The Nines
My Blog
Tuesday, November 11, 2008
If you need a textbook example of a film that tries desperately for drama, but winds up only with drama that you can call 'forced,' this is it. And when I say forced, I don't mean as in blackmailing a citizen into sabotaging the company of an opponent, I mean as in strapping a bandoleer of explosives to his chest and dropping him onto the building's roof from an airplane.
But I'm getting ahead of myself.
By the way, if you haven't seen this movie you might want to check it out before you read this review. I address the ending, which might be a spoiler. I say might be a spoiler because this movie is so aggressively sophomoric and incompetently written that to spoil this film by giving away the ending would be like spoiling a five dollar bottle of wine because you didn’t let it breathe.
John August's, The Nines, is a triple vignette of different characters indirectly connected in three separate segments to form an extremely convoluted and inane whole. In the first segment, Ryan Reynolds plays TV star, Gary, under house arrest for driving while under the influence of drugs and alcohol. In the second part he plays a writer trying get a show television show aired, and in the third, a family man out driving in the country with his wife and daughter.
After spending the many, many hours watching The Nines, it gave me a pay off that left me demanding my time back. In fact, when I was done, I wanted to hurt someone...namely the writer, John August. (There should be laws against this sort of thing. I mean Congress should look into holding hearings on certain film making violations. If it did, we just might be able to set up some kind of intervention program to prevent disasters like this).
This movie really is that bad.
One of the biggest problems is the adolescent jokes. In the movie, Margaret (Melissa McCarthy) is hired to handle damage control and celebrity repair for the TV star. While on the phone talking to someone about the wayward actor's wrecked vehicle, McCarthy says, "Yes, he totaled the car...but it was an environmentally friendly car. Why doesn't that get reported?"
Uh...just incase you're wondering, that was supposed to be a funny.
In another scene, after Reynolds had masturbated earlier, a sexy, lactating neighbor drops by with a bottle of wine and two glasses hoping to seduce the young house bound actor. The woman holds the bottle and glasses up and says, "And the best part is I can drink it. I pumped before I came."
Now for those of you who haven't guessed the next line, his come back is of course, "So did I." And for those few who may still be conscious after so violently being hit over the head with that skull-cracking joke, he goes so far as to raise his eyebrows and smile in suggestive fashion, lest there be any doubt in the audiences mind whatsoever of his meaning. This is the kind of writing we're subjected to in The Nines.
And it gets worse.
It attempts a bit of Douglass Adams type dialogue, but where the writer of 'The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy' comes up with lines that are at times, a genius level of comic achievement, the writer of this film fails miserably.
But it's not just the dialogue that misses; it's the story as well. As I hinted earlier, the story is aimless, meandering, doesn't seem to know where it wants to go, and if I may be a little elusive, seems to giggle at itself. Seeing this movie is like listening to a fourteen year old boy tell his buddy about his comic book story he's just come up with.
"Hey, dude, this is sooooooo cool. So like, no wait, this is awesome, like this one guy, he like, goes and then he, uh-uh, he like, he melts and his soul goes into the thing, I mean, like he becomes, like, a god, or something, and then like-like..."
I was a bit indulgent there, but that's the feel of this movie, somewhat.
Finally, the device August uses for the film's climactic ending comes out of nowhere. It's completely arbitrary and is presented only at the end, making no sense to anything else in the movie prior to its introduction. It's like having the detective in a murder mystery solve the crime at the end of the story by walking over to a bookcase, pull out a video and cry, "Here's the evidence, a video of the killer stabbing the victim!"
No, this is film making at its worst.
Overly melodramatic, The Nines makes no sense, and rather than projecting ambivalence, as its defenders are wont to claim, it gives us the impression that the writer is just making it up as he goes.
I will say that Alex Wurman's music is excellent and the cinematography by Nancy Schreiber is very good. But other than that, unless you have an extremely low threshold for artistic standards, avoid The Nines.
Keck
