Pedigree Chum

Producer Wes Craven continues to screw the pooch with this execrable horror thriller, directed by his former assistant Nicholas Mastandrea, that will surely rank as one of the worst releases of the year. The plot of The Breed is childlike in its simplicity, and in its execution. A group of five college students go on holiday to a deserted island, pitching up in a borrowed log cabin. John (Oliver Hudson), thinks little brother Matt (Eric Lively) needs a break from his medical studies, so arranges a trip with girlfriends Sara (Taryn Manning) and Nicki (Michelle Rodriguez) with friend Noah (Hill Harper) along for the ride. Over the next few days a pack of abandoned Alsatian dogs, genetically engineered to be killers, lays siege to the cabin as the kids try to defend themselves and flee to safety.

Opening with a nonsensical prologue, things just get progressively worse. The Breed is burdened by too much chat and not nearly enough splat, ticking off the genre-specific progressions in a monotonous litany of clichés. The cast endlessly flap their lips, but have nothing to say. The African-American Noah, a college-age teen played by the 41-year-old Harper, chatters away in slang for what feels like hours on end, making obnoxious pimped-out noises. It is a sweet relief to finally see him silenced. The rest of the cast make about as much sense as they jabber on unconvincingly, bleating out incoherent, monotonously generic back-stories and leaden flirtations.

Worse is to come when the filmmakers get around to making something happen. The dog attacks are predictable and unexciting and there are scores of them, each less terrifying than the last. When Rodriguez’s character takes an arrow through her lower leg, she shrugs off the injury as if it were cramp. Watching her climbing a ladder later is comical, even as she visibly remembers to rearrange her pug features into a limping grimace half way through the scene. Never much more than a mobile scowl, the actress finds herself drowning even in this shallow story. Beside her, Taryn Manning offers even less; a bite from a dog infecting her with a kind of glassy-eyed, sullen dementia, something I felt a touch of myself, by then. The two other male leads are remarkable only because it is impossible to recall a single thing they did or said.

Although the film is composed of nothing but problems, the biggest one is that the supposedly petrifying monsters are just dogs. They may be the best actors on display, (and certainly the best trained and best groomed) but there is nothing frightening or even particularly worrying about their presentation. They offer no threat, just another wasted element in a futile, foolish film, indistinguishable from hundreds like it, an overwhelming waste of time.

Windows 95

Not, sadly, a big-screen outing for the fish-out-of-water sit-com that had Greek shepherd Balki Bartokomous pitch up in swinging 1980s Chicago but instead a fatally tedious effort to re-jig the erotic thrillers of a decade later; the kind that had Sharon Stone airing her bits so often, they could be sketched from memory.

In Perfect Stranger, Halle Berry plays investigative journalist Rowena Price who learns, with the help of her techno-savvy researcher Miles (Giovanni Ribisi) that the recent murder of her childhood friend Grace (Nicki Aycox) might be connected to high-flying advertising honcho Harrison Hill, played witlessly by Bruce Willis. After reams of chatter about uploads, downloads, emails, chat-rooms and, WTF, ‘cyberspace’, Rowena goes undercover as a temp at Hill’s swanky agency where she juggles her multiple identities with her mundane secretarial duties, sidelining in diligent snooping and an all-to-easy seduction of her boss, who is quick with his fists and sleazy with it.

With the acting performances running the gamut from bad to wretched, Willis can consider himself lucky in the circumstances not to have to show his face in this ludicrous farce until nearly half way in. He’s still awful. But hold on a minute here. That’s nothing. Halle Berry is an unfathomable void, giggling spasmodically and wriggling likewise but making a mangle of even the simplest dialogue scene. Her close-ups often feel blank, like stills, but her beautiful, expensive, high-profile face demands a director to go in close for those big-screen moments, you know, the stuff that makes movies not television.

The words were dire anyway. Everybody charges around saying things are ‘sexy’, but that does not make them so. Instead we get blather like the moment that everything pivots around the ‘Hemingway Daiquiri” (ingredients: jigger of cheese, ham float, dash of critical bitters). As is unavoidable when trying to squeeze thrills from technology, there are scores of shots of fill-the-gap fingers banging away at keyboards or fumbling around with USB memory sticks. This is barely cinematic, never mind erogenous.

