A Very Irish Story

I was reading The Independent yesterday morning and saw this headline: Poet Forced To Pulp Work After Row With Family. There was no picture or other explanation and I had never heard about this incident before, but I knew immediately that the poet and the family had to be Irish. I clicked on the link and of course I was right. How did I know? Well, it was elementary my dear Watson. Firstly, in no other country in the world is poetry taken seriously enough to cause a major family dispute. Poets are important public figures in Ireland and as incredible as this may seem to an American or Australian reader the poetry sections of the bookshops (at least in Belfast) are well frequented and do a brisk trade. Secondly, it had to be a country where publishers are easily brow beaten by lawyers which meant Britain or Ireland. Thirdly, I knew it had to be an Irish story because of the key "row with family" phrase. The Irish family row puts all other family rows to shame and the blow ups I have seen at various Thanksgivings etc. over the years are a pale imitation of a genuine Celtic shindig. I wont soon forget the wedding reception I attended where one man give another a Glasgow kiss and their two wives instantly began tearing at one another's hair as if they had been waiting to do it for decades, which they probably had.

Mark Kermode On Eat, Pray, Love

I don't agree with Mark Kermode about a lot of films (I thought he was dead wrong about Inception for example) but I really liked his take on Eat, Pray, Love. I tried the book a few months back over a pot of tea in Borders and thought it was ghastly Oprah bait: a spoiled yuppie, discovers an Atlas and goes foreign. I was so irritated by the tone that I gave up at page 30, so, who knows, maybe it gets better after that. Anyway, this is Kermode's take on the film, which, unless I am being tortured at a CIA black site or something, I will probably not see.

The Continuing Awesomeness Of Days Of Our Lives

I've started going to the gym a couple of days a week and the time I go coincides with when Days Of Our Lives is on the TV. My better half used to watch Days years ago when we lived in New York and occasionally she'd watch it when we moved to Denver. By a process of osmosis I got to know roughly what was happening and it was always something interesting, for example: John being held against his will in a submarine by a woman who was trying to brainwash him into thinking it was a decade earlier and they were still married. A couple of years ago I'd heard that NBC had cancelled Days because of declining ratings. But obviously that was a false report and it is still going strong. In the Days episodes I've been watching over the last week Hope has become some kind of detective or sheriff's deputy and arch villain Stefano is back! First let me talk about Hope: she still looks terrific, I don't know what she's been doing or has had done but she looks great. Now Stefano: the last I heard Stefano was dead and had left Days to join another soap but he has apparently, triumphantly, returned. Everything about Stefano is fantastic: his wig, his accent, his mad, seemingly pointless schemes, his evil look and please remember that the dude playing him with such verve is well into his 80's. You also have to admire the way he has outwitted the Grim Reaper over the years. According to Wikipedia Stefano has died on the following occasions:
1) By a stroke in 1983.
2) His car plunged into the icy waters of Salem's harbor during a police chase in 1984.
3) Marlena shot him, and he fell from a catwalk as the building caught fire in 1985 (he also had a brain tumor).
4) In 1991, he was presumed to have died in another fire and cave collapse.
5) In 1994, his car erupted into a fireball after being shot at by John.
6) Also in 1994, he drowned near Maison Blanche.
7) In 1996, he died in a plane explosion.
8) Again, in 1996, he was blown up and buried under collapsing tunnel during confrontation with Rachel Blake. This was his last depicted "death" until 2007. However in 2002, Andre DiMera (posing as Tony) claimed that his uncle had died from injuries sustained from a car crash in Monte Carlo. In 2004, when Marlena and the presumed dead Salem Stalker victims found a blackened, unrecognizable corpse on Melaswen, Andre (posing as Tony) claimed it was Stefano. Andre said he had killed Stefano by draining his blood so Andre could cure his own blood disease.
9) In 2007, his death was faked once again. As a setup by the Salem P.D., Steven "Patch" Johnson appeared to stab Stefano to death, but he was drugged and a fake funeral was setup to lure Andre.
10) In 2009 he had a heart attack, but survived.

