Movie Nation

“Notorious Nick” is a workmanlike, formulaic “overcome all obstacles” MMA fight picture in the classic mold.

But it’s based on the true story of MMA fighter Nick Newell. And the “obstacles” basically boil down to one thing. Nick Newell fought with just one arm. So yes, it’s not just “inspired by a true story.” It’s inspiring.

This bio-pic follows Newell from childhood, where young Nick (William Jackson Kelly) is bullied as “the freak” for being born one with arm. But he makes that friend for life, fellow wrestling fan Abi (Marcellus Maxwell).

They imitate the pro wrasslin’ trash talk of their idol, Bubba “the Bear” Braun and horse around with his moves right up to the day a high school coach (Barry Livingston) taunts the now-teenaged Nick (Cody Christian of TV’s “All American” and “Teen Wolf”) and Abi (Cameron James Matthews of “Freeland”).

“Why don’t you guys stop faking like you’re wrestling and do it for real?”

One plus in this script is that it opens with Nick losing a fight (as an adult) and shows the teasing (“Hey, it’s The Elbow.”) and humiliations he endures on the mat. He loses. A lot. His buddy Abi, the one who talks him into MMA after high school, is a natural.

What just happened? “He kicked my ass.” “The key to getting better, know ‘why.'”

The villains are properly villainous (nobody wants to fight “the gimp”), and the leads — Christian, Matthews and Livingston — are quite convincing.

Elisabeth Röhm plays the supportive single mom who tells him “The only disability in life is a s—ty attitude.” She’s the one who takes him to an inspirational lecture by former major league pitcher Jim Abbott, who pitched for the Angels and the Yankees, with just one arm.

Livingston is a steady presence at the coach who doesn’t care for “quitters.” And Kevin Pollack is the droll promoter who cracks “Good thing you write with your right hand” and endorses Nick as he subdues a foe in his last amateur tryout.

“OK, he’s ‘technically asleep,’ now. Nice going.”

Yes, the training montages are straight-up cliches (This time he loads rocks into that tractor tire he drags around) and the story ventures into what can only be called melodrama, even if the melodramatic elements are largely true, or at least fact-based.

And the fight scenes and strategizing training sessions are well-choreographed and shot, the most instructive I’ve ever seen in an MMA movie. Yes, wrestlers do make some of the toughest foes in the octagon. “Notorious Nick” explains how.

I don’t want to oversell this, but “Notorious Nick” follows a formula and makes it work. Stay through the credits if you want to see the real Nick Newell in action.

MPA Rating: PG-13 for sports action/violence, and language

Cast: Cody Christian, Elisabeth Röhm, Cameron James Matthews, Barry Livingston and Kevin Pollack

Credits: Directed by Aaron Leong, script by Josh Campbell, Darrin Reed and Matthew Stuecken. A Lionsgate release.

Running time: 1:28

Interviewing Amy Heckerling (“Fast times at Ridgemont High,” “Clueless”) we got off topic and recalled “sitting next to the TV, waiting for this damned thing to come on.”

She was in Cali, I was in Alaska, waiting on August 1, 1981 for MTV to strike a blow for youth music culture like no other.

Heckerling remembered it informing her work from thence forward. I remember buying koala bear dolls for a girlfriend who could not get enough of that damned Men at Work video for a song that was plagiarized just a little bit .

This video posted below was MTV to me. Pop rock, models, whimsy and filmmaking that was distinctly “video” in medium and style.

MTV, we hardly knew ye.

The best damned action film of the summer has nothing to do with comic books and does not feature some perfectly-put-together gym rat in tights sticking “the super-hero landing.”

It’s Korean, and before you ask, there’s nary a Busan zombie in sight.

“Escape from Mogadishu” is a nerve-wracking account of diplomats scrambling to escape Somalia just as the 1990 civil war erupted and finished the country’s transition to “failed state.”

They were representatives of the two Koreas, so their harrowing attempt to get out didn’t get much attention in the West. And while I can’t vouch for how much of this Ryoo Seung-wan thriller is the literal truth, what we see is just jaw-dropping. Nothing Hollywood could dream up tops the action climax that real history and Ryoo (“The City of Violence,” “The Battleship Island”) serve up here.

I mean, WOW.

The setting is the “Killing Fields” anarchy that set in the instant Somali civilians rose up to overthrow their dictatorship, thereby inviting rebel militias to charge in and overwhelm the army and police of the capital. The story has a hint of “Argo” about it, as the South Korean and North Korean embassies, blood enemies, have to cooperate to get their tiny staffs out before the slaughter reach them.

