SEPARATELY Kevin Costner and Demi Moore are no strangers to delivering outlandishly awful performances, so how anyone could think that casting them in the same movie - and giving them free rein to plumb the depths of dreadful - could somehow be a recipe for success is a mystery. Yet this exactly what the makers of Mr Brooks have done, ensuring that an already ludicrous concept is tipped over the edge into mind-boggling insanity. Taking the titular role, Costner plays an award-winning businessman and all-round family guy who also just happens to be a serial killer with a split personality.
Moore is the psych-profiling, multi-millionaire heiress detective - honest! - who is determined to bring him down. After a sloppy homicide leaves a witness, this should be easy.
Trouble is, the witness wants to learn the tricks of the thrill kill trade and, rather than going to the cops, blackmails Mr Brooks into taking on an apprentice. Oh, and did I mention that Costner's murderous id is a chatty nutjob embodied by William Hurt. Or that his daughter might also have serial-killing tendencies?
Sub-plots and baffling twists pile up like pancakes here, but it's Costner's and Moore's unique talent for making everything seem even more stupid than it is that really dazzles. THE horror-comedy hybrid is a tough trick to pull off. Outlandish gore is a must, but so is a knowing script and actors with enough personality to make the requisite tongue-in-(lacerated)-cheek tone fly.
This killer sheep movie from New Zealand has the former, courtesy of a decent effects budget and the boffins at former schlock meister Peter Jackson's Weta studios, but the absence of either of the latter makes its premise about as funny or as frightening as an episode of One Man and his Dog. Genetic experimentation is the old chestnut debut director Jonathan King roasts to a crisp in his efforts to find a plot that will sustain his not unpromising notion that it might actually be cool to see a movie featuring a flock of vicious flesh-flaying mutant ewes. A diabolical scheme by a lamb-loving farm-owner determined to engineer the "sheep of tomorrow" using human DNA is to blame for turning the flock homicidal, and it's up to his ovine-phobic brother and a hippy animal rights activist called Experience to save the day.
Unfortunately, one-note characterisation, flat acting, and a script that fails to exploit its vague contemporary fears subtext ruins its monster movie credentials. DELVING into the moral minefield of Jewish complicity with the Nazis, this is the latest German film to get to grips with the more insidious aspects of the country's recent history. It's based on the true story of the largest counterfeiting operation ever mounted and revolves around a group of concentration camp prisoners granted respite from the worst horrors of the Holocaust on account of their forging abilities.
The main focus is Salomon Sorowitsch (Karl Markovics), an artist and a swindler handpicked by his pre-war arresting officer to lead a team of Jewish financiers, artists, printers and conmen to forge British and American banknotes that will enable Germany to follow through on a last, desperate plan to wreck the Allied war effort by causing mass inflation. What follows is a tense, gripping film in which the characters are torn between keeping themselves alive for another day and undermining a war effort that is their only real chance of long-term survival. UNLIKE the mega-successful zombie-slaughtering video game series upon which it's based, the Resident Evil franchise continues to advance to the next level without any increase in complexity.
Derivative wall-to-wall action, a continued absence of character development and the lack of a coherent story ensures this third instalment is about as engaging as watching someone else playing their Xbox. That it's a slight improvement on the first two is merely an acknowledgment that Highlander director Russell Mulcahy is better than his predecessors at filching from other movies (the Mad Max films are raided this time). Returning as Alice, the preternaturally talented zombie-trasher/eye candy, Milla Jovovich does what she's paid to do: run around a lot dispensing putrid brain-munchers with a variety of cool-looking weapons.
This time the setting is a ravaged, sand-strewn Las Vegas, which means she gets to sport post-apocalyptic cowboy duds. Nevertheless, fans can take comfort from the fact that, thanks to a cloning subplot, extinction is the last thing this series has on its mind. TALENTED Argentinean director Pablo Trapero had a minor arthouse hit a few years ago with the thriller El Bonaerense and he delivers another strikingly composed, intelligent effort with his latest, Born and Bred.
A meditation on loss, grief and guilt, its focus is Santiago (Guillermo Pfening), a young thirtysomething living a hard-scrabble life in the wilds of Patagonia, where he does a menial job maintaining the area's one - frequently closed - airport. The reasons for his limbo-like existence are presented in the film's shocking opening salvo, but it's his new life the film explores as if focuses on how tricky it is to start again when the past keeps tugging away at him. Trapero's glorious widescreen vistas help reinforce this theme by showing how even the great-outdoors can be oppressive when your mind is tormented.
The film also benefits from surrounding its protagonist with characters who have interior lives. STRANGE one this: The Nanny Diaries plays out like a Lindsay Lohan vehicle, but has somehow come into being with Scarlett Johansson in the lead role, a blue-chip cast in support, and the directing team behind the critically adored American Splendor at the wheel. Based on a 2002 bestseller, it's a Devil Wears Prada-style get-back-at-the-boss exposГ©, this time revolving around the dubious parenting skills of the New York elite as seen from the perspective of the self-righteous nannies they dump their kids on - in other words, another wafer-thin satire of an easy target no-one probably much cares about.
Directors Shari Springer Berman and Robert Pulcini fail to bring much substance to a fluffy premise that sees Johansson play an aspiring anthropologist who, after being mistaken for a nanny, takes a job looking after the neglected brat of a monstrous society wife and her couldn't-care-less husband (Laura Linney and Paul Giamatti). Jocular attempts to get to grips with child rearing ensue, but the serious points about parenting it tries to make are a little hard to swallow. AN INTRIGUINGLY loopy arthouse thriller, A Few Days in September stars Juliette Binoche as a French secret agent who has been asked by a former colleague in the CIA (Nick Nolte) to help reunite him with his estranged, grown-up children.
The plot kicker is that the film is set in the run-up to the terrorist attacks of 11 September 2001, the implication being that this mysterious agent, who has apparently been working undercover in the Middle East, desperately wants to make up with his children because he has some knowledge of the impending catastrophe. As Binoche takes off on a cross-Euro jaunt with Nolte's French daughter and American son, they're pursued by a poetry-spouting, French-speaking, therapy-obsessed CIA assassin (an enjoyably over-the-top John Turturro). As a stripped-down conspiracy thriller the film works pretty well, but director Santiago Amigorena wants this to be taken seriously and unfortunately feels the need to frequently slow proceedings down to allow his characters to engage in portentous, didactic chats about the pre-9/11 state of the world.
FILMS about writers and artists tend to be horrifically self-important and indulgent affairs, but a blast of hipster energy helps this Norwegian effort avoid the pitfalls of this particular sub-genre. In telling parallel stories of two friends striving for literary success in their early 20s, writer-director Joachim Trier pulls off the tricky task of delivering a film that's simultaneously sarcastic and sincere. Starting with best buddies Phillip and Erik (Anders Danielsen Lie and Espen Klouman-HГёiner) mailing their first novels off to a publisher at the same time, the film kicks off with a vibrant montage imagining how their lives might change from this point on.
The reality proves a little different but no less dramatic, and Trier has lots of fun embracing and skewering artistic clichГ©s.
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