Movie Nation

It is a crying shame that more people aren’t showing up in theaters to catch “A Private War.”

This film biography of “legend in her own time” war correspondent Marie Colvin is built on an awards-worthy performance by Rosamund Pike, with stellar support from Stanley Tucci, Tom Hollander and Jamie Dornan.

That’s right. Mr. “Fifty Shades of S & M” redeems himself for his Christian Grey sins with a moving, fearful turn as photographer and voice-of-reason (his function in the film, anyway) Paul Conroy, Colvin’s combat coverage sidekick during the latter part of her decorated career.

Colvin, an admirer of pioneering correspondent Martha Gellhorn, always went where the action was, covering the nasty, near genocidal civil wars that are the shape of armed conflict in the world today.

She bore witness, she’d say, so that others didn’t have to.

“I cared enough to go to” East Timor, Sri Lanka, Libya, Afghanistan, Syria and many others, “and write about it to make others care.”

There’s a fine new documentary about her, “Under the Wire,” that lets others describe what she was like. Look for it to turn up on The History Channel. But what documentarian (“Cartel Land,” “City of Ghosts”) and first-time feature director Matthew Heineman gives us is much more internal, a far more intimate, warts-and-all drama about what drove Colvin, what haunted her and the risks she took that eventually got her killed.

Pike nails the Long Island-born Colvin’s look and accent, her gruff, brassy demeanor and her compassion. No, she never got over the many faces of death and she never stopped “caring.”

Her modus operandi was to avoid embedding with forces on this side or that one. And even if she did follow this unit into action or sit on that side of a firefight, she rarely focused on soldiers. She always zeroed in on the refugees, the dead, wounded and displaced civilians, writing “the first draft of history” that was sure to “make that suffering part of the record.”

The statuesque beauty Pike dresses down, and how, picking up Colvin’s story at the tail end of her partying, love’em and leave’em (and divorce one) years, just as she’s racing off to cover the conflict that cost her an eye.

Her eyepatch became a signature, and her bravado took on a binge-drinking/crying jag urgency after that. Her “Private War” was with herself, competing to be the marquee foreign correspondent of her generation, shouting for prime placement in The Sunday Times, fending off challengers to her throne, wrestling with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder.

Pike lets us see the horrors in her head as Heineman’s film visualizes the viscera — entrails covering the ground around a bus destroyed by a roadside bomb, the blood that covers everyone and everything in hospitals, the deaths that really “marked” her and stuck with Colvin as she embraced conflict after conflict, as if fleeing her “normal” life of friends (Nikki Amuka-Bird), lovers (Greg Wise and Tucci) and her boss (Hollander, in fine form). The photographer she hires, on the fly, she drags into the maelstrom with her.

Dornan’s function, as Conroy, is to lay out the stakes even as he’s riding her coattails to fame. Pike’s Colvin may show dismay and conviction, but Dornan’s Conroy lays out the danger, the naked fear any non-soldier would feel running “to the sound of the guns.”

Colvin is given a reckless streak here, gambling foolishly and risking a lot of people’s necks in the incident that cost her an eye. Pike suggests a greed for that next scoop and a desperation to save the people she is writing about merely with her presence and the spotlight she brought with her.

The most telling incident in her career is given short shrift. That was the East Timor civil war where she used her presence quite literally as a human shield, and that had to be in her mind as she was speaking from Homs, Syria, via Skype with Anderson Cooper on CNN. Everybody is telling her to flee, and she won’t, and that’s the best explanation why.

The film also tidies up her grim death (“Under the Wire” has graphic audio), after going to some pains to show the gruesome business of war “like it really is” before that.

Pike is magnificent in this part, giving us layers to the hard-drinking live-for-today chain-smoker who could be moved to tears, repeatedly, by the suffering she saw.

Her reporting captured that, touching dispatches about mass graves and the wailing of survivors of victims of Saddam Hussein, finally seeing what happened to long-vanished relatives.

Marie Colvin saw and she made sure we saw as well, in words accompanied by graphic photos and video, the consequences of wars that politicians glibly catalog under “foreign policy.” But we, watching or reading at home, have the option of looking away, something Colvin never did.

See “A Private War,” and warn your friends. They shouldn’t miss one of the best pictures of 2018.

MPAA Rating: R for disturbing violent images, language throughout, and brief sexuality/nudity

Cast: Rosamund Pike, Stanley Tucci, Jamie Dornan, Tom Hollander

Credits:Directed by Matthew Heineman, script by Marie Brenner. An Aviron release.

