Mary Magdalene

‘Mary Magdalene’ is yet another retelling of the Jesus Christ story but this time using a new interpretation of the New Testament which does a demolition job on the wildly held assumption that Mary Magdalene was a mere prostitute. As an RE lesson, pretty much all the usual story is present and roughly correct. You know, the raising of Lazarus, Palm Sunday, the Last Supper, Judas’s betrayal and the Crucifixion. This time though Mary Magdalene seems to be Jesus’s right hand man, I mean woman, rather than Peter.

Mary M (Rooney Mara) rejects the expected norms of an arranged marriage and a future of prodigious childbearing for the want of something better to do with her life. Good girl. Her family are rather appalled at this ground breaking madness and promptly attempt to exorcise the demon within her. However it’s not a demon that has taken her but the unkempt bunch of blokes who turned up unannounced in her village. This ragamuffin group turn out to the disciples lead by a rather scruffy chap called Jesus (Joachim Phoenix). A man who seems to be keeping his alleged charisma well hidden. Nonetheless she elopes with this dozen or so blokes which perhaps understandably doesn’t go down that well with her father and brothers. They attempts to take her back but the disciples refuse to let her go. Which I didn’t think was very Christian of them.

So this retelling puts Mary M front and centre and seems to suggest that she knew what Jesus was on about better than the lads did. She becomes somewhat a teacher’s pet and starts following Jesus around like a lost sheep. Which, to be fair, is pretty much what everybody else does. The cameraman included which is why the film often drags so much. There are only so many lingering stares between the two of them you can take. Apparently Phoenix and Mara are an actual couple in real life, I just hope they have more chemistry at home and perhaps speak a bit louder to each other because at times here the dialogue is scarcely audible.

There are a few other, possibly contentious and confusing, plot changes. Judas (Tahar Rahim) doesn’t seem to betray Jesus but sort of just makes a mistake and no money changes hands. While Peter (Chiwetel Ejiofor) forgets to disown Jesus, not once let alone three times. 

It’s all a bit of a mess really but lets face it, no one really knows what went on out there in the desert in 33AD, but if it really was as dull as this then I doubt this bible thing would have gained as much traction as it has.

Lion

'Lion' is based on the novel ‘A Long Way Home’ the true story of Saroo Brierley, as he is known now.

We start in Khandwa, India in 1986 with five year-old Saroo (Sunny Pawar) and his older brother Guddo (Abhishek Bharate). They help support their family by stealing coal from trains and general scavenging for items which they then trade.

When Saroo manages to persuade his brother to take him on a job at night it doesn't end well. Saroo gets so tired he falls asleep on the station platform where his brother tells him to wait until he returns. When Guddu does not return, Saroo gets on a train that is parked in the station hoping his brother will be on it.

When the train moves off not only is his brother not there but there seems no way out of the empty carriage and the train does not stop for anyone to get on until it arrives at its final destination of Calcutta, nearly 1,500 kilometres away.

In Calcutta he joins masses of other homeless children as he cannot get anyone to help him because they speak Bengali and he only speaks Hindi. Someone eventually takes him give, giving him food and shelter but Saroo flees when he rightly senses that they have unpleasant plans for him, mostly likely being sold into prostitution.

Then he is rescued a second time and placed in an orphanage. The staff attempt to locate his family but Saroo cannot correctly name the place he is from and does not even know his mother's actual name.

As they can’t return him home he is instead adopted by a Tasmanian couple, Sue (Nicole Kidman) and John Brierley (David Wenham) and he grows up with them in Hobart along with another adopted but emotionally disturbed Indian boy Mantosh (Divian Ladwa).

Twenty-five years later, and totally Australised, Saroo (now Dev Patel) heads off to University to study Hotel Management where he even bags himself an attractive girlfriend in Lucy (Rooney Mara). However as flashbacks to his early years surface in his mind he begins to wonder about his past.

One of his student mates tells him to trace his home town on Google Earth which at first he doesn’t take seriously but an obsessive need to trace his origins soon takes hold, disrupting both his career plans and his relationship with Lucy. To be fair Hotel Management was probably giving Dev unsettling flashbacks anyway, all the back to the Best Exotic Marigold Hotel.

Of course, looking for your home town when the town name you have in your head doesn't exist is akin to looking for a very small needle in the very large haystack that is India and he spends many months starting at railway lines on Google Earth looking for something he recognises.

It’s all very sweet, if a bit of an advert for said Google Earth, but I don’t really get all the angst. Why does he shut everyone out? We did he not let his Uni mates help him or his girlfriend or his family and when he finally traces his home in India he goes out there alone.

Overall it’s decent enough film that ends with actual footage of Saroo being reunited with his mother. Dev Patel has bagged himself an Oscar nomination for his role but it has to be said the real star is Sunny Pawar who puts in an extraordinary performance as the younger Saroo.