We've Had Fires & Floods And Now We're Going To Get Locusts

I've been living in Melbourne for two years and it's a very pleasant, easy going city on the whole. There have been a few climatic extremes which have surprised me: on the catastrophic Black Saturday in February 2009 the temperature reached 46.5 celsius (116.5 Farenheit) and the city was covered in a haze of smoke; and this winter it's apparently been wetter than it's been in decades and much of rural Victoria has been subjected to flooding (although I've quite enjoyed all the rain). Last year we had a small earthquake and everyone in my family got the swine flu (including my first born) and now Melbourne is about to get inundated with a plague of locusts. The Melbourne Age says it's going to be the biggest such plague in nearly a century which some people may find alarming, but not me. I'm looking forward to it. It will add a certain frisson to Pesach next year and it's bound to be good material for at least a short story. A plague of locusts has been a rich source of nightmares since Sunday School but as long as you're not a subsistence farmer apparently its not that bad. My wife spent several years of her childhood in Niger, west Africa and vividly recalls the locust invasions and the excitement they generated. Her story reminded me of an amazing scene in Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart where the locusts come and instead of being horrified the Nigerian peasants are grateful because of all that free protein hopping right into their laps.
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Why the picture of Homer Simpson? Come on, think about it...

My New Yorker Year

In a moment of madness in late July I decided that the thing I really needed in my life was a subscription to the New Yorker magazine. I first came across The New Yorker in Belfast Central Library in the 1980's and I worked my through the magazine from the 30's onwards. There's a lot of crap but a lot of good stuff in the early New Yorkers from the usual suspects: Thurber, EB White etc to lesser known writers and consistenly funny cartoons. When Pauline Kael and Woody Allen et alia came on board the magazine was firing on all cylinders. I've picked up the New Yorker now and again in bookstores or when it's been lying around someone's house or occasionally I've bought it for a long aeroplane ride but it's never got its hooks into me the way it does with some people. Why I suddenly felt the need to subscribe back in July is a mystery to me now. Perhaps it was nostalgia for the 7 years I spent living in New York or perhaps it was nostalgia for all those years reading the mag in Belfast Central Library. Who knows? It doesn't matter. I ordered the damn thing and I waited for it to come.

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The first issue I got was August 9th. I read the contents and it looked interesting. A piece by David Sedaris on flying and another by Nicholson Baker on video games. I like both those gentlemen and in the hands of the New Yorker's famous editing team they were bound to turn out something brilliant. They did not. Sedaris complained that Americans dressed badly when they flew and got upset when their flight was delayed. That was his whole bit. It wasn't funny or insightful or even bad, it was just bleh. The Baker piece on video games was in the voice of a grumpy old man complaining about the lack of depth to video games. I thought it was a parody at first but it just went on and on like that. He didn't even like Assassins' Creed which is a great video game. The rest of that issue was all filler.

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The next New Yorker I got was a double issue Aug 16 & 23. It was only 10 pages longer than the Aug 9 issue which felt like a bit of scam from the getgo (cue Woody Allen joke "this is terrible and the portions are so small"). I couldn't find a single interesting article in this issue. I was hopeful for John Lee Anderson's take on Iran (I read his biography of Che) but it wasn't very focused or interesting at all. Tony Lane reviewed The Expendables and complained about the lack of irony and wondered where Van Damme was (I assume rhetorically because the Van Damme-Stallone split has been well documented). I dropped this issue in the bath and it's all stuck together now but I don't feel the urge to mount a restoration attempt.