This is pre-“Blackhawk Down,” before U.S. intervention in the humanitarian disaster, and long before lawlessness settled into an equilibrium where militias and war lords ran everything and piracy (“Captain Phillips”) became a leading export.

Ryoo introduces us to the players, overwhelmed South Korean Ambassador Han (Kim Yoon-seok, amusingly flustered), hopeful that he can “gift” and negotiate his way into favor with the Somali President Barre, and new enough to the job that he still frets about why the North Koreans “can’t play by the rules.”

South Korea was courting many countries in Africa, looking for the votes for U.N. membership. North Korea’s cunning Ambassador Rim (Heo Joon-ho, deliciously aloof and arrogant) is hellbent on stopping that.

There’s just enough of the diplomatic struggles, the spy game played out by each ambassador’s young, thin and Raybanned “intelligence” counselor (Jo In-sung plays the upstart South Korean, Koo Kyo-hwan is his runty, short-tempered North Korean counterpart) to give an idea of the stakes and the place this “game” is playing out in.

Double-crosses, double-dealing when it comes to arms sales, the North was eating the South’s lunch.

A CIA memo and an Aussie journalist might say of the Somalis that they “don’t think they’re ready for a civil war, yet,” but events quickly prove them wrong. The riots turn into an armed insurrection, the power goes out, communications crash and looting and rebel infiltrators turn the entire city into a free fire zone.

The tiny Korean consulates don’t have guards to protect them, the means of getting out and can’t even call home for fresh orders. They’re on their own, with undisciplined, trigger-happy child soldiers holding their fate in their Somali hands.

Can the two hated enemies “steel” their “hearts” and help each other out of this fix?

Ryoo gives us one tense standoff after another at embassy gates, government ministries (abruptly abandoned as the “real” looters — the government — fled), in the streets and in the consulates once the shooting and looting begins.

The story is related through parallel characters. The ambassadors must save face, follow protocols or agree to break them “through (personal) negotiation.” Their mistrust is amplified in their subordinates, with one intelligence agent demanding that his boss not approach “those South Korean bastards” and the other insisting they can’t trust “those commie bastards.”

The humor in the story — and yes, there’s humor even in Dante’s Inferno playing out in the Horn of Africa — comes from that mistrust and hatred. The North Korean children of the staff have their eyes shielded from the decor in the dark, shell-shattered South Korean embassy. Too many Seoul Olympics posters and pictures of prosperity are capable of corrupting their young minds.

An awkward shared meal is tense right up to the moment Ambassador Han realizes the commies fear the food is poisoned.

And we’ve seen how Han’s wife (So-jin Kim), a pious Christian, imposes her “Let us pray” on even the Buddhists in her husband’s staff. But when it comes to breaking the ice, it is wives and families who make the first progress. But “pathos” of the “Why can’t we get along?” variety never settles in. Relations range from hostile to frosty to grudging, but never further.

The sets are a sea of fires and firefights, as impressive as anything Ridley Scott managed for “Blackhawk Down.” But the struggles here aren’t so much heroic as just human, flawed people under pressure struggling to improvise their way out of a life-or-death jam, and bitching about who used the toilet after the water was cut off.

It’s not giving too much to say that the movie’s climax involves a convoy, and I’ve never been more nostalgic for my 1980 Mercedes 240D, thanks to these scenes of overbuilt German cars rumbling through a hail of lead and Molotov cocktails.

You want great action? Eschew the comic book movies and read a few subtitles. “Escape from Mogadishu” is in a league of its own this summer.

MPA Rating: TV-14, violence, profanity

Cast: Kim Yoon-seok, In-Sung Jo, Huh Joon-ho, So-jin Kim, Kyo-hwan Koo, Man-sik Jeong

Credits: Scripted and directed by Ryoo Seung-wan. A Well Go USA release.

Running time: 2:01

As MMA has supplanted “the sweet science” of boxing in the sporting world, so the MMA melodramatic thriller has replaced “the fight picture” as a genre staple.

Everything we see in the Polish made-for-Netflix thriller “Bartkowiak” we’ve seen in half a century of boxing movies. Gangsters masquerading as “entrepreneurs,” a beaten fighter struggling to regain his manhood by defending the family, intimidation and murders aimed at securing coveted Polish real estate, the ex-girlfriend who is the daughter of the hero’s trainer.

“Bartkowiak” opens with our hero, the champ, Tomasz (Józef Pawlowski) losing his title to a tattooed brute. It ends with our hero, beating his way up through the ranks to get to the evil developer (a “redundant” description, even in Poland) who wants to get ahold of the family nightclub.