Director James Foley, who has had a decade years to regain the heights of Glengarry Glen Ross, and has another and more facing him, fails to whip this floundering old yarn, this Disclosure II, into any kind of compelling shape or even wrangle a state of plausible alertness out of his blundering talent. Instead, he checks off the genre clichés without distinction. It’s galling in a way to see another ‘killer’s wall’, where the suspected murderer’s motive, method and madness are artfully photographed and arranged on an adjacent, highly visible surface. Updating it to include a ‘killer’s wallpaper’ and giving it a repeating line of squawking computerised dialogue does not help matters.

Foley even struggles to frame an interesting shot or connect a couple of them into sequence, although there is a small measure of fun to be had watching him try. In a late-act confrontation with Berry in a car, Willis’ smooth head comes and goes from right-of-screen at a supernatural angle, like a turtle knotting a necktie. Not once or twice but three glorious times. I found it amusing at the time because I was listlessly scanning for stupid bits to heap scorn on this Two Word Title and I was getting lots of hits, but it isn’t really.

Spies Like Us

Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck, now there’s a name to remember. The young German director makes a brilliant debut with this gripping, powerfully acted Osti drama about a playwright (Sebastain Koch) and his actress girlfriend (Martina Gedeck) who fall foul of the oppressive state police in East Berlin in the 1980s. Showered with over 40 major international awards, including this year’s Best Foreign Film Oscar, The Lives of Others is an exemplary movie, trailing last year’s Downfall and Goodbye, Lenin in a mini-renaissance for German cinema.

A suitably ruffled and distracted Koch plays Georg Dreyman, a writer who keeps himself working by limited his dramaturgy to practical, political plays about factory workers and soldiers under the watchful eyes of the socialist cultural ministry. He invariably finds a role for Gedeck’s flighty Christa-Maria, a beautiful, talented actress who shares his book-filled apartment. After a porcine government minister makes a pass at Christa-Maria at a subdued after-show party and is rebuffed. In an act of spite, the party official has Grubitz (Ulrich Tukur), his lapdog in the Stasi (the all-seeing secret police spies) open a case file on the couple. He in turn charges Wiesler (played by Michael Henke regular Ulrich Muehe), his most astute and meticulous agent, with finding some dirt on them. The hollow-eyed spy moves into the vacant apartment upstairs and, in a scene of military precision, bugs every room in their home in under 20 minutes.

But despite a long surveillance, Wiesler can’t uncover anything subversive on the writer, who in the early part of the film at least, appears to believe in the Socialist experiment and champions the state in the face of his friends radical arguments. Soon, however, the tightly controlled, robotic Wiesler finds himself obsessed with the lives of these two intellectuals, living as freely as they can, particularly Christa-Maria, who he starts to trail. At the same time, Dreyman starts to express doubts about the political situation, and meets a magazine editor from the West, who gifts him a clandestine typewriter (all typewriters in East Germany were registered with the state). The editor also asks him for a story, so Dreyman, who has had a friend recently take his own life, starts to write an anonymous article about the high suicide rate in the East, a subject that would have him arrested and jailed. Over Dreyman’s head, listening intently, Wiesler too is having doubts. Although he has come to admire them both, he is under pressure from the top to uncover something, anything, that will ruin Dreyman, the run-off from a political ideology that denies innocence and makes everyone a suspect.

The complex and demanding scripting expertly weaves together the various dramatic and personal threads of the story into a perfectly played whole, thanks to some outstanding performances, an exhaustive production design and an uncanny clarity of purpose that deliberately avoids cliché. Although it is fictional, the film is firmly rooted in fact, which adds an extremely satisfying heft and a gradual, inexorable tension. The film is finely photographed, tightly framed and superbly economical, making excellent use of the brutal architecture and characterless interiors.

By the time resolution arrives, in the reunited Germany of the early 1990s, the grey streets have been embroidered with splashes of graffiti, there are traffic jams and a brazen line of bookshops. From peering into people’s post, Wiesler is now employed to deliver it, one of a number of humanistic ironies that crowd the staggered conclusion. If the available buffet of jumpy space operas and blood-thirsty CGI battle orgies aren’t to your taste, the individual spell cast by the engrossing, literate scripting and top drawer acting performances found in this excellent picture fully deserves an audience wanting more.

Ugly On The Inside

Eddie Murphy’s latest latex fat-suit disaster Norbit arrives just weeks after his triumphant turn in Dreamgirls, a polar double-header that serves as a salient reminder that no matter how often one declares a given film to be the worst of all time (the near-identical Big Momma’s House, for instance) Hollywood will contrive to drive the bar still lower. This is a terrible film, a well-nigh unwatchable disaster, written and produced by the former funnyman and his brother Charlie, that is spectacularly, flagrantly offensive and just as spectacularly unamusing.

