remain immortal, like Acorn Antiques, which was not only a scathing critique on Crossroads and other low quality soaps, but was also, with the assistance of Celia Imrie and Julie Walters, hysterically funny.

Zaha Hadid's death is a tremendous blow to the world of architecture. Perhaps the most talented woman architect in history, she was what I might call "Frank Lloyd Wright squared", taking his ideas to the next level and beyond.
Frank Gehry once said: If a building with no curves costs $1, a building with one curve costs $2. A building with two curves costs $10".
Her buildings often featured multiple curves, like her design of the Welsh Assembly building in Cardiff. They did the Frank Gehry math, and decided Wales couldn't afford it, to our lasting shame. The building we do have isn't bad (though for a talking shop the acoustics are terrible), but it ain't a Hadid, and we are so much the poorer for that.

Big news in the Pelagius household

I have neglected my blog lately, but there is a reason. In March I took the plunge, the first real plunge since my retirement five years ago, and applied for the master's course in creative writing at Cardiff university. I went to the open day where I was told I would need a graduate qualification, "A two-one or first", they told me. I told them that was a problem because they don't award first and second class degrees at medical school- a pass is all anyone gets. After all, it wouldn't do to have first class and second class doctors- who'd want to go to a second class one if there was a first class one available? Turns out a medical degree was sufficient.

 The whole thing was done online. I had to submit several specimens of my writing, among which I included one of my blog posts (my January media review as it happens, where I reviewed The Wake). Ten short days later I had my unconditional offer. I bought a new computer on the strength of my success and bought the "standard text"- Creative Writing, edited by Linda Anderson. I am now working through it and trying to complete the many exercises contained within. Hopefully I'll be well prepared by the time the course begins in September.

This is a tremendous time for me, and I'll admit I haven't been so happy in a long time. When I retired I felt as if my raison d'etre had been removed, along with my status as senior partner in a busy inner city general practice. For months and months I moped around, reading, writing a little but mainly watching the tele and becoming increasingly frustrated by my empty existence. It took a couple of years to get over the shock of the loss, but now, finally, I am using my retirement to do what I always intended when I arranged to retire at 60 back in 1979: finding a new way, completely divorced from medicine, to fulfill my potential in life. Wish me luck. I'll probably need it...

The great Panama Hat Trick

You have doubtless heard about how well capitalism is doing right now, only slightly embarrassed by the revelations of Tuesday. World leaders from around the world have wisely invested their money in tiny dominions  which are the ultimate responsibility of the UK: the Russians, the Chinese, the Icelanders- it is a long list of people we have been helping to become even richer, even though they are vastly wealthy already. Jesus said the poor are always with us, and he could have added, and so are the rich. It's the fact that we the British are helping all these greedy people to protect and expand their wealth that really sickens me.

COME ON JEZZA- SAY SOMETHING!

Jeremy Corbyn has said he's in favour of remaining in the EU- very quietly. Perhaps he's keeping his powder dry until the campaign begins in earnest, but right now he is remaining remarkably taciturn about the whole thing. Is it because of his militant left background, and like Tony Benn, believes the EU is little more than a club of capitalists, conveniently coseying up to each other in order to make even greater profits while the ordinary citizens get left behind? I don't know, I just hope he makes his feelings known to the rest of us soon- and loudly.

Palestine Dispatch

"A LAND WITHOUT PEOPLE FOR A PEOPLE WITHOUT LAND"

The words of the first president of the state of Israel, Chaim Weizmann in 1914. The land which has been called Palestine for centuries is the place he was referring to, and was populated only, according to him and all other leading Zionists, by a few wandering bands of Bedouin tribesmen, themselves of questionable moral standing. Plus, of course, it had been home to the Jews for millennia before they were turfed out by the Romans in 70 AD.

Trouble was, it wasn't populated by a few Bedouin tribes, but by nearly seven million Arabs. Then in 1917, in the famous (or infamous) "Balfour Declaration", the British government pledged itself to the formation of a Jewish state in Palestine. In the small print, it also promised to defend the rights of the indigenous peoples of Palestine, but the print was so small it was overlooked and then forgotten altogether in the rush to create the brand new country of Israel. And since the establishment of that state in 1948, they have been forcing them out (millions now live in Jordan) and corralling those remaining into smaller and smaller enclaves.

I have just returned home from a week in the West Bank, absorbing the unique atmosphere of that place and learning the harsh realities of life there. When I last visited it in 2010, settlements declared illegal by the International Courts of Justice perched on the tops of a few hills around Bethlehem and other sites. Now they can be seen everywhere, not just on the hilltops but along ridges which stretch for mile upon mile. Now close on 750,000 Jewish settlers live on land bought, co-erced or simply stolen from the Palestinians. And they have no interest in living in harmony with their neighbours. They regularly sally forth from their redoubts, chopping down, burning and poisoning the Palestinian olive trees, iconic symbols of survival throughout the Middle East. Nearly one million out of the seven million olive trees belonging to the Palestinians have been destroyed in this way since 2006. So far not a single settler has even been prosecuted, never mind convicted of any offence.

How do you tell the difference between an Arab house and a settler house? Easy. An Arab house will have a large white plastic water barrel on its roof, the Settler one will not. Water supply is restricted to the Arab areas, so they needs must store it. Israeli houses live under no such restriction, their water flows from their taps just as ours does. Oh, and where does this water come from? The Arab lands of course. Yet some settlers will still tell you that the Arabs store water because they are greedy and would steal water from their neighbours. This is how they justify their behaviour. At one point we stood on a hill in Beit Sahour, a suburb of Bethlehem and looked down into a valley where a ten metre high wall has been built by the Israelis. Hundreds of Arab families live on this side of the wall, while the land they own lies on the other side. But not for long. The Israelis have passed a law saying that if land is neglected for more than three years it is forfeit, so now these families have lost their land and it is being developed by the Israelis for their own purposes .

When we arrived in Bethlehem the Palestine Marathon was about to be run. Four thousand runners, mostly Muslims, but also Arab Christians (a minority within a minority) and even a handful of liberal-minded Israelis (yes, there are a few), along with several hundred visitors from overseas. In a wonderful carnival atmosphere, under the banner of "THE RIGHT TO MOVEMENT", people forgot their differences for a few hours before returning to the grind of life under military occupation. Then two days ago, we visited the Dead Sea, surely one of the most extraordinary places on Earth and swam in its strange, unreal waters. Here too, Jews, Muslims and Christians came together to enjoy the amenities. Granted, there wasn't exactly a dialogue between these groups, but there was no segregation, no fences, just people sitting on the beach in deckchairs within yards of each other, all enjoying the balmy atmosphere and stunning views.

So it seems these warring factions can come together under the right circumstances. The Palestinian people are an incredibly robust and optimistic bunch. They are sure one day they will obtain the justice they deserve, but I fear this will come only when the world wakes up to the reality of their suffering, and comes together, as it did with Apartheid South Africa, to bring it to an end.