Almost everything in between is dead screen time as the movie utterly flatlines without high stakes, life and deal brawling.

Tomasz’s manager/brother (Antoni Pawlicki) barely has time to gift his sibling with a vintage Mach One Mustang before he dies in a wreck. Tomasz will have to give up his job as head bouncer at a swanky club and take over the siblings’ nightclub.

That means another run-in with the punk rapper Sleepy D (Rafal Zawierucha) and his entourage of bodyguards. That means facing down the guy (Bartlomiej Topa) who covets this whole part of their beloved city for his new office tower project.

Zofia Domalik is the lawyer once-and-future girlfriend, Janusz Chabior is her dad, the bald trainer/corner man who lost everything when the champ lost his last fight.

I’d say more about this, but there’s no dialogue (in Polish, with English subtitles, or dubbed into English) worth quoting and the assorted assaults — threatening a butcher in the deli with butchery, a beat-down on the exclusive golf course — are by-the-book basic and boring.

Cast: Józef Pawlowski, Zofia Domalik, Janusz Chabior, Bartlomiej Topa and
Rafal Zawierucha

Credits: Directed by Daniel Markowicz, script by Daniel Bernardi and Monika Slawecka. A Neflix release.

Running time: 1:31

Pablo Schreiber makes the most of a rare leading man turn as a biker and ex-con who dives into an instant family with “Lorelei.”

Schrieber (“Orange is the New Black,” “Den of Thieves,” “13 Hours”) is playing yet another tough guy, and with the right haircut and stubble, he’s as “biker” as they come. But here he plays a biker sentimental enough to want to recapture the great love of his pre-prison life, and sensitive enough to try and make it work, despite the long odds.

Wayland just did 15 years, giving up most of his youth for “not squealing” on his Night Horsemen brethren. They come to pick him up when he gets out, take him drinking and laud his sacrifice. But the Lutheran pastor (Trish Egan) who runs the halfway house he checks into in his corner of the Pacific Northwest gives him the simplest warning — “They’re trouble.”

Another sign of trouble? Running into lithe blonde Dolores (Jena Malone) at her support group meeting.

She’s picking up charity food donations for her family. No shame in that.

But she’s stuck with an ancient, battered Chevy Nova for a ride, movie shorthand for “bad judgement.” She’s wearing a lot of ink, and in the most personal places.

She has children. And if Wayland’s warning bells don’t go off when he hears their names, ours do. “Denim Blue” is the youngest, “Periwinkle Blue” is the responsible one and “Dodger Blue” is the oldest. Any woman who would name her kids that doesn’t need to tell us she doesn’t know all of their fathers.

A single visit to a roadhouse, where they’re too broke to have more than a drink or two, hits the reset button. They lose themselves in their youth, when he was a 20something hustler trying to get something going and she was a star high school swimmer, begging him to take her to LA.

As they tumble into bed and into a relationship, the forks in their road together are revisited, Wayland’s crime is uncovered and Dolores starts to come out as rash, impulsive and barely suitable to baby sit her kids, much less raise them.

That’s a hard thing to realize AFTER you’ve moved in with somebody.

First-time feature writer-director Sabrina Doyle makes the most of this hardly-working class milieu, the bars and the sorts of jobs available to an ex-con, the limitations of a low income future that “ex-con” status dictates.

The script rounds out Wayland’s life with work, family loss, the cost of ignoring that pastor’s advice and the pressures of a new “family,” money, old ties and a probation officer who’s just waiting for him to screw up.

Malone (“Antebellum,” “Batman vs. Superman: The Dawn of Justice”) makes Dolores more than just a collection of stereotypes. We can see the nostalgia that’s playing in Wayland’s decisions working on her, too. Our leads do an excellent job of keeping us guessing about who “impulse control issues” half of the couple will screw up next.

There’s little here we haven’t seen before, with the novel moment here and there, and worn out tropes (getting pulled back into biker drug-dealing) played down, and easy “answers” (A new business opportunity?) tripped up.

But Schreiber and Malone leave it all on the set in this sad but wistful romance, a movie about teen dreams that lose all meaning if they’re deferred too long.

MPA Rating: unrated, some violence, drug content, sex, profanity

Cast: Pablo Schreiber, Jena Malone, Ryan Findley, Trish Egan, Chancellor Perry,
Parker Pascoe-Sheppard and Amelia Borgerding

Credits: Scripted and directed by Sabrina Doyle. A Vertical release.

Running time: 1:51

If you were raised and educated in English, chances are you have at least a passing acquaintance with the tale of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. This chivalric romance comes up in any class that goes back to “Beowulf,” dips into Chaucer and climaxes with Mallory’s “Le Morte d’Arthur.”