Running time: 1:50

I don’t think Aviron, the distributor, previewed this one in my market.

If they did, my invitation was lost on the Interwebs. Ahem. You know where to find me, kids.

But as I already reviewed the “homework” documentary on the “real” Marie Colvin, her exploits and death (“Under the Wire”), I’m dashing out to catch a showing of “A Private War” this AM and hoping for the best.

Rosamund Pike nailed the look and voice. Does she get the brashness that covered a sentimental side — Colvin’s “calling” to always look at war from the point of view of the victims of it?

Hoping for the best.

OK, cute commercial/promo for a return engagement/kid-friendly (ISH) re-release of “Deadpool 2.”

I, for one, am NOT tired of these cute jokey Ryan Reynolds in his costume and in his smart-arsed element adverts for his movies.

Not yet, anyway. Limited engagement second weekend in Dec.

The trailer to this latest “The Internet will get you KILLED” thriller doesn’t really sell it for me.

But the set-up is promising — British PYTs with a Youtuber in their ranks tour California and disappear, because #followme invited the wrong creep.

It can’t have cost much, and while the over-OVER exposed SoCal locations strip what little hope for novelty “#FollowMe” holds. But there’s always hope. Indie distributor, “2019” is all we have for a release date now.

Writer-director Sam Hardy is also in the cast.

Not to be confused with the John Ford Irish “troubles” classic of the 1930s, which is about an Irishman torn by guilt, haunted and then hunted for ratting out the IRA for “Trip to America” cash.

In this “Informer,” Joel Kinnaman is an ex-con who goes “back inside” to infiltrate the mob.

Rosamund Pike, Clive Owen and Ana de Armas also star in this Andrea di Stefano (he scripted “Life of Pi”) film. “The Informer” opens March 22.

And yes, remaking the John Ford “Informer” with modern sensibilities remains a good idea, just sitting out there in the “black and white classics” of your Netflix queue.

Two things one sees in the way the weekend take of “Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald” is being spun.

Warner Brothers got Deadline.com and Box Office Mojo to play up the “Huge opening, worldwide.” It opened day and date over much of the planet and earned $253 million. Yes, the global market is more important than the domestic one in our One Big Cineplex World. But that’s a way of avoiding direct comparisons and soft-peddling bad news.

Because the the second talking point is that it made less than was being predicted, even as late as Friday PM, Sat. AM. The take shrank and shrank. Projected to clear $70, it earned only $62 million domestically. 

That’s quite a bit less than the first film in the “adult” Wizarding World series earned two years ago, when it opened 20% higher ($74 million).

“Instant Family” won the race for fourth place ($14.7), edging the adult heist picture “Widows” ($12.3).

“The Grinch” had a big second weekend, tallying $38 million and change (It’s over $126 on just its second week).

“Bohemian Rhapsody” had a healthy but not stellar take and now stands at $127, still well behind “A Star is Born.” ($185)

“The Girl in the Spider’s Web” opened weakly, and plummeted on its second weekend. Out of the Top Ten by Thursday.

Limited release “Boy Erased” almost cracked the top ten, “Green Book” had great per-screen numbers (opening wider Thanksgiving), “The Front Runner” and “A Private War” aren’t setting the per-screen averages on fire in just a few theaters(“Private War” is on a lot more screens, and won’t reach an audience without Awards Season help).

OK, quick show of hands — Who has back trouble? Those who CAN raise their hands? C’mon, let’s see’em.

Give it time, smart aleck kids. Your day will come.

Paul Lieberstein, a veteran of “The Office” both in front of and behind the camera (he was a writer on the sitcom), wrote, directed and stars in “Song of Back and Neck,” a sciatica comedy with an “Office” vibe about it.

It’s daft and cringe-worthy like “The Office,” with offbeat comical rhythms bouncing through the dialogue. But it’s also magical and ethereal, while being just as relatable as that landmark show in the Must Squirm TV comedy genre.

We meet Fred Trolleycar (How’s that for a made up name?) in silent agony. He drags himself out of bed, into the shower, to the closet to get dressed and into the kitchen to eat his generic Cheerios to start his day.

Literally “drags.” As in “My Left Foot” played for laughs. His aching spine won’t let him get off the floor for the first several minutes that start every day.

