Some Quickie Reviews

I saw a nice picture of the singer Orianthi [Orianthi Penny Panagaris] on Twitter.  She tweets from time to time.  I checked out a couple CDs and it turns out that I heard her already.  She sounds like she was on the soundtrack of some film or television program.  I like her voice.

I saw the film The Children's Hour (Audrey Hepburn, Shirley MacLaine, James Garner) based on a play.  It is about the power of a lie (a hint of lesbianism).  The acting is good though the film starts to go in a somewhat melodramatic direction.  

The 1930s version sometimes gets better reviews and one of the stars plays the selfish aunt here.  I checked out These Three, and it was well-acted, especially by the two friends (lesbianism is not covered here) with the guy a bit more frivolous.  It amuses me that the girl telling the lie later played Nancy Drew.  I shut it off before it got to the depressing stuff.  

Bonita Granville (Nancy Drew in a few films) also starred in Hitler's Children, which the library had. First, I also got out Grand Hotel, but it started off dull, so I didn't try watching two hours of it.  I have less patience these days. I have watched a few 1930s films. I recall liking Dinner at Eight years ago.  

The Hitler film was in 1943 and started with a striking bit of true believers.  I lost interest, perhaps given the boring nice guy American professor has the role of the innocent abroad.  Granville plays a German-born American citizen caught up in Nazism.  She is taken away and we are stuck with boring guy realizing 1938/9 German is that bad.  If I stayed with it, it would shift to the Germans.  It does not end well for our heroine.    

I also came upon The Princess of Montpensier, a modern-day French film starring Mélanie Thierry.  I actually found it enjoyable but after about an hour and a half, the story was boring me.  There was a basic simplicity of the plot that didn't warrant so much time though it was all put together and acted rather well. I checked online to see what happened.  A lot of depressing stuff.  

[The film is French so it does have some sex, including a portrayal of her wedding night that -- if slightly away from the action -- a rather crowded cast involved.  Things are not that explicit in the scenes I saw though we see the actress' impressive breasts more than once.]

I will check out the actress in two more films.  I also saw the fifth episode of The Way Home.  It was pretty good -- the mom did not tell her daughter yet that she also went back in time. And, though hinted at, the attempt to try to save the young boy (her sister) that was lost was not covered yet.  One more possible time-related matter also was avoided. 

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Anyway, while checking out the books of Elaine Pagels (who I saw give a lecture years ago and wrote notes about), I saw that she wrote an introduction to Secrets of Mary Magdalene.  The editors are not historians or anything. And, there are some mumbo jumbo b.s. mixed in.  But, there is a lot of stuff from reliable scholars (including Pagels).

Pagels introduction is a few pages and for some reason basically skips the John scene.  Not sure why.  A few reference the Gnostic Gospels while somewhat skimming over how LATE they are.  

One entry makes up for it by overdoing it -- the Gospel of Mary being written "over two hundred years after her death" is dating it rather late (and her death a tad early).  And, one person for some reason writes with an assurance that Jesus for years -- again curiously dating it early [around 26] -- lived in Capernaum.  

The book is over three hundred pages and I still do not get a full sense of her all the same.  One thing that is not really covered is Mary as a woman of her era and region.  We have some colored pictures of art that portray her over the years. There is but one regional representation that (if in a somewhat primitive form) shows her something like she would have looked. The art is as expected modeled after European women.

I realize that the little we know of Mary leads to a lot of reactions to an understanding of her that puts on her stuff not her own.  But, such happens regularly in the Bible.  The Book of Daniel speaks of events written hundreds of years before it was likely written.  The "books of Moses" portrays events of a different age in ways that mix in anachronisms that only experts are likely to pick up. But, they are surely there.  

The theology of John (written sixty or so years after Jesus died at the very least) is in various ways as loyal to his actual teachings as gnostic material.  Which expressed some stuff that we can get a taste of already in the New Testament.  There is talk of "powers" and such in there.  And, the Gospel of Thomas might have been finished sometime in the second century but has material probably earlier.  And, anyway, it isn't the only NT book that was completed in the second century.  

So, it is not really too different in some ways that gnostic materials and even later Mary material change "actual history."  Still, a book of this sort should have a bit more on the actual Mary.  If we are going to be upset that the desire for a complete story (plus usual "sex sells" etc.) resulted in a composite Mary that made her into a former prostitute [and even the person she is combined with is deemed a "sinner" -- we don't know if she is actually a whore], we should try to get a sense of the real Mary.

There is a way to do that in some sense.  An essay on how a somewhat successful (though what Luke meant by saying she and other women helped pay Jesus' way is far from clear) woman of that day lived would have been nice.  I was annoyed that Bart Ehrman's book that covers Peter, Paul, and Mary [Magdalene] did not go more into the exorcism, which is a real practice, with or without the presence of actual demons. 

Anyway, the book has enough material to make it not upsetting to me that I bought it for around $5 on eBay.