As strange and magical as David Lowery’s “The Green Knight” is, that familiarity reveals it as a fairly conventional — or more conventional than you expect — retelling of the story of an ambitious member of court who accepts a combat challenge from an interloper and has his mettle, his mental state and his honor tested by the “game” the green stranger proposes.

There’s little Terry Gilliam/Terry Jones Medieval whimsy in this film from the director of “A Ghost Story” and “Pete’s Dragon.” This is as quiet as a whispered fireside legend, deadly serious and portentous as it honors the somber tone of the original tale.

Dev Patel is Gawain, a young lay-about aspiring to knighthood in the court of his king (not “Arthur,” an opening narration insists), a place at that king’s (Sean Harris, the movie whisperer) esteemed round table.

Gawain has a lover, a short-haired pixie (Oscar winner Alicia Vikander) who wishes he would make her his “lady,” and marry her.

The aged king and his queen (Kate Dickie) long for Gawain’s knighthood so that he can take his place at the table as the son of the king’s sister. She (Sarita Choudhury) is the conjure woman of the court, “a witch,” in the vernacular of the day. And Gawain?

“I fear I am not meant for greatness.”

Christmas is the day of reckoning for this round table of revelers. A towering stranger bangs open the door, rides in wielding a huge battle axe and states his case. Let one knight strike a blow against him, only if that knight visits the stranger in his Green Chapel one year hence, where The Green Knight is obliged to return the blow.

“Oh greatest of Kings, let one of your Knights try to land a blow against me! Indulge me in this game.”

Only headstrong Gawain accepts the insulting, Christmas dinner-interrupting affront.

“Do not take your pledge honoring this idly,” he is warned.

And even when the Green Knight (Ralph Ineson) lays down his axe and offers his neck, the kid doesn’t smell a trap. He takes the king’s sword and slices that head off.

Which the Green Knight’s body picks up and gallops off with, the original “headless horseman” with the head bellowing a reminder about “NEXT Christmas” as he makes his exit.

Gawain has a year to consider the consequences of his haste, the “bravest of the brave” fame it generates (including a Punch & Judy show in his honor), the prospects of maybe marrying better than his beloved Essel (Vikander) and the grim payback awaiting him after a long journey north come next Christmas.

He hadn’t reckoned on the (literal) green stranger not dying of beheading.

The Green Knight himself is leafy, woody and flowering, so much so that you half expect his introduction to be “I am Green Groot.” His underreaction to his beheading brings John Cleese’s “a mere flesh wound” (“Monty Python and the Holy Grail”) to mind. But again, this is more “Excalibur” than Monty Python.

Lowery’s film stakes its claim to “exceptional” in the second and third acts, a lengthy quest to the north where “a small kindness” to a battlefield scavenger (Barry Keoghan) is repaid with treachery, a mysterious “St. Winifred” (Erin Kellyman) requires his service and a noble couple (Joel Edgerton and Vikander again) offer hospitality, with a catch.

The quest is shrouded in shadows and fog, with tension and dread building via long tracking shots of Gawain crossing treeless hills and moors, with the last forests either being chopped down or full of menace, hiding highwayman.

Patel makes a sturdy, sensitive Gawain, someone who lets us see the hard lessons he’s learning with his face and eyes. “Green Knight” is a film of few words in that regard, and all the richer for it.

And thanks to a muddy, gloomy glorious Dark-Ages-on-a-Budget look and the almost heartbreaking pathos Patel brings to each “lesson learned” moment, it works. If you want to know why this fable endures, Lowery’s film makes that case better than any English lit class ever could.

MPA Rating: R for violence, some sexuality and graphic nudity

Cast: Dev Patel, Alicia Vikander, Joel Edgerton, Sarita Choudhury, Sean Harris, Kate Dickie and Ralph Ineson.

Credits: Scripted and directed by David Lowery. An A24 release.

Running time: 2:10

So anyway, I have this Johnny Appleseed/Roger DVDseed thing I do on the endless Nomadland road trip that is my life. I donate DVDs I review to whatever public library I pass on my travels. Plant City Fla. to Danville VA, Bluefield , W. Va. or Walterboro, S.C., assorted hamlets all along life’s “blue highways” get their hands on some grand mostly international cinema.

Tonight’s donation is to the Forsythe Co. Public Library in Winston Salem, N.C. Interested Interested in a little slice of life in Ghana? “Nakom,” which I reviewed this week, should be in their collection by Tuesday

Matt Damon makes a most convincing Oklahoman in a china shop in “Stillwater,” co-writer/director Tom McCarthy’s wholly fictional tale of an American coed locked up by a European justice system and the father who tries to help.

