Tag Archive: Greenland


The epic loop of The Greenlanders

Filed under: Books, Fiction, Music — Leave a comment
November 20, 2016

THE GREENLANDERS by Jane Smiley (Anchor Books, 2005)

franzen_smileyIs life too short for big books?

When it comes to novels like Infinite Jest or Middlemarch, I’d say not.

David Foster Wallace was so overflowing with ideas that he needed the space to expand his thoughts while George Eliot used a larger palette to create a world with a world.

Yet, there seems to be a trend (or requirement) for writing 500 or more pages as a demonstration of a writer’s prowess.

Jonathan Safran Foer’s  sprawling ‘Here I Am’ is one recent example of a novel that would have greatly benefited from trimming by at least 200 pages.

Jane Smiley’s epic Norse saga is another. Continue reading →

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ICE ON THE RUN

Filed under: Good causes, Movies, Photography, Politics — Leave a comment
August 2, 2013

CHASING ICE directed by Jeff Orlowski (USA, 2012)

Scientists can show us charts, produce statistics and even talk about the real possibility of a ‘mass extinction event’  but it is hard visual evidence that real makes you see that global warming is real.

The astonishing work of nature photographer  James Balog and his Extreme Ice Survey shows what Balog calls the  “miraculous horror” of what is happening.

By documenting the collapse of glaciers in Greenland, Iceland and Alaska with time-lapse pictures we can see with our eyes what no-one has ever witnessed before.  The images are beautiful but terrifying. Continue reading →

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PLOT HOLES IN THE SNOW

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April 10, 2012

SMILLA’S SENSE OF SNOW directed by Bille August (1997)

Despite the cool title, this is strange and ultimately stupid film. 

The MacGuffin surrounds an energy producing meteorite which we see coming to earth in 19th Century Greenland at the start.

In the present day, white-haired Richard Harris is the enigmatic chief baddie of a secretive organisation which is planning to harness this power as a first step to world domination.

Somehow, this far-fetched plot is connected to the mysterious death of a young Inuit boy who fell from the roof of an apartment block in Copenhagen.

Transplanted Greenlander, Smilla Jaspersen (Julia Ormond) lives in the same block and smells a rat. Her sense of snow means that she instinctively knows from the trail of footprints left by the boy that he was running from someone.

A neighbour known only as The Mechanic (Gabriel Byrne) also suspects foul play but Smilla thinks his offer of help is also prompted by wanting to get her in the sack (which he eventually does).

Smilla is a bit of a ball-breaker but shows a softer side with the mechanic. This might work if the part was played by someone like Helen Mirren but Julia Ormond is too sweet-looking to convince you that she is also be hard-nosed. She remains perfectly groomed and unflappable throughout and is curiously unaffected by sub-zero temperatures.

You could hide some massive meteorites in the film’s numerous plot holes and the adventure gets buried as effectively as a dog turd in a snowstorm.

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