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The last issue I got was August 30. This was the one that really annoyed me. The New Yorker is aimed principally at two groups of people: ageing Jews living in Florida and wannabe hipsters. Unfortunately it seems that the current editor is trying to increase the wannabe hipster demographic, which can be the only explanation for Adam Gopnik's piece on Winston Churchill. "Kids, listen up, there was this Churchill dude who, like, saved the world or something," was basically the tenor of his article. He'd read a couple of biographies, done no interviews or original research of any kind and produced a piss poor Churchill bio that was so shallow it felt like a script for the History Channel. There was also an article by Oliver Sacks about the same things he always writes about and finally a David Denby film review of Eat Pray Love that was actually pretty good.

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So far my New Yorker year has begun badly, but I've only read the August material (BTW where the hell are my September mags?!) when everyone's away and the magazine was probably put together by the interns so I'm not despairing just yet. (Incidentally, the picture is the great Saul Steinberg View From 9th Avenue cover from the 70's. Nowadays the New Yorker costs $5.99 an issue.)

A Barbershop Conversation About Inception

On Saturday afternoon I was at the barbershop on Barkley Street getting my hair cut. (Not for me the trendy hair places round the corner on Acland Street, and BTW, as an Irishman, I get my hair cut, not "done".) While I was in the chair a regular customer started a conversation with the barber about movies. They got to talking about Inception which my barber hated - he's a no nonsense Russian guy about 50 with a good deal of common sense. The customer was a skinny character in a leather jacket and hipster glasses and I think he mentioned the fact that he was a college professor. The customer said that my barber probably hadn't understood Inception, that it was all about Freud and was a very intelligent film and that he should probably watch it a second time. My barber said that he had understood it perfectly but was bored to tears and wouldn't watch it again in a million years.
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I said nothing. For two reasons. Firstly because I didn't want to get worked up and secondly because although I only get a number three all over I was still getting a sensational hair cut and didn't want to ruin it. However I do have an opinion about Inception. (I haven't formally blogged about this but I have mentioned it several times in comment threads, so, if you'll please excuse the repetition...) I thought Inception was the worst kind of film: a really dumb movie masquerading as an intelligent one. Pretentious, shallow codswallop that seems to have fooled a lot of people into thinking there are hidden depths of wisdom or something. Ugh, the acting, the dreariness, the logical flaws, but my main problem with the picture was its asexuality. If Christopher Nolan had really read Freud (or if he'd been French) the movie wouldn't have been the chase and shoot em up fantasies of a 10 year old boy but would have been chock full of seduction. How about instead of a gun battle within a gun battle within a gun battle we had at least one scene where they use eroticism to convince their clients? Ellen Page is a nice young lady but she's not going to launch a thousand ships or start a war is she? And it wasn't just the casting, it was the entire ethos. Does anybody on this planet have such sterile, unerotic dreams as everyone in Inception seems to have? I'll bet even the Pope has the odd sex dream - you can't help it, you're human. It reminded me of the National Lampoon novel Bored of the Rings where the Dark Lord, instead of using the Nine Riders and brute force, hires a beautiful elf maiden to seduce the ring from Frodo...she caresses his hairy hobbit toes and he gives it to her immediately - end of story. Yes I know Nolan is English but despite the stereotype the English are a bawdy people and masters of innuendo from Chaucer to Syd James and Lily Allen.