Having exhausted this stunt in his Nutty Professor films, Murphy somehow still has an appetite for dressing in voluptuous rubber, taking on multiple roles and terminally embarrassing himself. Murphy plays the title character, a put-upon weakling orphan who grows up to marry an overbearing, abusive and morbidly obese woman called Rasputina. The timid Norbit is powerless against the frequent verbal and physical assaults of this monstrous creation and her family of baseball bat brandishing gangster brothers. Cue the fat jokes, the race jokes and the you-go-girl, finger-snapping ghetto-talk, crassly staged as a parade of crushingly unfunny situations where Norbit and Rasputina play out their unhappy, monotone cinematic existences, riffing on the intertwined themes of shame and regret. An unashamedly larcenous creation, even Rasputina’s catch-phrase, “How you doin’”, has been pilfered, from Joey in Friends in this case. If you’re going to steal, at least have the guts to steal big and don’t pretend that ethnically derived, smutty one-liners can be somehow rearranged into family comedy under the umbrella of sneering irony.

When Norbit’s first love Katie (a dangerously scrawny-looking Thandie Newton) and her self-serving fiancee Deion (the mugging Cuba Gooding Jr) return to town to buy the orphanage where they grew up, Norbit must gain the self-confidence needed to remove himself from the enormous shadow of his battleaxe spouse, expose the sneaky Deion as a cad and re-unite with his brittle former crush. Adding insult to injury, Murphy dons an unconvincing Asian disguise to play Mr. Wong, a foul-mouthed Korean racist with a passion for whale hunting and an inexhaustible supply of ethnic slurs, neither of which raises a single laugh.

You have to deduce that Murphy plays all the roles because nobody else wanted to be in the film, which is artlessly directed by Brian Robbins, the genius behind The Shaggy Dog. Progressively loud and disturbing, Norbit is a perversion of staggering crudity and ineptitude, unworthy of the electricity required to project it on the screen, never mind the price of a ticket.

Big Miss Sunshine

Following his exemplary zombie movie 28 Days Later and his charming children’s adventure Millions, Danny Boyle takes on the ultimate movie genre, science-fiction, but with mixed results in Sunshine, a ponderous film that starts out full of ideas and ultimately abandons most of them.

Set fifty years in the future, mankind faces disaster because the sun has died, its dwindling power causing the Earth to freeze over. A multinational effort has assembled all available resources to build an enormous spaceship, called (without a careful reading of classical legend) the Icarus II. The seven man crew are charged with delivering a thermonuclear bomb (“the size of Manhattan”) into the heart of the darkening star to reignite its reserve of hydrogen and save humanity. They are following in the path of the first Icarus mission, which had the same mission seven years before, but was lost, presumed destroyed. As the new ship closes in on its target, they discover the old one floating, like the Marie Celeste, in an eternal orbit around the sun. When they decide to intercept it, to give themselves a second chance should something go wrong with their own mission, a simple human error leads to disaster.

One of the first problems with the film comes with populating the cast, who are never introduced to us, leading inexorably to a lack of any involvement in their shared drama and a distinct absence of compelling interest. The most prominent character is physicist Capa, played by Cillian Murphy, a quiet, distant prodigy haunted by dreams of a fiery death. Beside him (although the film barely registers their character names or individual traits), Australian actress Rose Byrne plays pilot Cassie, Maori Cliff Curtis is a tough mission specialist Searle, Chris Evans plays engineer Mace, Hiroyuki Sanada is the captain Kaneda while Michelle Yeoh plays Corazon, who tends an interstellar garden. Yeoh’s character becomes integral later, when an accident destroys the ship’s ability to generate oxygen and the crews ability to complete the mission; asking the moral question of when is it right to sacrifice one life in order to save millions more. The concept is well introduced, but because we neither know or care about any of the protagonists, it is relegated to being a plot device, and a moot one at that.

Written by Boyle’s regular collaborator Alex Garland, the film takes its cues from the classics of science-fiction without adding much to the sum of its influences, despite being supposedly based on ‘real’ science and boasting a couple of particle physicists among its advisors. The spiritual notions at the centre of the adventure; of death and rebirth and the Sun being the giver of life, a god in effect, become secondary and entirely incidental in the second half of the story, replaced by well-staged but otherwise unremarkable chase sequences and a horribly derivative and foolish finale that recalls the execrable Event Horizon in camp bombast and religiously derived hysterics. There are further nods, to John Carpenters Dark Star, Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey and the vanguard of the eco-conscious science-fiction, Douglas Trumbull’s Silent Running. Regardless of its influences (and there are plenty more of them) as it plays out, Sunshine becomes the first half of a great film uncomfortably welded to the second half of a really bad one, a hybrid of miscalculation and misplayed tension.