Fred (Lieberstein) visits “the top orthopedist in the state” (played by “Bridesmaids” director and “Ghostbusters” remake writer Paul Feig) who is entirely too flippant for comfort.

Fred has sciatica, a herniated disc and a pinched nerve in his neck  “the trifecta of back and neck problems.” He asks about options and hears, “I can’t help you. No one can. These things sort themselves out…from time to time.”

He gets talked out of three surgeries over ten years.

“I can’t put you on an endless stream of narcotics,” Dr. Make You Feel Worse adds.

The patient brings up acupuncture and the doctor chortles. “I could get some leeches and bleed you out.”

Fred shows up stooped-over at the office where he works, a 50ish paralegal at the law firm his father co-founded, dragged into meetings by the punk new lawyer on the block (Clark Duke, of course) “to make us look bigger than we are.”

That’s where he meets Regan, played by Rosemarie DeWitt. She’s ready to divorce her “made us rich” but never at home husband. And whatever the scheming senior partner (Sam Anderson) and insufferable Young Turk (Duke) say, it’s Fred who is on her wavelength. He’s interested in her story of love lost, and gets why she pretty much intentionally spills a coffee cup she’s accidentally over-filled, and why she’s pretending that didn’t happen.

When she hears about his pain, she punches her acupuncturist’s digits into his phone. He makes the appointment in the middle of their legal consultation. Fred is “on the spectrum” that way. And that’s when “Song of Back and Neck,” which is funny right out of the gate, really takes flight.

Dr. Kuhang (Raymond Ma) speaks no English but his face says volumes. The  untranslated Chinese puzzlement he mutters to his assistant/translator/daughter (Alice Wen) doesn’t need translation. The look of “WTF?” is universal.

When he sticks pins in Fred’s back, the pins start to vibrate and resonate, a ringing that the “doctor” (Fred uses “air quotes” to call him that) and his daughter hear, but Fred dismisses.  At first.

But Dr. Kuhang, a “third generation” acupuncturist, shakes his head at his daughter, brings in his father, who has never heard the like. He goes on Skype to consult with
the Wisdom of the East — experts in the Old Country.

Lieberstein, an alumnus of a TV show that had many running gags, crafts a beauty with this. Whatever else happens in “Song of Back and Neck” — the personal journey of the hero, the romance, the Moments of Reckoning — this escalating Chinese cultural reaction to the musical ringing emanating from the pins in Fred’s aching back is laugh out loud funny every time it is revisited.

I won’t give the stages in this rising comic crescendo away, except to say there’s “music” here, and no Chinese healer, bystander or chat show host we meet wants to waste that. No musician, either.

Lieberstein has a great eye for the romantic beauty of LA, which he captures as Fred recovers, via musical acupuncture sessions. Fred bounces up off the table, puts on roller blades and skates over to thank the woman who saved him.

And quirky as they both are, they click. DeWitt is at her most vulnerable and winsome. Liebertstein’s Fred is befuddled, bemused, wincing and depressed, with just a hint of charm about him. We can’t so much see a love connection here as feel it.

Their easy rapport is most obvious as they bond, reading passages of “Healing Back Pain” to each other — and laughing.

His office is, of course, the source of much of Fred’s angst — a life that eschewed law school, the oldest paralegal on staff and the only male in that “pool.” He is bullied and being the son of a partner, has a clueless bravado in the face of that bullying. Job for life, right? Or not.

He riffs on how “valid” people think “being in touch with their anger is” in this day and age, not caring that they’re making everybody else miserable by giving vent to “their” feelings.

Regan wistfully recalls her husband courting her, realizing too late she was “turning myself into a trophy.” Little pieces of LA reality get at the loneliness of the place. Regan tries to make a movie date with her pal, her personal yoga instructor. Nobody you pay is a “pal” in the lonely City of Angels.

Lieberstein writes with an “Office” vibe — moments of awkwardness, veiled insults, unveiled contempt delivered via a perceived pecking order that is more delusional than real, or merit-based.

Mop-topped Duke takes one more dip in the entitled frat-boy/prick pool, and we hate him the way we always do in this guise (he was a Young Turk on “The Office,” too).

Hapless Lieberstein makes us root for Fred.

DeWitt, who first gained fame on “Mad Men,” “United States of Tara” and “The Last Tycoon,” reminds us what loneliness with a very pretty face looks like.

