Laila Lalami

I went to see the film adaptation of Cormac McCarthy’s The Road a couple of days ago. I tried to trick myself into not expecting anything from the movie because I thought that would prevent me from being disappointed. There was anything wrong with director John Hillcoat’s work. And Viggo Mortensen delivers a fine performance (but then he nearly always does.) But I was still terribly disappointed. The problem, I think, is that there was no poetry to this movie and it simply doesn’t do justice to the novel.

The Californian artist Sandow Birk has just unveiled a new, monumental project titled American Qur’an, a series of paintings of an English-language Qur’an that has been adorned with scenes from American life. He has been working on this project since 2004, and has managed to finish approximately 60 of the 114 chapters. Some of the paintings are on display at the Catharine Clark Gallery in San Francisco and others at the Koplin Del Rio Gallery in Los Angeles.

I went to see the show when it opened this past weekend. Each of Birk’s paintings is made up of a Qur’anic chapter hand-written in ink, in a style of writing reminiscent of graffiti art. According to the New York Times, the text comes from a copyright-free 1861 English translation by J. M. Rodwell. Beneath the hand-written chapters are pictures in gouache. A few of the illustrations seem to me to be literal or expected (e.g. the chapter titled “The Constellations” comes with a picture of a constellation), but the vast majority are novel or unusual in some way (e.g. the first chapter, the Fatiha, appears with a maze of L.A. freeways.) Most of the pictures are narrative scenes: farmers working in a field; people standing in front of a display of dinosaur bones; workers picking up trash; and so on.

When Jori Finkel of the New York Times asked Usman Madha of the King Fahd Mosque what he thought of the project, he cautioned that some people might find the work offensive. The potential for offense is always there, as with any piece of art. But my take on it is that, although the project is titled American Qur’an, it is a highly idiosyncratic series.

It is not what one might call traditionally “American.” The painted scenes do not take place exclusively in the United States; there are representations of outer space and of a South American pyramid. And those narrative scenes that are from the United States include many different races, ethnicities, and languages. Neither could the project be referred to as a proper “Qur’an”. It is not a book, it is a series of paintings. The text is not in Arabic; it’s in English. And it doesn’t even appear to be entirely faithful to one English version. For instance, I noticed that in Rodwell’s translation, Chapter 86 is titled “The Morning Star” and begins with “By the heaven, and by the Night-Comer! / But who shall teach thee what the night-comer is?” whereas in Sandow Birk’s version, Chapter 86 uses the Arabic title of “At Taariq” and begins with the “By the heaven and that which comes in the night/But who shall teach you what it is that comes in the night.” Chapter 36 uses the proper name “Yasin” as its title and so do several English translations, but Birk uses the title “Human Being.” Birk also includes a couple of misspellings. In Chapter 53 (”The Star”) the word revelation is spelled revalation. All in all, this struck me as a highly personal project, in which an artist tries to make sense of the Qur’an on a highly personal level.

Photo credit: Sandow Birk/Koplin del Rio Gallery

Producers of The Office have announced that Aziz Ansari has joined the cast for their spin-off show. I am unreasonably excited about this–can’t wait to see what he’ll do.

I loved Jean-Dominique Bauby’s The Diving Bell and The Butterfly when I read it almost ten years ago, so I was quite reluctant to see the film adaptation, even though I’d heard that it was directed by Julian Schnabel. The movie arrived via Netflix on Friday and…it’s incredible. Schnabel does what so few directors are capable of doing when it comes to adaptations of novels, which is to say, translate literary language into visual language. What a beautiful film.

(photo credit)

So last Saturday, we braved traffic on the 405 to go see The Band’s Visit. It’s about a small Egyptian orchestra that arrives in Israel for a performance, but instead finds itself stranded in the desert, in the remote town of Beit Hatikva. All right, so you have to suspend disbelief for this one, considering Egyptians and Israelis aren’t going to be performing in each other’s countries anytime soon. Anyway, the band has no money and no place to stay, and Tewfiq the conductor (Sasson Gabai) is a grouch. One of the film’s running gags is that Tewfiq persists in referring to the band as the Alexandria Municipal Classical Orchestra, and no one has any idea what he’s saying. Eventually, the band is taken in for the night by a restaurant owner named Dina (played by the lovely Ronit Elkabetz). The Egyptians don’t speak Hebrew, the Israelis don’t speak Arabic, so everyone speaks broken English. I thought the story was a bit thin and the director, Eran Kolirin, tried to be cute, but for some reason I was charmed by the film. (And I don’t do cute. Go figure.) My favorite line in the movie is when Dina asks Tewfiq why he still plays Umm Kulthum, and he answers, “This is like asking a man why he has a soul.”

(Photo credit: Sony Pictures Classics. You can view the trailer on YouTube.)

Tomorrow is International Women’s Day, so here’s a little poem for you by the lovely and amazing Suheir Hammad: “Not Your Erotic, Not Your Exotic.”