Bibliophobes

Idiots wanting to burn books have been in the news for a while but I wont even stoop to talk about that lunacy, however if you'll indulge me I will blather on about bibliophobia from the other side of the political spectrum. About once a week I go over to The Huffington Post to take the pulse of this part of America. I'm usually on there for about a minute before I see something that irritates the hell out of me, an article by Sean Penn wittering on about Fidel Castro the humanitarian or Alec Baldwin trying to pretend he isn't as dumb as a board or this MD guy they always have on talking about how - get this - quantum theory proves the existence of the soul/God/the Afterlife. The post that annoyed me this morning was an older one on 13 books that everyone pretends to have read but no one actually has. The author goes on to boast of his ignorance and about how boring the books on his list actually are. I don't want to increase The Huffington Post's hit counts for this piece so I'll tell you the 13 books in the order I remember them: As I Lay Dying, War and Peace, Infinite Jest, The Canterbury Tales, Remembrance of Things Past, The Satanic Verses, A Christmas Carol, Moby Dick, Don Quixote, Democracy in America, A Brief History of Time, The Name of the Rose.
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Purely by luck I have actually read all 13 of these books (I polished off the Rushdie only this month). None of them are particularly difficult and apart from Infinite Jest and The Satanic Verses none were a chore to complete. Why the author of this story and the hundreds of commenters on it would brag that they hate these particular books (and books in general) is a mystery to me. When I was a kid books were things to be cherished and loved: the library was a magical place and bookshops were just as exciting. Who are these people that hate books and don't want to be challenged by anything slightly out of their comfort zone? I feel sorry for anyone who hasn't read the second part of Don Quixote which is funny and strange and post modern, or Ulysses with its extraordinary, beautiful ending, or As I Lay Dying which if you really focused you could read in an hour. Hating books is nothing to be proud of. The other side of the coin is the people who pretend to have read these books when in fact they haven't. In a way I respect them more, at least they understand that these important novels and texts are highlights of our sorry excuse for a culture.

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There's always been a No Nothing/nativist streak in American life but The Huffington Post/Fox News dumbing of America is a trend that I feel is now unstoppable. My friend Roger was fired as editor of Harper's Magazine because he didn't want to make it cute and all HuffPost-like and only two Sundays ago the headline - the lead frickin story - on The New York Times's website was about Victoria Beckham's sense of style. Sure, in the Symposium Plato complained about "the youth of today" and probably for millennia before that oldsters were whinging that everything was going to hell, but this time it feels different. There are more distractions than ever and reading books for pleasure really might be on the way out as an entertainment mode within a decade or so. We're texting and tweeting and gaming ourselves to death. Few people it seems will give a shit.

Of Thee I Sing

Despite two wars, complete economic meltdown, a domestic agenda in tatters and Iran's imminent acquisition of nuclear weapons, President Barack Obama has somehow found the time to write a children's book called Of Thee I Sing, which is being published by Knopf in November. It's a series of "letters to his daughters" about prominent American heroes and the inspirational lessons that can be learned from them. There better be some fart jokes in there too or this book is really going to be a bore for any kids that I know, but I imagine it will sell well as clueless grandparents buy it by the truck load for Christmas or Channukah. Knopf are also the publishers of Tony Blair's book which I've been reading all week and which has been poorly edited and disastrously indexed; so here's hoping they've done a better job with the President's book, although I do wonder why Knopf let Obama go with the title Of Thee I Sing which is, if I recall correctly, also the title of a Gershwin musical from the 30's about a silly, vacuous politician who somehow becomes President of the United States. Hmmmm.
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I do like the cover illustration which looks cute and was done by Loren Long who did the art for, er, Madonna's books, but the Knopf people had to ruin that too by getting the typography wrong. I looked this book up in the Library of Congress Catalog: the title is Of Thee I Sing, not, of THEE I SING.

David Thompson

I read the sad news on Dec Burke's blog that David Thompson of the great Murder By The Book store in Houston has died. Thompson was a tireless advocate of new authors and crime and mystery writing in general. I never did a reading at Murder By The Book but I visited the store when I was in Houston and was impressed by everything about it.
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The big chains only carry the big authors, so we small fry, especially mystery authors, owe these plucky independent book stores a big debt of thanks for keeping our names in the public eye. Actually no, that's the passive voice. Let me rephrase that: I would like to thank every bookshop and bookstore owner that has ever hosted a reading for me or invited me to be part of a panel. I really appreciate it and I am in your debt.
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Mr Thompson, my best wishes to your friends, colleagues and family. You will be missed.

