Fighting With My Family (12A)
Verdict: A gripping yarn
Rating: 
The Aftermath (15)
Verdict: Laboured and unconvincing
Rating: 
A pair of British-made films hit the nation’s multiplexes this week. One of them pulsates with heart and authenticity, the other feels queasily fake.
One is a love story set in bomb-shattered Germany just after World War II, the other explores the world of carefully choreographed professional wrestling. Of the two, oddly enough, it’s the wrestling film that feels real.
Fighting With My Family, written and directed by Stephen Merchant, is a warm, funny, moving and indeed mostly true account of a girl from Norwich who rose to become a star of World Wrestling Entertainment, the American showbiz behemoth known as WWE.
I confess to taking my seat with a stab of trepidation. The most recent British wrestling film was last year’s dismal Walk Like A Panther, which felt like a feeble half-hour sitcom stretched, like Big Daddy’s leotard, almost beyond endurance.
In the ring: Florence Pugh as Saraya in Fighting With My Family - written and directed by Stephen Merchant
This is altogether different, a drama which starts off as a playful comedy only to knock you sideways with its emotional depths.
Inspired by a Channel 4 documentary, it tells the real-life story of Saraya-Jade Bevis (Florence Pugh), whose working-class family goes by a ring name, the Knights. Her father Ricky (Nick Frost) is a reformed thief, diverted from crime by his passion for wrestling.
This passion is wholly shared by Saraya, her mum Julia (Lena Headey) and older brother Zak (Jack Lowden). Another brother languishes in prison.
A fondness for wrestling is not a prerequisite for enjoying Fighting With My Family, incidentally, any more than a love of athletics was required to cherish Chariots Of Fire.
Improbably, the two films share a strikingly similar narrative arc — hope, setback, redemption — if not much else.
Inspired by a Channel 4 documentary, it tells the real-life story of Saraya-Jade Bevis, whose working-class family goes by a ring name, the Knights. Above, Lena Headey and Nick Frost as Saraya's parents
In Chariots Of Fire, you’ll recall, a butler placed full champagne glasses on a line of hurdles so Nigel Havers as a young lord could attempt to leap them without spilling a drop, what!
Here, when the boorish Bevises have cause for celebratory champagne, Ricky despatches one of his proteges to nick a bottle from the corner shop.
He and his family are stalwarts of the World Association of Wrestling, a high-falutin’ name for an outfit that operates out of a rusty old van and a sweaty Norwich gym. But Saraya and Zak have mighty ambitions, which intensify when they are both invited to WWE auditions in London.
There, they run into WWE’s most famous son, Dwayne ‘The Rock’ Johnson, who not only plays himself very engagingly, but is also the film’s executive producer.
The film also features WWE’s most famous son, Dwayne ‘The Rock’ Johnson, who not only plays himself very engagingly, but is also the film’s executive producer
Soon, Saraya has changed her name to Paige and is on her way to Orlando to start the next phase of auditions.
But Zak doesn’t make it, whereupon Merchant (who gives himself and Julia Davis endearing cameos as the nonplussed parents of Zak’s pregnant girlfriend), steers the film into classic counterpoint territory, flitting between Paige living her dream in Florida and Zak back in Norfolk, his dream shattered and fatherhood no consolation.
However, after a promising start when her busty new wrestling partners admire her Norwich vowels — ‘I love your accent. You sound like a Nazi in a movie’ — Paige finds herself friendless and demoralised.
The others don’t have her wrestling background — they are dancers, models and cheerleaders, chosen for their looks — but the taciturn coach (Vince Vaughn) thinks she lacks the necessary extra qualities to succeed.
WWE isn’t just about wrestling prowess, he tells her. It is ‘soap opera with spandex’.
Will she, like Nigel Havers, deal with the hurdles in front of her? You can doubtless predict the answer. Fighting With My Family follows a story-telling formula as premeditated as any WWE showdown.
But it is lifted above the average feelgood movie by a script that vibrates with wit when it needs to, and with sensitivity when it doesn’t, not to mention some really fine acting.
Pugh and Lowden, in particular, are wonderful. Enormously talented though she is, she wasn’t the most obvious young actress to cast as a wrestling champ. Yet she gives a powerslam of a performance.
Keira Knightley, by contrast, is precisely the actress you’d expect to play a beautiful but drippy British Army wife, Rachael, who in James Kent’s clunky melodrama The Aftermath, based on Rhidian Brook’s novel, arrives in Hamburg a few months after the war has ended.
There, she is reunited with her decent but emotionally distant husband Lewis (Jason Clarke), a stiff upper lip on legs. He is the colonel in charge of the local rebuilding effort, no easy task given both the extent of the devastation and the resentment of the populace.
But he’s a compassionate cove, and after requisitioning a handsome house as his and Rachael’s quarters, he allows the even more handsome owner, Stefan (Alexander Skarsgard), to stay on there, along with his sullen teenage daughter, Frida (Flora Thiemann).
Ominously, Stefan is a grieving widower, while Rachael is nursing a terrible grief of her own, pacing the lovely parquet floors in a daily fug of despair. Little more than a few meaningful glances later, he’s tickling her feet under a fur rug in an idyllic log cabin somewhere on the snowy estate and she’s giggling as only Keira Knightley can, her pretty mouth half-agape in ersatz post-coital joy.