By the way Saroo, or Sheru as it actually is, means Lion.

Her

Spike Jonze’s new film Her takes place sometime in the future and we find Theodore Twombly (Joaquin Phoenix) living in a world where technology has finally taken precedent over human interaction. A whole where people spend more time talking to their computers than they do to each other. Of course this has already happened for some.

Indeed Theodore’s job is to write personal letters for people because presumably they are no longer capable of doing so themselves. Theodore is a bit of a sad case who is going through a divorce because somehow he has managed to let the gorgeous Catherine (Rooney Mara) slip through his fingers. He does manage to get himself a hot date but then turns down the girl’s sexual advances. Now he fills his time playing computer games (pretty cool ones) and not much else.

Eventually he finds solace in someone who understands him, cares about him, flatters him and is much more considerate than real people are. It’s also got a sexy voice and names itself Samantha. This is his new OS. Now we all know that computers can take over your life but this is probably especially true if they sound like Scarlett Johansson.

Anyhow Theodore and sultry Samantha ‘fall in love’ in a world where a guy having virtual sex with his OS is absolutely normal. In fact, even when they double date with another real couple no one bats an eyelid.

This I guess is the film’s take on modern society but the problem is rather than being a ‘yeah this is the one’ sort of relationship it turned out to be like any other typical bland romance that any sane person would want no part of. Their conversations together really are banal.

More interesting for me was the interaction between Theodore and his neighbour/friend-without-benefits Amy (Amy Adams) who is married to another. Will Theodore cheat on his OS behind her back? Sadly Theodore isn’t that exciting.

Of course, we all also know that sometimes computers can let you down. One day Theodore learns just how well his OS can multitask when he finds out that Samantha can have virtual sex with hundreds of smart phone users simultaneously. Then she dumps him! In fact she dumps everyone.

I’m not sure if we’re supposed to be sad when this happens but I just thought, right then, it’s Amy time and that’s how the film ends. Sort of. We don’t really know. Do they jump off that building together or do they jump each other. Hopefully the latter, even in this futurist world surely the Billy Crystal rule that men and women can’t be friends still applies.

The film has some nice ideas but the overall premise is a bit thin and gets stretched thinner throughout the two hours, meaning there are quite a lot of dead patches in the film.

Generally though I liked it and the technology shown was all well founded, which is a rarity in a film. Everything that the portrayed is worryingly possible...

The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo (2011)

Tonight the swift and pointless remake, sorry re-adaptation, by Hollywood of, yep, ‘The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo’. Luckily most pointless remakes, sorry re-adaptations, aren't directed by David Fincher and, to my immense surprise, I rather liked it.

That is once I got over the rather unexpected opening credits which involved Led Zeppelin's ‘Immigrant Song’ remade, sorry re-adapted, by Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross with vocals by Karen O. Together with rather striking visuals. It was totally out of place and was more like a supporting feature. It was how you’d expect a James Bond film to open and then low and behold on walked Bond himself, Daniel Craig.

I won't go over all the plot again because you should know it and if you don't, either go read the book, see the Swedish original or if you’re American and you can’t read subtitles, then read my review of it. This review could only ever have been a comparison between the two.



Just like the Swedish original the first hour felt rushed with too much to fit in. You urged it to slow down and eventually it did. At which point it dawned in me that this version was actually more faithful to the novel and included plenty of scenes that were omitted from the original. Blomkvist's daughter is back as is his affair with Erika Berger but not his one with Cecilia but it’s also clear that Fincher has seen the Swedish version because he steals plot from that as well, using the same shortcuts in places.



Of course, the Swedish version was spliced from a TV series which, across the trilogy, left a total of two hours on the cutting room floor. I've just ordered the DVD of that, so that'll be an interesting watch to see what was cut for the cinema release. However, they still cut it, so they have to take the rap for it.

This version also seems to big up Lisbeth Salander (Rooney Mara) role and reduce Mikael Blomkvist’s (Daniel Craig) which considering we have a rather wooden Mr Craig here, is perhaps no bad thing. Craig’s Blomkvist lacks emotion and personality, at times looks lost and forgets to wear enough clothes for the Swedish winter. Although, to be fair, Blomkvist is a bit dull in the book as well, save for his liking of trysts with his women. Don't we all.



Talking of trysts, this version seems to throw Blomkvist and Salander together on the screen a lot more, both in bed and out of it, but still the pair badly lacked chemistry. Not that a lack of chemistry has ever got in the way of a good shag. Mara certainly throws herself, totally naked, into that and into the whole role. She is good throughout although she will inevitably forever be overshadowed by Noomi Rapace from the Swedish version. She just doesn't have the same presence. Mara’s Salander is waiflike, more pouting teenager where as Rapace was simply a menacing woman who had never learnt how to pout. Loved the t-shirt though Mara, ‘F*ck you you f*cking f*ck’.