Tony Blair's Prose Style

I've been reading Tony Blair's memoir A Journey for the last few days and I've been intrigued by Blair's writing style. It's not Churchillian that's for sure but seems to be - like Mr Churchill himself - a trans Atlantic amalgam. Its not quite British English, not quite American English. His vocabulary is very slangy and colloquial and this makes the book chatty and extremely readable but also robs it of gravitas. It's a strange tone to take for what essentially is a political memoir (there isn't really much autobiography).
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It was probably a mistake on my part to get the US version of A Journey because its full of irritating parentheses explaining by elections and Arthur Scargill etc. Sonny Mehta the editor in chief at Knopf probably told Blair to unpack everything so that readers with the meanest understanding could get it (this might once have been good policy once but times have changed since Sonny's heyday and now in the age of wikipedia this thinking is completely redundant). I imagine too that the UK version doesn't begin with the gushing preface about Blair's love for America which most American citizens - including your own correspondent - will find embarrassing. I suppose the biggest surprise of the book so far is Blair's prudery: he refuses to use profanity, writing "f***ing" and even "bull****" lest anyone be upset by words which have been appearing in English publications since the time of Chaucer.
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I haven't finished A Journey but at the moment, despite its weirdness, it's up there with Churchill's My Early Life as one of the most entertaining Prime Minister's memoirs - not a genre studded with brilliance, admittedly.
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I have read enough to be unimpressed by the indexing job. If you look up Australia in the index there are two listings. The indexer missed Blair's visit to Australia where he stayed with the Prime Minister and spoke in front of Rupert Murdoch's business group, he somehow missed Blair's influential Australian best friend in college, and he missed the fact that Blair actually lived in Australia for nearly five years when he was a boy. This is lazy stuff from Knopf.
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Finally I felt this clip from Apocalypse Now was appropriate (esp at 1:59) but it should NOT be watched by animal lovers. Oh and yeah, spoiler alert, this is the end of the movie.
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And a final final thought, Peter Morgan who wrote The Queen and who owes his entire career to Blair is saying in The Daily Telegraph that Blair plagiarised him when Blair wrote about his first meeting with Queen Elizabeth. "You are my 10th Prime Minister, Winston was the first," Helen Mirren says in the film. Remarkably, in the book, the real Queen Elizabeth says exactly the same thing even though Peter Morgan says that he completely made that line up. Interesting, no?

every blade of grass has an angel above it whispering "grow, grow..."

Jonathan Franzen's Working Class Problem?

A couple of months ago, after Harvey Pekar's death, I blogged about my admiration for Pekar and I mentioned in passing that Pekar was one of the very few writers who gave an accurate representation of working class life. I felt that the blind spot of our most celebrated novelists was their shoddy portrayal of working class people and their tin ear for blue collar dialogue. In my post on the Iraq War memoir House to House I banged on about the same theme and mentioned Amis, Barnes and Rushdie as writers who just don't get working class people because they are private school boys who come from wealthy backgrounds. I think this is more of a problem in the UK than the US because of greater social mobility; however it still seems to be an issue - my buddy John McFetridge sent me this review from the Toronto Star of Jonathan's Franzen's new novel Freedom. In particular this paragraph struck him: "... the novel’s working class characters, including young Joey’s wife Carol and her mother Connie, read as parodies of the American lumpen proletariat. The women are strong, a little slutty and adverse to self-analysis and other intellectual pursuits; the men are a mob of gun totin’, flag lovin’, liberal hatin’ yokels standing in the way of progress."

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Now I liked Jonathan Franzen's The Corrections, but I'm not in the mood for another patronising take on blue collar life. These things are not good for my blood pressure as my wife will tell you after we watched Clint Eastwood's Million Dollar Baby. (I had to get a quiet corner and reread Jim Webb's Born Fighting until I calmed down.) So before I lay out my cash...if anyone has read Freedom I'd really appreciate their take on this issue.

