Dev Patel

Film Review: LION (Australia 2016)

festreviews 2016 movies, movie, Movie Review, Uncategorized , , , , , ,

lion_movie_posterLION (Australia 2016) **
Directed by Garth Davis

Starring: Nicole Kidman, Rooney Mara, Dev Patel

Review by Gilbert Seah

When a feel-good story as in LION is made into a film, filmmakers often still feel the need to add on additional sweetness. PLAY IT LIKE BECKAM, BILLY ELLIOT and the more recent QUEEN OF KATWE are examples of films that fall into this trap.

Audiences do not seem to mind as observed in the box-office success of the first two aforementioned films though QUEEN OF KATWE bombed. Critics, however are never impressed with sugar-coated feel-good films. Unfortunately, LIONS falls into this category. Director Davis is still not ashamed to show a tear or two dripping from the face of the main protagonist, Saroo (Dev Patel), not once but twice.
Dev Patel (THE BEST EXOTIC MARIGOLD HOTEL, SLUMDOG MILLIONAIRE), Rooney Mara and Nicole Kidman star in the true story of Saroo Brierley, who was adopted by an Australian couple after being separated from his family in India at the age of five, and then located his original home using Google Earth 25 years later.

The film begins with overhead shot of Tasmania, Australia before settling, oddly in India. Here, the audience sees precocious five-year-old Saroo Khan (Sunny Pawar) in a very poor family. Over-eager to help his older brother Guddu with any odd job that will provide their family with much-needed money, Saroo follows Guddu everywhere he goes. One night the two boys are separated on a train platform in their native Madhya Pradesh, and Saroo winds up nearly a thousand miles away in Calcutta where he is fortunately taken in by a government orphanage. When an Australian couple (Kidman and David Wenham) adopts him, he is taken to live with them in Hobart, Tasmania. It’s not until Saroo leaves that island as a young Australian man (Dev Patel) that he begins to wonder what became of his first home and the family he so adored. Saroo falls into romaine with an Australian (Rooney Mara) in an awkward romance. It does not take a genius to figure out that Saroo will eventually be united with his mother in India through the help with Google earth.

Adapting Brierley’s own book, A Long Way Home, screenwriter Luke Davies and first-time director Garth Davis infuse the story with just too much heartbreak. Nothing is gained or learnt from this predictable true tale made worse with its tear jerking at every possibility. This is an example of the worst of a based on a true story, tear at your heart-strings film.

The reason the film is called LION is revealed at the very end of the film. Not that it matters any. The film LION arrives with much less than a roar.

Trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s3ns9XjWKws&t=7s

TV CONTESTSUBMIT your TV PILOT or TV SPEC Script
Voted #1 TV Contest in North America.		 FILM CONTESTSUBMIT your SHORT Film
Get it showcased at the FEEDBACK Festival
writing CONTEST1st CHAPTER or FULL NOVEL CONTEST
Get full feedback! Winners get their novel made into a video!		 SCREENPLAY CONTESTSUBMIT your FEATURE Script
FULL FEEDBACK on all entries. Get your script performed
Advertisement

Movie Review: THE MAN WHO KNEW INFINITY (UK 2015) ***

festreviews 2016 movies, Movie Review, Uncategorized , , , , , , , ,

Deadlines to Submit your Screenplay, Novel, Story, or Poem to the festival: http://www.wildsound.ca

the_man_who_knew_infinity.jpgTHE MAN WHO KNEW INFINITY (UK 2015) ***
Directed by Matthew Brown

Starring: Dev Patel, Jeremy Irons, Malcolm Sinclair, Stephen Fry

Review by Gilbert Seah

THE MAN WHO KNEW INFINITY is the bio pic of Indian mathematician Srinivasa Ramanujan (Dev Patel) based on the 1991 book of the same name by Robert Kanigel. Growing up poor in Madras, Nujan (as he is fondly called in the film) earns admittance to Cambridge University under the mentorship of professor G.J. Hardy (Jeremy Irons). Initially upset at Nujan for his pride and refusal to work out proofs for his mathematical theories, Hardy eventually relents and lets the horse run loose. Together, they achieve milestones in mathematics, cracking the almost impossible task of formulating formulae for partitions.

The first 30 minutes of the film is boring while the the film is set up. Nujan is just married, shown to love and excel in mathematics before fate forces him to leave Madras and serve his true calling. For a biopic of this kind, one expects him to face hardship and prejudice in his new country while finally proving himself to the nonbelievers while uniting with his family at the end. The film felt headed that way and one would almost walk out of the film if it had not changed course.

The typical story is altered by the First World War that creeps into the story. The second is the illness (T.B. or Tuberculosis) that Nujan falls prey to. The rest is pretty predictable stuff with the usual ‘stuffy’ English dialogue put in so that the film feels put up on a high pedestal since it is supposed to have a Cambridge university setting.

Patel was the second option to play the main role as the filmmakers wanted an actor internationally known to carry the film. Patel, who has proven himself apt in comedy as in SLUMDOG MILLIONAIRE and the BEST EXOTIC MARIGOLD HOTEL films, demonstrates here that he is also capable of carrying a more dramatic role, one that needs to show suffering from illness as well as desperation and despair. Irons looks convincing as the pipe puffing professor who ends up sympathetic towards Nujan’s course. Stephen Fry is remarkable in being able to make a lasting impression from a performance than lasts only a few minutes. The role of Bertrand Russell, the British philosopher and mathematician undertaken by Jeremy Northam is underwritten and exists only to make a few criticisms on Hardy’s character.

World War 1 is dealt with in terms of both prejudice and its futility. The former issue is demonstrated very effectively in a scene in which Nujan is beaten up by white English soldiers for being a freeloader in a country where the rest have to go fight and die for their country. It is anger that has its point and one almost impossible to resolve. Hardy organizes antiwar rallies dealing with the other war issue.

Associate producers Manjul Bhargava and Ken Ono are distinguished mathematicians who also served as the film’s math consultants. The math is shown only briefly but the message on the intricacies of infinite series and partitions comes across clear enough.

THE MAN WHO KNEW INFINITY make its case more of one of cultural acceptance than (one) in the development of new mathematical theories. Brown brings the film to an end all too quickly, wrapping everything up with Nujan’s eventual failure to survive from Tuberculosis.

 

Also, Free logline submissions. The Writing Festival network averages over 95,000 unique visitors a day.
Great way to get your story out: http://www.wildsound.ca/logline.html

Deadlines to Submit your Screenplay, Novel, Story, or Poem to the festival:http://www.wildsound.ca

Watch recent Writing Festival Videos. At least 15 winning videos a month:http://www.wildsoundfestival.com