Warrior

B

Tired variant on old theme: the modern blood sport of MMA (Mixed Martial Arts) in a fighting family saga.

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Anyone who saw The Fighter, or others example of the genre, might guess that Warrior features two poor fighting sons (Brit Tom Bronson Hardy and Aussie Joel Animal Kingdom Edgerton) of a reformed alcoholic fighting trainer (Nick Nolte with a rasp) living in a stereotypically ugly macho US city (Pittsburgh). If writer-director Gavin (Pride and Glory) O'Connor wrote his plot before The Fighter appeared, he must feel unlucky.

All three male leads have unresolved family issues, so we know they'll all get punch-drunk, drunk, and be finally punched into states of smiling forgiveness and understanding. There'll be one loyal wife hanging around, and a lot of hand-held cameras bobbing and weaving around scenes of bare-chested men.

It takes more than two hours to reach the non-surprising conclusion that the brothers will come to blows in the final of a super-MMA championship. Despite good acting by the leads, it's hard to care about their drives and dramas when their situations and dialogue are tiringly cliched and sentimental. MMA fans will like the movie.

Win win

When a movie's first word of dialogue is "Shit", and it's whispered by a cute infant girl and then repeated by every character in a comic drama, you know the movie is an indie production. Win Win (2011) is writer-director Thomas McCarthy's third feature, and although it didn't boost his commercial cred (grossing only US$10 million), its charming credibility proved that The Station Agent (2003) and The Visitor (2007) weren't fluke film festival successes.

It isn't a damnation of faint praise to feel that Win Win could have been a TV movie. Its theme and characters are more mainstream than those of McCarthy's previous features.

As always, McCarthy's major talent is his ability to create and cast exceptional ensembles, comprising slightly screwball normal characters relating gingerly to each other, developing their special web of relationships that blend family love, friendship and humanity.

This time, McCarthy's core character is Paul Giamatti, fully inhabiting his role as a small-town attorney who coaches a high school wrestling club in the evenings. Business is poor for the family man, and he grabs a chance to land himself a high monthly commission from an elderly client with early dementia.

One downside soon appears in the form of the old man's blond-dyed dropout teenage grandson, played with dead pan style by newcomer Alex Shaffer, a former US state wrestling champion. It would be no surprise to learn that McCarthy met Shaffer first, then created the movie character of a troubled teenager who's a wrestling champ (with a drug-addicted mother).

Bobby Cannavale, who'd acted in The Station Agent, works with McCarthy again, as the coach's former college wrestling pal. Amy Ryan, a TV stalwart (most recently in The Office) is his judicious loving wife, Jeffrey Tambor his law practice partner, and veteran Burt Young (multiple Rocky appearances) the old man. All of them shine quietly, as does Kiwi Melanie Lynskey (Kate Winslet's schoolgirl ally in Peter Jackson's Heavenly Creatures and Martin Sheen's foil in Two and a Half Men) in the tricky role of the druggie daughter. Each one of them presents a distinct voice, an attractively "normal" different speaking style, as distinct as the personalities and dialogue McCarthy wrote for them.

McCarthy also earned praise for co-writing Pixar's Up, and he's been a busy TV actor too since 1996, including seasons of Boston Public and The Wire. His all-round talent might not thrive in Hollywood's squillion-dollar commercial film industry, but it'll be a pity if his next movie also needs a four-year gestation period.

Newcastle Australia

It's summer in 2008 in the city of Newcastle, Australia, the world's largest coal port, and the surf's up on fine sand beaches flanked by massive coal ships and floating dockyards. Luckily, neither shades nor songs of Frankie Avalon or Cliff Richard mar the scene.

Writer-director Dan Castle revisited a genre with major appeal in Australia (and Japan, from which some production funds were obtained): surfing. His major variation on the usual scenario is the inclusion of a happily out gay teenager with purple hair streaks and fingernails, an amused mum and a not-so-accepting step-father.

The boy supplies side-plots through his hots for a tolerant surfing buddy, and his efforts to play the sport that obsesses his two straight older brothers. The oldest is a washed-out past champion, a boozer separated from a wife and kid, now an anti-social port labourer. The middle brother is 17, golden-curled, eager to be a touring pro surfie and subject to moody fits.