And every so often, Fred has a session on the table, with pins in his back and the curiosity of folk medicine authorities, TV hosts and musicians of the East, all pondering what it all means, and what can be done with the haunting melody singing from the pins in his aching back.

The romantic comedy elements here are just offbeat enough to appeal. But with every encounter with the needles, the music and the “Song of Back and Neck,” the pitch rises and the laughs — awkward and endlessly surprising — turn to cackles and then guffaws.

All of which has to be music to any comedy writer’s ears.

MPAA Rating: unrated

Cast: Paul Lieberstein, Rosemarie DeWitt, Clark Duke, Raymond Ma, Alice Wen, Robert Pine, Brian d’Arcy James, Chelsea Cook and Paul Feig

Credits: Written and directed by Paul Lieberstein. An Orchard release.

Running time: 1:26

Sony Pictures Classics is releasing this story of an artist who worked first under the Nazis, then under Soviet dictats, finally escaping to the West to pursue…the Truth? His truth?

“Never Look Away” is a fictional tale of artificially imposed “mainstream” art under totalitarianism and the idea of “truth” in art, and was written and directed by the German director Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck, who figured doing “The Tourist” with Jolie and Depp was as much Hollywood as he could stand. He returns to the setting of his breakout his, “The Lives of Others” for this Nov. 30 (limited, platformed) release.

“Swimming with Men” is “The Full Monty” with fins — only there are no swim fins allowed in synchronised swimming.

It’s a twee, flippant English farce built around diminutive Brit comic Rob Brydon. Freed from being Steve Coogan’s “Trip” movie second banana status, he headlines this midlife crisis comedy in which he is mostly shirtless and often surrounded by A-list character actors from Brexitania.

The film director Oliver Parker (the “St. Trinians” comedies, “Johnny English Reborn”) and Brit TV writer Aschlin Ditta build around them is sometimes laugh out loud funny.

Brydon plays Eric Scott, senior accountant at a downtown London accountancy. It’s as boring as it sounds.

His boss (Robert Daws) is the sort who sticks his nose in his door every AM. “How’re the numbers, Eric?”

“They fend off the chaos!”

Eric’s wife (Jane Horrocks of “Little Voice”) has just been elected to the borough council, which is quite a coup even if it means they drift further apart. His son is a smart aleck teen who’s forgotten the word “Dad.” People he meets ask “How long have you been an accountant?” and his answer seems all-too-accurate.

“Three hundred years.”

But every weeknight at 6, clock-watcher Eric escapes the grind to do laps in the solitude of an indoor public pool. It’s the perfect way to dodge phone calls and check out of life. It’s zen, man.

The kid may smart off “You stink of chlorine” when he gets home. He knows how to shut that up. “You stink of drugs.”

The wife may be spending too much time in conference with her council boss (rakish Nathaniel Parker, brother of director Oliver) and drinking Eric’s wine as she does it. The pool is his safe place.

Until that fateful day when he lets himself sink to the bottom and sees them. — seven mostly middle-aged men, sitting on the bottom, sweeping their hands upward to stay submerged.

It’s bizarre and unquestionably silly. On the surface, he overhears what they’re about — creating designs and shapes, in unison, in the water. Synchronized swimming is an Olympic sport — for women. These guys? They use it for bonding, support, to give themselves purpose and maybe an artistic outlet.

And they’re no good at it. They can’t figure out how to do rotations, shifting the shapes they create or simply spinning in sync.

“It’s a FITNESS issue!” “It’s a PRACTICE issue.”

Actually, Eric interjects, “It”s a NUMBERS issue. You don’t have a pivot point, an apex variable.”

Say what now?

“Symmetry,” the accountant tells them. “Maths.” Their odd number derails their rotations.

“What are you, a syncro swimmer on the spectrum?”

The swimmers eyeball him, see him later in the bar and sense the “Can we not do this now?” nature of his fights with his wife. When Eric reaches crisis, they reach out.

“We’ve all had our moments at the bottom of the pool.”

They ask him in, in the name of humanity, in pursuit of symmetry. They give him a nickname — Archie, shorthand for the most famous mathematician of them all.

Rule One of Swim Club? “No one talks about Swim Club. What goes in the pool, stays in the pool.” Rule two, “For one hour a week, we swim as a unit, for each other.”

And so on. Eric, his home life spinning off his apex variable, is swept up with a crew played by Jim Carter of “Downton Abbey,” Daniel Mays of “The Bank Job” and “Rogue One,” Adeel Akhtar of “Four Lions” and “The Big Sick,” Thomas Turgoose, Ronan Daly and Chris Jepson.