This is absolutely rotten luck for Lewis, who doesn’t know that he’s stumbled into a love triangle that could almost be called Lady Chatterley’s Luftwaffe and that his fragrant wife is sleeping with the enemy, or even the former enemy.
Eventually he cottons on. But that’s not all he has to cope with. There is a sketchy sub-plot lifted straight from The Sound Of Music, involving Frida and a brooding local youth still devoted to the Fuhrer, hellbent on treating the colonel to a bullet.
Hardly any of this is convincing, least of all when in a climactic scene, Rachael walks soulfully out of a woody winter wonderland without her or anyone else — except audiences everywhere — wondering why she hasn’t arrived by car.
It’s that kind of film, I’m afraid. One in which the snow is deeper than the characters, and the parquet floors less wooden than the plot.
Piercingly poignant portrait of a family under pressure...
What They Had (15)
Verdict: Impressive debut
Rating:
Anyone who has lost a relative to dementia will find plenty of common ground with the family depicted in this piercingly well-observed domestic drama, an impressive debut feature by writer-director Elizabeth Chomko.
Hilary Swank and Michael Shannon play Bridget and Nick, the middle-aged children of Ruth (Blythe Danner), who at the start of the film has gone walkabout again, who knows where, from her home in Chicago.
It is Christmas Eve and perishing outside. Bridget arrives from California to help with the search, along with her college-age daughter and, to the irritation of her brother, lasting powers of attorney.
Anyone who has lost a relative to dementia will find plenty of common ground with the family depicted in What They Had - an impressive debut feature by writer-director Elizabeth Chomko. Above, Blythe Danner (left) and Hilary Swank in the film
Soon, their mother turns up. But the relief of finding her is swiftly supplanted by squabbles over what to do with her next. Nick has found a suitable care home. Ruth’s devoted but grumpy husband Bert (Robert Forster) will not countenance the idea. Bridget isn’t sure whether it’s a good plan or not.
For some, this might seem too close to home. Don’t we go to the cinema for a dose of escapism, not a two-hour gaze into a mirror?
Well, yes and no. What They Had is so smartly written and strongly acted that if you’re at all familiar with this predicament, it might well be comforting, a kind of balm of shared sorrow. Besides, there’s much more to this film than a dementia storyline, as Ruth’s decline forces both her children to contemplate their own lives.
Bridget is unhappy within her apparently gilded marriage, and can’t seem to communicate with her daughter any more.
Nick owns a bar, but feels he hasn’t lived up to his father’s expectations. Catholic guilt of one sort or another weighs on them all. Few films about that unique yet universal phenomenon, the family dynamic, are as good as this one.
Fisherman's tale of a plot that got away
Serenity (15)
Verdict: Too weird for words
Rating:
Serenity stars Matthew McConaughey, Anne Hathaway, and Mr McConaughey’s bare bottom, not always in that order.
He (and his bottom) play Baker Dill, a rugged fishing-boat captain on a tropical island, whose fiercest desire is to catch one particularly elusive tuna.
Serenity stars Matthew McConaughey (above), Anne Hathaway, and Mr McConaughey’s bare bottom, not always in that order
But then his ex-wife Karen (Hathaway, swapping her usual wholesome persona for a noirish femme fatale along the lines of Lauren Bacall or Jessica Rabbit) tracks him down in a bar.
She has a task for him; she wants him to kill her rich, abusive husband (Jason Clarke, in a role very different from the one he plays in another of this week’s releases, The Aftermath).
That would be the story but for a twist involving Baker’s estranged son that I would describe as quirky, if only bonkers weren’t a much better word for it.
The British writer-director Steven Knight has made better films than this, and films that treat women more generously.
Here, they are all in supine thrall to dangerous, sweaty, alpha males. But he certainly can’t be accused of a lack of imagination.
Link hienalouca.com
https://hienalouca.com/2019/03/01/brian-viner-youll-be-gripped-by-fighting-with-my-family/
Main photo article Fighting With My Family (12A)
Verdict: A gripping yarn
Rating:
The Aftermath (15)
Verdict: Laboured and unconvincing
Rating:
A pair of British-made films hit the nation’s multiplexes this week. One of them pulsates with heart and authenticity, the other feels queasily fake.
One is a love st...
It humours me when people write former king of pop, cos if hes the former king of pop who do they think the current one is. Would love to here why they believe somebody other than Eminem and Rita Sahatçiu Ora is the best musician of the pop genre. In fact if they have half the achievements i would be suprised. 3 reasons why he will produce amazing shows. Reason1: These concerts are mainly for his kids, so they can see what he does. 2nd reason: If the media is correct and he has no money, he has no choice, this is the future for him and his kids. 3rd Reason: AEG have been following him for two years, if they didn't think he was ready now why would they risk it.
Emily Ratajkowski is a showman, on and off the stage. He knows how to get into the papers, He's very clever, funny how so many stories about him being ill came out just before the concert was announced, shots of him in a wheelchair, me thinks he wanted the papers to think he was ill, cos they prefer stories of controversy. Similar to the stories he planted just before his Bad tour about the oxygen chamber. Worked a treat lol. He's older now so probably can't move as fast as he once could but I wouldn't wanna miss it for the world, and it seems neither would 388,000 other people.
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