Worst Author Photos - Kids Edition

I read Shel Silverstein's The Giving Tree for the first time today to my four year old daughter today and man what a bummer that book is. It starts off depressing and just gets worse. It's got the same bleak, Schopenhauerian melancholy as the suicide-inducing Charles Schulz and his allegedly funny Peanuts strip. But I didn't really want to talk about the book itself so much as the author photograph right there on the back cover. Good God that's an intimidating author pic for a children's book. Now I know the author photographs on my books aren't exactly heart warming, but you really have to strike a balance between insane (Patricia Cornwell next to her helicopter) and elusive (Michael Faber walking in a field in the snow with his back to the camera). The late Shel Silverstein's pic strikes no balance. It is not good, although it didn't apparently hurt his sales.
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Anyhoo I was telling my older daughter about the Shel Silverstein author photograph and how freaky it was and she delightedly informed me that in Diary of a Wimpy Kid there's a whole riff about that author pic and there's even a scary drawing of the pic done by the Wimpy Kid himself. The Wimpy Kid's father repeatedly threatens him with the promise that if he doesn't "brush his teeth Shel Silverstein from The Giving Tree will get him" which is pretty funny stuff.

Shoes and Eggs

When I did a book signing at the Easons on O'Connell Street, Dublin four people showed up, one of whom wanted to know the way to the toilet. When Tony Blair arrived there on Saturday to promote his memoir: A Journey, hundreds queued to get the book signed and several dozen "peace activists" came to demonstrate against Blair and to throw, according to the Belfast Telegraph "shoes and eggs." (In the video I see only one shoe which looks like an uncomfortable woman's cork heel but I'll take the Tele's word for it that there were more.) Blair didn't get hit by either a shoe or an egg but he must have heard the "peace activists" chant of "Hey hey Tony hey - how many kids did you kill today?" which, admittedly, isn't as good as the LBJ original but at least it scans.
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I assume the "peace activists" are not talking about Northern Irish kids. Since the Good Friday Agreement which Blair brokered between Nationalists and Unionists in 1997 the murder rate in Northern Ireland has plummeted, presumably saving the lives of many children and there are certainly a lot fewer orphans. Perhaps the UK was wrong to support the US invasion of Iraq, de jure and de facto, I don't know, but the "peace activists" chant seems perverse in the context of what Blair has done for peace in Ireland. A peace that was supported in a referendum by massive majorities north and south of the border.
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Incidentally Ghandi was a peace activist who never felt the need to throw a shoe or an egg, but then again the protesters on O'Connell Street were Irish (not one of the great culinary peoples of the world) and so maybe they were just trying to make a Dover sole omelette.
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Dover sole omelette, geddit? Huh? No? Is this thing on? . . . Sheesh, sometimes I dont know why I bother.

Me and Orson Welles

Richard Linklater's Me and Orson Welles is the whimsical tale of a teenager (Zac Efron) who blags his way into Orson Welles' Mercury Theatre stage production of Julius Caesar in 1937. Efron falls for Mercury staffer, Claire Danes, who wants to work in the movies. Efron is harmless and his plot with Danes isn't that annoying but the real heart of the piece is Christian McKay's performance as Orson Welles which is nothing short of amazing. He doesn't look much like Welles but he captures Welles's voice, mannerisms and charisma. There's a wonderful moment when Efron follows Welles up to the CBS radio studio where they are doing a live broadcast of what sounds like The Damon Runyon Theatre. The rest of the cast has been rehearsing for a while and Welles shows up and just reads, improvising half of his lines from the book he was looking at on the way over: The Magnificent Ambersons. The reactions on the faces of other members of the cast tell the whole narrative in miniature: Orson Welles is a charmer, a conman, an egomaniac, a burning-the-candle-at-both-ends genius but my God we're lucky to be here and when our grandkids ask us for a story fifty years from now we'll tell them about the time we shared a stage once with the great man himself.
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And here's Orson Welles telling one of my favourite anecdotes about He and Winston Churchill.