Rupert Graves is Luke, the organizer, a realtor who lives in a trailer and is sweet on the 30something pool manager (Charlotte Riley). Susan watches the CCTV monitors in the office and finds these “broken” men worth encouraging.

There was a famous “Saturday Night Live” sketch that pointed to how inherently funny the idea of men doing this could be. How do you top that? By having the lads “entertain” at a child’s birthday party, by convincing sweet, demure and supportive Susan, who knows a little about the sport, become their trainer.

“PAIN is WEAKNESS leaving the BODY!”

“Swimming” wears its “Full Monty” ambitions (It isn’t on that level, but it’s funny enough.k) on its trunks, with the flippant banter and blend of melancholy sentimentality and sight gag silliness. It even uses a Tom Jones anthem for its “big finish.” Yeah, there’s an “informal world championships” for men who do this. No, seriously.

Parker and Ditta blend the two tones the film reaches for in a scene that is pure comic magic. Eric sits on the bottom of the pool, contemplating never coming back up alive, when hands reach down to grab him, manoeuvre him, hold his ankles and move him into position. He’s “invited” in, saved and manhandled all in the same gesture.

This isn’t just “a club,” it’s “a protest…against what we’ve become.”

One’s widowed, several are divorced, one blew his big chance at a football career, one’s a gay dentist not totally out in his relationship, another’s a young felon, “Silent Bob” never talks, “The New Guy” never gives everyone his name. “Aging alcoholics” they joke, and they’re half serious.

Rude random bits blend with nurturing moments. Although the cinema has had more than its share of “male bonding/male support group” comedies, the film’s amusing body issues and raging against the dying of the light take it into “Calendar Girls” territory, which was the female “Full Monty.”

“We’re as strong as our weakest member, and that is strong enough.”

Brydon, shorn of the shtick that makes him a Brit chat show favorite (No impressions, no funny voices), makes an amusing Everyman in a Suit, paranoid about age, a drifting marriage and general dissatisfaction with “what we’ve become.” Carter lends the comedy gravitas (his function in “Brassed Off,” “Downtown Abbey” and most everything else he appears in), Graves and Riley give the tale sex appeal.

And the swimming in sync, whether done well or in that English “That’ll do, the important thing is trying” way, can be cute, comical or life affirming. Get past the obvious joke — guys wrestling with a girly sport — and “Swimming with Men” finds its sweet spot. Yes, there “will always be an England.” And it’ll always be just a tad twee. 

MPAA Rating: unrated

Cast: Rob Brydon, Rupert Graves, Jim Carter, Jane Horrocks, Adeel Akhtar, Nathaniel Parker, Spike White, Robert Daws

Credits:Directed by Oliver Parker, script by Aschlin Ditta. An IFC/Sundance Selects release.

Running time: 1:37

Whatever box office clout Hollywood musicals still have, it’s still big budget juvenalia that is the surest best to BO success.

A fall that has seen “Venom” and “Grinch” and “Halloween” blow up, adds “Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald” to its list of smash hits, as the Wizarding World sequel may approach $70 million on its opening weekend.

That’s based on pre-sales, Thursday night and all-day Friday numbers. Saturday, being the big family-goes-to-the-movies day, could push that up or down.

I think it’s the worst movie to ever have J.K. Rowling’s name attached to it, and reviews overall reviews overall have been weak to mixed.

Conversely, the critically-acclaimed “Widows” isn’t catching the same wave. An R-rated heist thriller for adults, it’s only managing $13-14 million, well below the already lowballed expectations ($18+) pushed out there by the studio and movie marketing experts.

“Instant Family” seemed like a no-brainer, a Mark Wahlberg comedy with kids and cussing? Those things sell themselves. But “Daddy’s NOT Home” this time. Unless Saturday brings in the bacon, this sweet, rude farce about adoption, which is opening to pretty good reviews, isn’t going to clear $12 million. If every review was like mine, noting the harsh language the film uses for laughs, it might be that this hard PG-13 cursed itself out of a goldmine.

It’s not yet Thanksgiving, the kids aren’t out of school, so Friday’s haul was big for “Grindelwald” and decent for the rest, but not huge.

“Grinch” will manage $31 and “Bohemian Rhapsody” another $16 or so, which means “Widows” and “Instant Family” will be fighting for fourth place.