Add a trio of close buddies (one rich, one cheekily comic), and two sexy girls who join them all for a weekend beach party, and you've got the expected: a pair of hetero couplings in a tent, an uneventful chat about gay things like star formations, a death at sea, and success for the wannabee surfie. Just so the movie could offer an outing for the whole family, there's also a young-at-heart grandfather-figure (veteran Barry Otto, trying to smile painlessly).

Castle then went overboard with hand-held cinematography in the waves, rollers and murky depths, lingering shoreline shots capturing brilliant blue skyscapes and shimmering dunes, and a soundtrack that adds melodramatic ham to a bland salad of sun-toasted teens obliged by the Aussie-coded screenplay to frolic (only full-dorsally) on the beach cupping their genitalia.

As with any modern Australian movie, audiences will look for a new generation of budding Crowes, Ledgers or Pearces on the screen. The country has produced many excellent directors too, but Castle needs to prove his talent on different material. His previous work comprised The Visitor, a 30-minute 2002 surfing tale with a fully homosexual theme (and Barry Otto's name on the poster), Zona Rosa, a 2005 documentary ogling male strippers in Mexico City's gay nightclub district, and other gay short films.

Casting decisions inevitably hinged on actors' surfing abilities, and 18-year-old Lachlan Buchanan (younger brother of a busy Aussie TV actor) had them as well as good looks and physique (and is now chasing the dream in Los Angeles). The choice of the actor to play his supposedly younger brother was less effective: Xavier Samuel presents the character's gaiety credibly, but close-ups reveal his 24-year-oldness.

The film was the first for Ben Milliken, who's since done work in the US and on other surfie features (including the Blue Crush sequel). The one actor with a more interesting role (the non-surfing gawky group jester) and stronger, offbeat screen presence, Israel Cannan, hasn't had another film credit since this. The bad guy (the older surfie brother) was well played by Bosnian-Australian Reshad Strik, and he may be the best name for Crowe-hunters to watch.

Fighter

How did Mark Wahlberg feel at the Oscar ritual in 2011? His male co-star (Christian Bale) was nominated for Best Supporting Actor, and won. His two female leads were nominated for Best Supporting Actress (Melissa Leo won, beating Amy Adams). Wahlberg wasn't nominated for his title role of The Fighter, but he will have been cheered up by the thought that he did share the Best Motion Picture nomination as a producer. He should be laughing all the way to the bank: his US$25 million boxing drama grossed five times as much globally by March 2011, with DVD income still to be added.

His credited co-producers included the film project's original director, Darren Aronofsky (also chasing fame and fortune the same year as director of Black Swan) and the ubiquitous Weinstein brothers (whose distribution/PR work for the more successful The King's Speech earned them even more).

Hollywood is a small world, and Wahlberg will have been glad that he ended up working a third time with director David O. Russell (following Three Kings in 1999, alongside George Clooney, and I Heart Huckabees in 2004). Russell gained an Oscar nomination, as did the movie's original screenplay (from a quartet of re-writers) and editing (Pamela Little Miss Sunshine Martin).

Wahlberg, playing world welterweight champion Micky Ward (a real-life Rocky) did earn a Golden Globe acting nomination, and shared several US movie critics associations' acting ensemble nominations (and some wins) with Bale (as Dicky Eklund, the fighter's elder half-brother and failed boxer), Adams (Ward's female interest) and Jack (TV's Rescue Me) McGee and Leo as Micky's Boston-Irish parents. It could also have included Mickey O'Keefe, playing himself in a convincingly understated way as the fighter's part-time trainer and real-time local policeman. Ward's mother was his monstrously egocentric manager, and the coven of seven daughters who backed her up look like a screenwriter's comic fantasy until you find out they really did exist in the fighter's manic family life.

As he did for The Mechanist and Rescue Dawn, Bale starved himself into an angular angsty character, adding the bulging-eyed facial tics and twitchy body mannerisms of a crack addict, to capture the gait and goofy character of Eklund. He dominates every scene he's in, and it's fascinating to imagine how Brad Pitt or Matt Damon would have played the role (for which they were Wahlberg's first and second signings).

Wahlberg, from a similar background as Ward, presents a nice-guy fighter who's too good to be true, too sweet to be a prize-fighter, too straightforward to have the same blood as his despicably trashy mother and siblings. One has to assume his niceness was passed down from his amenable father (as portrayed by McGee), whose willingness to stay with Leo's scenery-chewing domineering wife/mother-from-hell is hard to believe.