The Levantine Center is a Los Angeles-based organization that brings the arts, literatures, and films of the Middle East and North Africa to American audiences. It regularly puts together wonderful events (some of which I’ve written about in this space) and now they are in need of your support. This month, a generous donor has offered to match every pledge up to $10,000, so every penny you give the Levantine Center will be doubled. Please: Reach out for that checkbook or credit card and go here.

When the Oscar nominations were announced last week, I was a bit surprised to hear that the film adaptation of Atonement had earned a nod for Best Picture. In some ways, the beauty of the novel rests on its use of language, its psychological depth, and a rather odd structure, which Ian McEwan somehow manages to pull off. The first third of the book takes places over the course of one day and is told from the points of view of several characters: the young, impressionable Briony Tallis, who wants to be a writer; her older sister Cecilia, who just returned from Cambridge; their inept mother, Emily; the teenage Lola, a house guest who is raped that evening; and Robbie Turner, the son of the Tallises’ charlady, who also just returned from Cambridge with a ‘first-class degree,’ and stands accused of the crime. The second part of the book is set during the Second World War, in which Robbie serves. Through flashbacks, we find out what happened to him, and learn more about his romantic relationship with Cecilia, and his fight to clear his name. The third part of the book is told through Briony’s point of view. She is now training to be a nurse, and works at a London hospital where a huge number of wounded soldiers are sent. There is also an epilogue, written in 1999 by a now elderly Briony.

In Joe Wright’s adaptation, the first third of the book is rendered beautifully and the shifting points of view work well on screen, but the entire project falls apart as soon as Robbie is whisked off to jail. The war scenes inevitably recall in the spectator’s mind the work of Steven Spielberg–and the comparison is not to Wright’s advantage. Where the book is subtle (in France, Robbie sees a single human leg hanging from a tree), the adaptation hits you over the head (a whole group of Catholic school girls dead under a tree.) The parts that are set in the hospital feel bogged down and irrelevant. Saoirse Ronan (who plays Briony as a child) and Vanessa Redgrave (who plays an old Briony) manage to rescue the scenes in which they appear, and the cinematography is certainly breathtaking, but I thought Atonement just didn’t hold together as a film. (In sharp contrast to, say, the Coen brothers’ adaptation of No Country for Old Men.)

Photo: Atonement film still (link.)

I had been meaning to visit the Museum of Contemporary Art’s exhibit on The Revolutionary Art of Emory Douglas for quite a while, and I finally, finally got a chance to do so this past weekend. Douglas, for those of you who are curious, was minister of culture in the Black Panther Party and designed all their posters–rally announcements, commemorations, calls to action–as well as their official newspaper. I was fascinated by the pieces on show, by how they ranged in tone from pure propaganda to deeply felt testaments of a cultural revolution. The exhibit included articles showing the connection with Algeria (the influence of Fanon’s theories, Eldridge Cleaver’s flight to Algiers, the support for the Panthers in post-colonial North Africa) and with other countries of the non-aligned movement. It was interesting, too, to see how Emory Douglas contributed to the branding of the Black Panther image with the consistent use of black berets, army jackets, and rifles in representing party members. (This reminded me of a show I saw a couple of years ago at the V&A museum in London, about Alberto Korda’s iconic photo of Che Guevara. The revolution will be branded!) The exhibit was curated by Sam Durant, and it’s only open for another week, so if you’re in the L.A. area, hurry up and see it before it closes.

Photo: “Power to the People” poster, by Emory Douglas

I finished work early yesterday and went to the Laemmle in Santa Monica to catch a matinee of the Coen brothers’ new film, No Country For Old Men, their adaptation of Cormac McCarthy’s novel by the same title. The story is about a welder named Llewellyn Moss (Josh Brolin) who stumbles on a handful of dead men in the Rio Grande, along with a bag full of cash–about 2 million dollars. He takes the cash, setting off a chain of events, which, although easily guessed at, are nevertheless completely suspenseful. On Moss’s trail are a psychopathic killer (Javier Bardem), a sheriff (Tommy Lee Jones), an assassin (Woody Harrelson), and a handful of unnamed Mexican drug dealers. (Unnamed, and undeveloped as characters, something that is true also of two of the three females in the book.)

In some ways, the Coen brothers’ adaptation remedied a couple of the problems in McCarthy’s otherwise excellent novel. One is that a crucial scene that resolves what happens to Moss is missing from the book, but not from the film. The other is that, in the book, it’s easy to miss the fact that the story is set in 1980 (the date is hinted at the beginning, but not mentioned again until about halfway through the novel.) Obviously, in the movie, the sense of time was immediately clear. The film also gives us the pleasure of hearing McCarthy’s pitch-perfect dialogue spoken by talented actors. (You know how, after watching Fargo, you left the theater and tried to speak like Frances McDormand? You’ll be doing the same with Tommy Lee Jones in No Country.) But there are also ways in which the Coen brothers’ movie doesn’t quite compare with the novel. The one female character, for instance, that did something other than plead with a man or serve him food or coffee ended up being cut entirely from the film. Still, the level of craft that went into making this adaptation is really, really remarkable. Not to be missed.