If it’s raunchier, it’s also funnier, not sure if that's a plus or not. It’s also possibly more sadistic. Whether this is because Yorick van Wageningen who plays Nils Bjurman looks like Rory McGrath, which is a scary enough thought on its own.



The slightly altered ending may actually be better but isn't correct. Sadly Harriet no longer runs a cattle ranch in Australia but the reinstatement of Salander’s gift to Blomkvist is welcome and is necessary to set up her antagonism toward him later, should the second book get filmed. Although I’m sure some scenes from the second book appeared here - e.g. Salander's confrontation with Bjurman about his tattoo removal.



As remakes go, this is actually a good one. The scriptwriter deserves praise and the cinematography is better, although I expect done on a much larger budget. They also resisted the temptation to transpose this story to America, which was a relief.

I would almost say it was better than the Swedish version but for Daniel Craig. So overall it’s still the rawer original for me, I think... maybe... I'm actually not sure.

(Saturday 7th January)

The Girl Who Kicked The Hornets' Nest

So the late Stieg Larsson's Millennium trilogy comes to its conclusion with ‘The Girl Who Kicked the Hornets' Nest’ or to give it its Swedish title ‘Luftslottet Som Sprängdes’ which translates literally and badly as ‘The Air Castle That Was Blown Up’. It seems that in Swedish an ‘Air Castle’ is what we would call a ‘Pipe Dream’. With that info the title starts to make more sense.

The film picks up exactly from where the second one left off and because of that it’s kind of important to have seen that film. Preferably you need to have read the books because again there’s quite a lot of unexplained stuff going on.

Our heroine Lisbeth Salander (Noomi Rapace) has somehow survived being shot in the head, as well as in the hip, and is now in hospital. Just down the corridor is another patient, the man who tried to kill her, her father Alexander Zalachenko. He’s having an axe removed from his skull, which is where she left it. Amazingly neither of them has a police guard. So it’s not difficult for the clandestine group inside the secret police, which we now know as ‘The Section’, to attempt to assassinate them both. They manage with Zalachenko but by more chance than anything they fail to get to Salander.



The film then follows Salander's rehabilitation process and also the preparation for her impending trail where she will charged with attempted murder. The same powers that be, who locked her in a psychiatric institution at the age of twelve, are hell bent on returning her there.



Mikael Blomkvist (Michael Nyqvist) meanwhile is preparing a special issue of ‘Millennium’ magazine exposing the whole shady lot of them and in the process hoping to exonerate Salander.



What follows is a complex web of intricate plot lines and characters, which is why you need the background story. Many people muck in together to help her; her friendly doctor is on side, as is Blomkvist’s sister Annika Giannini, an attorney, who is to defend Lisbeth. Her fellow computer hacker Plague even rides in on his white horse to assist. The old men of ‘The Section’ however, have no boundaries and are prepared to do whatever is necessary to silence everyone, prevent exposure of their group and bury their secret forever.



Finally though Salander and Giannini have their moment in court, outsmarting the prosecution and turning the tables on their key witness Lisbeth’s former psychiatric doctor, Dr. Teleborian. That’s quite fun to watch.



Unlike part two, which was all action at the expense of a more meaningful plot, this film is the other way around and most of the action comes towards the end as Salander explores an old factory left to her in her father’s will. That said the suspense of the scene is diluted by knowing that her psychotic half brother is lurking there. The action with the nail gun doesn't disappoint though.

For a film that still sprawls itself over two and a half hours, it is still lacking in detail and I can’t imagine it makes much sense to the casual viewer. Obviously a lot of material had to be cut from each of the books, which are huge tombs, but they have made some odd calls about what to leave in and out. There are also superfluous additions. Scenes added of Neiderman and an unnecessary sub-plot concerning Millennium boss Erika Berger and a stalker that was altered from the book but still left needlessly in the film. It achieved nothing and if the minutes were so valuable, why waste them?

Both of the last two films had a badly cut feel about them and when I dig deeper I find out possibly the reason why. All three films were intended as a six part mini-series but were then cut down to a reasonable film length. With that information, it begins to make sense why it doesn't make sense. I look forward to seeing the DVD's of the full versions sometime.

Neither this film nor 'The Girl Who Played With Fire, were as compelling as ‘The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo’ but it's not bad. Overall the series has been a little disappointing and for once I'm actually looking forward to seeing Hollywood’s take on these. Not all car chases I hope. However Hollywood’s Salander, Rooney Mara, has a lot to live up to. The films may have been a bit messy but Noomi Rapace has been outstanding throughout.