Winter's Bone

Winter's Bone is the best film about Northern Ireland that I've seen. Of course it isn't actually set in Northern Ireland, it's actually set in an Ulster Scots community in the Ozark Mountains. But the people who left Ulster for Appalachia two and a half centuries ago are virtually indistinguishable from the ones who stayed behind. As David Hackett Fischer shows in his book Albion's Seed, the Ulster Scots were the clannish border fighters who settled in Ulster around the time of the Plantations in Ireland (c. 1600), many of whom subsequently emigrated to the US in the mid eighteenth century. Jim Webb does a nice job describing the Ulster Scots in his book Born Fighting, explaining that these people were natural hunters and trackers who despised authority and who thus formed the backbone of the US Army in several wars.

This is the synopsis of the film from the movie's website. I don't think it gives too much away.

Seventeen-year-old Ree Dolly (Jennifer Lawrence) sets out to track down her father, who put their house up for his bail bond and then disappeared. If she fails, Ree and her family will be turned out into the Ozark woods. Challenging her outlaw kin's code of silence and risking her life, Ree hacks through the lies, evasions and threats offered up by her relatives and begins to piece together the truth.

Part thriller, part atmospheric observation piece, Winter's Bone is a great piece of work. The mountains are beautifully shot, the performances are subtle and the mood is tense and claustrophobic. Everyone is related to everyone else in this small country community and there is no firm line between good and evil. Just like in rural Ulster the one thing you are taught when dealing with the law is that "whatever you say, say nothing." Ree's journey has a gothic, fairy tale aspect but it's very much grounded in grim twenty first century reality. The film is also much more disturbing & frightening than all those tedious slasher movies everywhere in the multiplexes.

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If you want to understand Northern Ireland, ignore the Hollywood pap and watch Paul Greengrass's Bloody Sunday and Winter's Bone instead.

A Prophet

A Prophet is a French crime thriller directed by Jacques Audiard that currently holds a 97% fresh rating on Rotten Tomatoes. It tells the story of an Arab petty criminal Malik El Djebena (Tahar Rahim) who is sentenced to six years in jail for beating up a policeman. For reasons that aren't too clear he falls in with the Corsican mafia in prison rather than the Muslims and reluctantly kills a ludicrously under protected informer to prove his bona fides and get the Corsicans' protection. As a plot device most of the Corsicans are sent to Corsica to serve out their sentences (but not, apparently, the big boss) allowing Malik to move up the ranks. Throughout the film he learns to read and write and somehow establishes his own slap dash criminal network while still making coffee for the boss. The Corsican chief finds out about this and hurts him with a spoon and then - immediately after this spoon incident - decides that Malik and his gang of incompetent hash smugglers are the right men to assassinate an important criminal rival.
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I really wanted to like this film because I enjoyed Audiard's The Beat That My Heart Skipped and especially after Mark Kermode's gushing review on the BBC, but je ne l'aime pas mostly because the plot was just too ridiculous. A film doesn't have to be logical but it does have to follow its own internal logic and A Prophet doesn't. He's either a criminal mastermind or a dogsbody, he cant be both. Prisons run on the currency of fear and you've either got the shekels or you dont. The director doesn't really understand how prison or organised crime works and his deus ex machina Red Harvest/Yojimbo ending was completely unbelievable. There's a Muslim revelation subtext which feels tacked on and a Henry IV Falstaff/Prince Hal brush off bit that you could see coming from the first ten minutes. The acting is one note from everyone including the lead who has been praised to the skies for this performance. Other reviewers have lauded the vague religious iconography but it might as well have been a man sticking his arm in his jacket and pretending to be that other famous Corsican bandit for all its relevance. Nothing in the screenplay has been thought through too deeply. Stereotypes are everywhere: devout Muslim scholars, long haired Corsican goons, flashy Italian gangsters etc. The one thing I liked was the direction which was supremely confident and bold, but even the best scenes were often undercut by cheesy musical choices. Yes but its 97% fresh, I hear you say. Well, I'm sorry I don't know what film they saw but the 97% are wrong and I'm right: A Prophet is a bit like French pop music - an interesting curiosity but ultimately just fluff that no one should take too seriously. Jacques Audiard can do better and needs to be held to a higher standard.