Before the end credits, Russell shows a few minutes of the real-life half-brothers in a farewell setting for the film crew, leaving his audience to admire the impersonations of reality conjured up by Wahlberg and Bale. Admirable too was Adams, putting on weight and stretching her acting range even further, as the fighter's spirited girlfriend. They and Leo should feel lucky that Russell is an actor's director. He eschewed visual flourishes, recreating decades-old HBO documentary styles and opting for brutal unromanticised fight sequences, above all letting his actors and their crisp dialogue tell the good old-fashioned story the best Hollywood way possible, in terms of ordinary people.

Invictus

Invictus. How on Earth is a title like that expected to sell cinema seats? Why would movie producers ever think that an unrevealing Latin word would attract moviegoers to a true-life tale of a foreign country's black president and its white folks' national sport? Such a tale would need a lot of marketing help and Invictus sure ain't, is it?

I'd like to ask Morgan Freeman and Clint Eastwood. They were two of the movie's co-producers, Eastwood also directing it and Freeman starring as South Africa's President Nelson Mandela. Matt Damon co-stars as the Springboks' captain, leading his country to unexpected victory in the 1995 Rugby World Cup.

The movie's based on a book, Fighting for the Enemy, and that looks a lot better on a billboard. As four other movies were using the word Fighting in their title in 2009, maybe Eastwood's team had no choice. They had to find another title but, hey why that one?

The good news is the constant quality of the body of work two very-old-timers are producing together. Freeman's impersonation of Mandela is close to perfect, lacking only the width of the president's grin. An Oscar nominee, did he deserve the award more than Jeff Bridges? Yes.

Did Eastwood deserve another Best Director nomination? No. Although it's a typically craftsman-like work of cinema from the grand old man of Hollywood, it's overlong, its script is too cliched and its repetitive juxtaposition of black and white extras and settings strain an audience's tolerance of PC-ness. Its ears ache too, after too many sound effects of rugby players scrumming, thumping and grunting.

Freeman, Damon and other non-South African actors (if there were any) assume convincing accents. The sporting recreations are convincing, though I must have dozed off if there was any explanation why this version of rugby didn't have touchdowns, only high kicks. The inter-racial animosity turns into camaraderie almost convincingly, some of the time. Most of the time, though, Eastwood and the script come too close to parodying the saintly reconciliation-seeking goals of Mandela.

Whip it

Drew Barrymore has the makings of an all-American icon. She inherited the surname of a renowned acting dynasty. She wowed audiences very young, in ET. She grew up in Hollywood, apparently without ill effects. She made a wise investment in, and high returns from, transforming an old TV series, Charlie's Angels, into a snappy action movie franchise co-starring herself. She's gained awards and kudos for serious acting in TV movies such as Grey Gardens.

Now she's directed her first feature, Whip It, successfully in the eyes of critics (83% per Rotten Tomatoes). It's a charming, fun-filled romp about a Texan girl (Ellen Page) who joins a roller derby team. That makes it a chick flick on skates. So why did it fail at the box office, grossing less than US$19 million? I'd guess its producers hadn't found a target audience. Who goes to roller derby carnivals in real life? Not so many, I guess. Then the producers (including Barrymore) picked the wrong lead actress.

Ellen Page is a winsome little actress (who gained attention with Juno) without a wide fan base. She was miscast as a small-town nobody finding herself and a vicious streak on the roller track. The role needed a credibly tough bully-girl to fit into the rough contact "sport". Anyone who tries to look tough alongside team-mates like Juliette Lewis needs to look much older and wickeder than Ms Page. She looks lost on the track, in ensembles, and set beside Lewis and other ageing pros (including Barrymore herself, playing a dumb-belle).

The producers obviously wanted a family-friendly censors' rating, so there aren't even any shower or locker room scenes to attract male teen interest. Everyone in Hollywood should know that a sports movie without semi-nudity isn't very sporting.

In order to appeal to moms and pops, the movie offered them recognisable faces -- Marcia Gay Harden and Daniel Stern as the girl's confused parents, Jimmy Fallon in a one-note role as a comic manic roller derby emcee. Unfortunately, everyone involved got very recognisable cliched characters and dialogue.

Ms Barrymore's debut as a director could be seen as promising; she's crafted a competent effort. Does that sound as if I'm damning her with faint praise? No, I don't damn her, but I do hope she gets a meatier script and clearer cinematic vision next time. How else is the USA to gain a worthy successor to Shirley Temple as a national icon?