Boyle and his cinematographer Alwin Kuchler create some extraordinary visions of space travel, using the traditionally rendered and claustrophobic setting of the Icarus to contrast with the vastness and emptiness of the cosmos. Light, as you would expect, plays a major visual role, with the power and glare of the sun expertly displayed in a much-needed succession of exciting set pieces. Later, and by contrast, the unknowable cold and infinite darkness of space is brilliantly used to trim the crowd in some beautifully realised death sequences, an inevitability of the genre that Boyle takes on with considerable relish. In terms of production, the film looks outstanding, with the imagining of the Icarus itself an awe-inspiring highlight and a gold-plated spacesuit standing out among the strong costuming and set design. Although it would prefer to be thought of as a feast for the mind and the senses, Sunshine is better appreciated as eye-candy, pretty and tasty and eminently watchable but neither fulfilling or particularly memorable.

Freedom Is The Other Side Of Fear

Days of Glory tells the true story of the almost-forgotten Arab soldiers (known as the Goumiers), that fought for the French army in WWII and, once enlisted and trained, were treated contemptuously, as cannon-fodder, by the French command. In the opening scenes, an Arab elder walks through an Algerian village, calling on the men to assemble in the square to enlist as soldiers in the fight to liberate France, overrun by the Nazis in 1943. One of the five main characters we come to know through the film, Saïd (Jamel Debbouze) gets on the back of the truck, despite the protestations of his mother, arriving in Morocco shortly afterwards for basic training. There, he joins a platoon of fellow conscripts, including Yassir (Samy Naceri), Messaoud (Roschdy Zem) and Abdelkader (Sami Bouajila). Soon the soldiers, led by a bitter French sergeant (Bernard Blancanare), are landed in Italy and asked to charge a Nazi-held hillside in the film’s first raging battle scene; a brilliantly presented assault, as violent and deafening as anything in Saving Private Ryan or Flags Of Our Fathers, that expertly introduces the courage of these men under extreme circumstances.

Taken as a conventional WWII film, Days of Glory more than succeeds in terms of realism, excitement and drama, brilliantly recreating a succession of large-scale battle sequences, tense stand-offs and individual moments of heroism, made all the more compelling by the expertly joined sense of an unbreakable fraternity between the fighting men. The film’s greatest virtue, however, is in it’s determination to expose and explore the political ignorance of the time, creating a sense of outrage and wrong with quiet dignity. In an early scene, we are shown how the food rations are unfairly distributed between the white French infantry and the Arab conscripts until one of the men complains. Later, compassionate leave is denied, letters are censored and promotions are passed over. These elements are carefully intertwined with the simple reality of the war itself as the men we have come to know fight two battles, within and without. Despite the racism of the French, the soldiers remain committed to the cause, continuing to fight with the French because they believe they will be rewarded with citizenship and recognition for their efforts. “If I free a country, it becomes my country”, one of them says, a belief dashed by the film’s angry postscript which outlines the heartless denial of pension rights by successive French governments from the early 1950s until Jaques Chirac reinstated them in 2006 after a screening of the film.

Told in a naturalistic blend of French and Arabic, and boasting a plaintive, sparsely used traditional Berber music score, Days of Glory is as strong and compelling a war film as Saving Private Ryan, but with an angry, heartfelt political core, absent from Spielberg’s film, that gives it tremendous impact. The ensemble cast won the Best Actor award at the Cannes festival last year, and with good reason as they give, individually and collectively, astonishingly accomplished performances. The bleached-out photography and computer generated special effects are brilliantly executed, from the layered landscapes of the Moroccan desert through to a skein of allied warplanes roaring overhead. It is a film filled with tiny moments of extraordinary power; a soldier running his hand across cotton sheets for the first time, a tense track through a booby-trapped forest, an argument in the barracks that quickly turns deadly. Throughout, director Rachid Bouchareb connects his chaptered journey through a delicate interstitial that has a shadow passing over a changing landscape and a judicious use of archive footage. Days of Glory does show flaws in sustaining the unwieldy story, particularly in the final section where a lengthy wait for the last Nazi assault drags on far too long, but these are minor imperfections in a great work.