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.
“Around alone.”
Even armchair sailors can feel the queasy fear those two words summon up. Sailing solo around the world is one of the great tests the world still offers the adventurous. Because there are no lifesaving Sherpa guides in the middle of the ocean.
“Around Alone” refers, typically, to the solo sailboat race that has gone under many sponsor names over the decades. The London Sunday Times sponsored the first back in 1968, and thanks to Donald Crowhurst, it stands out as the most notorious.
Crowhurst was a weekend sailor most at home taking his wife and three children out on coastal jaunts on their 20 foot day sailor/catboat in Teignmouth, England. But the tinkerer, inventor and entrepreneur talked himself into entering that first “Around Alone,” poetically asserted the added romance of his “amateur” status and set out — late — in a trimaran (three hulls) of his own design.
And once at sea, he realized how out of his depth (literally) he was.
“The Mercy” is a beautifully-mounted telling of the Crowhurst story, luring Oscar winners Colin Firth and Rachel Weisz into playing the Crowhursts, Donald and Clare, and the formidable David Thewlis as Rodney Hallworth, the publicist retained by Crowhurst who made him famous long before he became infamous.
Director James Marsh (“The Theory of Everything”) and screenwriter Scott Z. Burns (“Contagion,” “The Informant”) give this story a grave foreboding with sprinklings of English pluck, forbearing and wit. And Firth, Weisz and Thewlis give it heart and pathos and remind you why each is heralded as among the finest crop of actors the U.K. has ever produced.
We meet Crowhurst as he’s hawking his electronic direction finder at a boat show in the pre-GPS 1960s. He may not have many buyers for the ingenious Navicat, disappointing his two sons, who idolize him. But he himself is inspired by a speech given by Sir Francis Chichester (Simon McBurney, a terrific cameo). Chichester was made a Knight of the Realm for becoming the first official “around alone” sailor, a man who made but one stop along the way as he circled the Earth.
“A man alone on a boat is more alone than any man alive,” he says, reminding us of the poetic turns of phrase a different generation could manage. “To only do what has been done before is to live in the shadow of other men.”
He’s there to announce The Sunday Times solo sailboat challenge, a race doing basically what he accomplished, but with no stops and for a £5000 prize. No, Sir Francis won’t take part.
“Wild horses wouldn’t drag me back to the sinister Southern Ocean,” he says. “The waves there are not measured in inches and feet, but in increments of fear.”
Crowhurst hears “the siren call of the sea,” talks his local travel-trailer dealer (Ken Stott of “The Hobbit” movies) into underwriting him, designs a boat he figures will be the fastest and hires a former reporter now “press agent” (Thewlis) to drum up more sponsors and interest from the British press and the BBC.
You’re a dreamer, he’s told. “Dreams are the seeds of action,” he pontificates.
You’re not really a sailor, another suggests. “It seems to me the act of sailing makes one a sailor.”
Firth’s Crowhurst is impulsive, mercurial, a bit of a blowhard, but endlessly quotable. It’s no wonder the press fell in love with him, “the amateur” taking on this insanely dangerous quest.
Weisz, as subtle an actress as the cinema has ever produced, gets across Clare’s pragmatism and stiff-upper-lip stoicism more with her eyes than with her words. She hides her shock at Donald’s abrupt announcement to friends about entering the race, and swallows her growing fear about what is facing him, and what will become of her and their three children while he is away, assuming he comes back safe.
There’s a lot of wonderful detail that underlies the dread that the Crowhursts, husband and wife, begin to show as deadlines pass, Donald doubles down on his gamble-with-his-life-and-life-savings bet and compromises are made to get this amateur-designed two-masted/three-hulled boat ready.
Firth lets us see the pressure starting to overwhelm Crowhurst before the Teignmouth Electron, his boat, ever hits the water. There are canned soup, rum and beer sponsors, his main investor to placate, his pressure-building press agent to please.
And the boat “just isn’t ready.” He tries to back out, and for the first and certainly not the last time, realizes he cannot.
Firth’s tentative first steps, as Crowhurst, on a floating boat he hasn’t had time to test and familiarize himself with will alarm even a non-sailor watching “The Mercy.” He has no sea legs.
The chaos that greets him below (unfinished wiring and uninstalled gear, food and alcohol stored in piles) would depress anyone.
And the BBC and the whole damned town turn out for his departure. Pressure? No, none at all.
The bulk of “The Mercy” is necessarily set aboard a small boat, just Firth below decks, stowing and then dashing for the companionway hatch, seasick — or above deck, bailing out this leaky barge which doesn’t sail as he’d anticipated and takes on water in a way that tells him the aptly-named “Roaring 40s” (the Southern Ocean) are no place for this “Electron.”
He makes radio calls, detailing his depressingly slow progress, shoots a little film, and records tapes for the BBC — “Everything on this boat is wet. Not damp. Wet.” A man alone at sea “explores his weaknesses with a penetration very few other occupations can manage.”
We see that Crowhurst is competent but overwhelmed, and Firth gives us glimpses of the grim realizations he comes to. He’s brave enough to climb his mast to attempt a repair in mid ocean (daunting as hell). But he’s figuring out that neither he nor his boat can make it around the world. He cannot proceed, and he can’t go back.
“Honor” is never spoken aloud, but it figures into what we see him thinking. Thewlis, as the skeptical Hallworth, justifies taking the job of promoting Crowhurst by declaring that he “sees a part of England that has been lost, the intrepid part” that Churchill and other heroes of the realm had. Crowhurst’s celebrity and the expectations he and Hallworth have ginned up mean he cannot afford to quit, cannot survive any further South and cannot save face in any way he can imagine. Until he starts to consider cheating. Surely all that booze on board hastened that decision.
Marsh’s film lets us see the magical solitude of sailing, surrounded by dolphins or whales, the peril of sailing bare-poles (sails down) during a mid-sea tempest. The sea passages are intercut with flashbacks, mainly snippets of Crowhurst or his wife giving BBC interviews before departure. The most beautiful moment might be a hallucination, Crowhurst remembering explaining to his children what “The Horse Latitudes” are, and visualizing the horror that pretty phrase hides.
Firth doesn’t overdo the whole “going mad alone at sea” thing, letting his growing hair and beard and sad eyes tell us the calculations going on inside the man’s head.
Marsh gives it just enough scale to be an intimate epic, but Burns’ script gives the players the latitude to make something memorable out of a tale many of us already know the ending of.
It’s an old fashioned story, perhaps too conventional for some tastes. But writing this review from the cabin of my cruising sailboat, I have to confess that I loved “The Mercy.” It’s one of those limited-release films that few will see, with acting so compact and contained that everyone who loves great screen acting should.
Weisz, Firth and Thewlis give us understated, unfussy performances that lift “The Mercy,” and make it a wonderfully tragic story with a hint of magnificence about it.
MPAA Rating: unrated
Cast: Colin Firth, Rachel Weisz, David Thewlis
Credits:Directed by James Marsh, script by Scott Z. Burns. A Lionsgate/BBC Films release.
Running time: 1:42
Love Rachel Weisz. And Colin Firth. David Thewlis I’m quite fond of.
And every sailor (including me) loves the tragic story of Donald Crowhurst, sailing around alone and going mad while doing it. I don’t get psyched for a lot of genres, but a movie with boats and Oscar winners in it? “The Mercy” is, as we say, right in my wheelhouse.
Movie Nation 