The story resembles the infamous Amanda Knox case just enough that it bears mentioning. But this drama is set in Marseille, the “conviction by media” was French and not Italian and the convict’s family isn’t AM talk show telegenic and bourgeois, but Oklahoma roughneck, working class through and through.

Considering what she’s been through and the way the movie flirts with her case, it’s understandable that she’s furious about it.

McCarthy “Spotlight,” “The Visitor”), Damon & Co. serve up an “Innocent Abroad” in Damon, a laid-off oil worker, a single parent burning through generations of family wealth visiting his daughter (Abigail Breslin) in a Marseille prison, incarcerated for murdering her girlfriend and roommate there.

The drama is about Dad’s search for a missing material witness whom his daughter accused of being “the real killer,” and the film gets sidetracked by one of the most adorable cases of “mission creep” in the murder mystery canon. Damon’s Bill Baker meets, befriends and leans on a French single mom (Camille Cottin) and her impossibly cute moppet, Maya (Lilou Siauvaud), who help him and distract him from his hunt for the mysterious “Akim,” whom his daughter is sure broke in and butchered her lady love, Lina.

But what the film is really about is American heavy-handedness, that “bull in a china shop” allegory, with Damon perfectly embodying a sturdy, flawed and determined man, out of his country and way out of his depth. Baker’s stoicism dominates the early scenes as we pick up the routine of this under-employed “between jobs” high school dropout trying to, if nothing else, light a fire under his daughter’s French lawyer.

But she (Anne Le Ny) is at the shrug and “There is a time for hope, and there’s a time for acceptance” stage.

Hiding this news from Allison and his late wife’s mother, who is underwriting their continuing legal fight, Baker takes matters into his own hands.

This is “Stillwater” at its most compelling and real. This man with a “lost daughter” in Marseille isn’t Liam Neeson with his “particular skills.” This is a ballcap, blue jeans, plaid shirt and work boots Everyman who doesn’t speak the language, who is oil-field roughneck tough, but nothing special.

He says grace at meals, never lets his drawling, charming requests for help give away desperation and just keeps “gettin’ it,” as he describes every job of work he’s ever had.

Baker gets just far enough to get himself in over his head.

McCarthy serves up nervy scenes — interrogations, pursuits. But he lets this quest drift and drift, which at least leaves plenty of room for Damon’s portrayal to sink in. There are actors who never should “play dumb,” and he’s probably one of them. But damned if he isn’t utterly convincing, letting us see the wheels turn, the mistakes blundered into and the flawed reasoning that is all that he has to apply to this problem that would be beyond most mere mortal’s reach.

M

Breslin gives one of her finest performances as a young woman desperate enough to cling to straws, bratty enough to cast blame, enough of her father’s daughter to make us wonder.

Cottin, who rarely works in Hollywood films (she was in “Allied,” but might be best known for the French film “Dumped”) is perfectly cast. Virginie is the idealized American stereotype of a French woman — smart, effortlessly stylish, sexy and confidently so even if she is just “a stage actress,” not a “model actress” type making movies and TV. She is convincingly curious about this stranger who needs her help, not shy about making him her “latest project” or getting in over her head. We shouldn’t buy the connection or any possible attraction. She sells it.

But you can’t watch “Stillwater” without feeling the drag, noting where the dragging kicks in and muttering to yourself “Hitchcock would have fixed this.” McCarthy spoils the twists and waters down what should be the tensest moments.

This is a dramatic thriller, and while McCarthy loses the drama here and there, the thriller thread plum gets away from him.

Whatever metaphor about an American abroad seeking American satisfaction and an American resolution in a place where “that doesn’t work here” is belabored and buried in the mix. Fine performances aside, this is a classic 100 minute thriller that runs on for an extra 40 minutes and blows the punch line.

MPA Rating: R, for language (profanity)

Cast: Matt Damon, Abigail Breslin, Camille Cottin, Lilou Siauvaud, Idir Azougli, Deanna Duggan

Credits: Directed by Tom McCarthy, script by Tom McCarthy, Marcus Hinchey and Thomas Bidegain. A Focus Features release.

Running time: 2:20

Focus Features didn’t make this available to me pre release, the fraidy cats. So I’m catching it on the fly in an artsy cinema in the artsiest city I ever lived in, Winston Salem NC.

It’s been a long time since I lived here, but if I remember it right, the city motto was “Winston Salem, it’s not just about lung cancer.” Something like that.

A/perture Cinema it is.