A Private War

A Private War is the story Marie Colvin (Rosamund Pike), the long time Sunday Times war correspondent of whom I was an occasional avid reader (now there's a contradiction).

Colvin, as with most war correspondents, risked her life to report from the front line but she often went where others feared to tread. Over the years she became a legendary figure who lost an eye to shrapnel in Sri Lanka in 2001 but, once she’d recovered, went back to reporting wearing an eyepatch like a badge of honour.

The film covers Colvin’s career up to her death in Homs in 2012 where she was in a building that the Syrian government shelled. At the time she was in Syria to prove that, despite what Assad had said, the government were targeting civilians. She proved it conclusively with her death and still got a live report in to CNN.

The film goes back a decade or more before Homs and keeps us informed of where we are with rather unnecessary nagging on-screen countdowns e.g. London, England, 10 years before Homs.

Having teamed up with photographer Paul Conroy (Jamie Dornan) she travels to Fallujah where they uncover mass graves containing victims of Saddam Hussein’s regime. Then as Colvin continues to be drawn to danger zones, we see her in Afghanistan and then interviewing Muammar Gaddafi in Libya.

Her editor Sean Ryan (Tom Hollander) constantly fears for her safety and sanity but ultimately he needs her to sell newspapers and, luckily for him, her DNA constantly drove her back to the front line.

Although we do see Colvin in civilian life it is fleeting. She struggles in her relationships (Greg Wise/Stanley Tucci), suffers nightmares, drinks a lot of alcohol, is rarely without a cigarette but she does occasionally pop home to pick up an award. The implication being that her job took a great toll on her but it's not clear if this was the extent of her personal life and it would have been nice to have known more.

Rosamund Pike throws herself into the role and does a good job. The film may be more action movie than I would have liked but I still liked the film a lot. It is pro-journalist at a time when many journalists are rightly being criticised and news itself is under suspicion. Marie Colvin was one who believed in actual facts and real news.

Fifty Shades Of Grey

So let’s recap in case you’ve been living under a rock and haven’t heard about the book ‘Fifty Shades Of Grey’, which my partner and I got through the audiobook of on a road trip to Scotland. Anastasia Steele is a mythical beast, the only remaining good looking 21 year old virgin in Seattle. Who, according to the book, has not only never had sex but never had neither a moment of self-pleasure nor a boyfriend either. Even though she must have had plenty of offers. So, one choosy chick.

When she stumbles into the office of Christian Grey CEO Grey Enterprises, whom she interviews for the university newspaper, she has this ‘holy cow’ moment and suddenly her inner goddess is doing the can-can or something or other. Grey is a damaged soul with sexual tastes that includes rope and cables ties from the US equivalent of B&Q. He likes to take pretty little students into his Red Room of Pain and gives them a good feathering, once they’ve signed the contract of course. So as soon as Anastasia Steele bites her lower lip, he decides she’s next for the full shackling.

The book has an interesting premise but, as has been well documented, it is poorly written and not terribly erotic but very very funny, unintentionally so I imagine. So bad it's good perhaps. Now of course the film is out. Normally I'd say don't ruin a book you really like by seeing the film of it because great books do not often make for great films.

Whereas... with something like Fifty Shades, you probably can’t go wrong... The good news is they have taken a chainsaw to most of EL James verbal diarrhoea. Anastasia’s inner goddess is back in its box and there’s no ‘holy hells, ‘double crap’ or even a solitary ‘oh my’. Although I’m quite sad about the loss of the ‘oh my’ actually. Ana (Dakota Johnson) is also much less of the irritating sap that she is in the book and is not reduced to a moist mess once, thankfully. Well, not that she tells us.

This Ana is no walkover and you’d probably want her in your own boardroom nibbling on her lip whilst renegotiating an important contract for you, such a good fist she makes of this one. Fist perhaps not being the most appropriate word to use as that was struck out of the contract negotiations along with the butt plugs.

Already I’m wondering why this wasn't this up for Best Adapted Screenplay at the Oscars? Did the Academy not appreciate what a truly great salvage job they've done here?

Johnson, initially a bit wooden, really grows on me and not just because she’s cute and mostly naked. Though she is. I also warmed to Jamie Dornan (as Christian Grey) eventually. Both actors managed to capture the essence of the book’s main characters. 

Plot wise, the film is true to the book although it all does seem a tad rushed as they attempt to cram everything into a couple of hours. There is little time for suspense to build or for the characters to be flushed out. Whilst Ana lost her innocence pretty quickly for someone who’d hung valiantly onto through so many years of Higher Education.

There are, of course, plenty of sex scenes but they are no more explicit than in many other films and TV series (hello to Game of Thrones). However they do feature a hell of a lot more of Johnson than they do of Dornan. True Dornan is topless at lot of time but Johnson spends huge chunks of the film completely naked. Not that I particularly wanted to see more of Dornan but this is a bit weird for a film supposedly aimed at women.

As in the book I found Christian Grey quite unimaginative when forced to ad-lib outside of his red room where ‘vanilla’ becomes the predominate flavour of the day. Although I'm hoping at least that the film makers now have the confidence to ramp it up for book two.

It turns out that Fifty Shades is a far better film than it was a book and I quite liked it. It is certainly far from the worst film we’ve seen so far this year.