a SIFF 2009 review
Surreal $9.99 a Bad Bargain
I am not sure what the point of $9.99 is and I’m perfectly okay admitting that. Beautifully animated, this Claymation spectacular is a weird freak show of depression and regret that moves in a direction uniquely its own. A surreal stop-motion world of hope and despair, its final moments aim for eloquence but succeeded only in leaving me scratching my head, the whole thing a hodge-podge of grotesque lunacy that’s nowhere near as transcendent as I wager it thinks it is.
Zack and his piggy bank add another coin to their friendship in Regent Releasing's $9.99
Based on his own acclaimed short stories (which I admit to having never read), Etgar Keret’s screenplay, co-written with director Tatia Rosenthal, is a bizarre mishmash of whimsy, ridicule and morality that attempts to enlighten as it entertains. Revolving around an eccentric group of tenants living inside a rundown apartment complex, each story connects to the other as if the lot of them were the many veins of a single bloodstream.
The problem for me is that, by and large, I didn’t want to watch just about any of them. There’s single father Jim Peck (Anthony LaPaglia) living with his 28-year-old youngest son Dave (Samuel Johnson) who thinks he can learn the meaning of life from a $10 booklet. A few floors up is a lonely widower named Albert (Barry Otto) who’s happened to make friends with a narcissistic chain-smoking angel (Geoffrey Rush), the two of them prone to rooftop arguments that are nowhere near divine.
Also living in the building is Zack (Jamie Katsamatsas), a little boy obsessed with buying the latest toy only to discover the joys of taking care of his little pink piggy bank; underachiever Ron (Joel Edgerton), a sad-faced slacker whose fiancé has put the kibosh on their relationship leaving him to converse with a trio of drunken two-inch tall enablers; and Tanita (Leeanna Walsman), a sexy supermodel with a peculiar fetish from smooth skin that could leave Dave’s older brother Lenny (Ben Mendelsohn) as nothing more than part of the furniture.
Here’s what I did like. The vignette revolving around little Zack is priceless, the film’s themes coming through with refreshing clarity that had me smiling nearly as broadly as the boy’s piggy bank. I also quite liked the final moments between Jim and Dave, their ability to see one another from a fresh perspective far more moving than I’d ever have first anticipated. The film is also magnificently animated, and while it’s not Wallace & Gromit or Chicken Run the filmmakers nonetheless do such a remarkable job I was pretty much consistently amazed.
Unfortunately, that’s about it for what I went for here. While I’m normally all for pushing boundaries and doing things a bit differently, most of the time watching this I could help but feel like Keret and Rosenthal were being weird simply for the sake of being weird. While the concussive conclusion of the angel’s storyline did make me laugh out loud I couldn’t quite figure out what the point of his ultimate sidewalk comeuppance was really all about. As for Ron, the less said there the better, his whole melodrama feeling more like a bad piece of drugged-out soap opera than it did anything else.
Then there is Tanita and Lenny. I have absolutely no idea whatsoever what to say about their bit other than it left me seriously disturbed. If the point is to showcase just how far some people will go to find love than I guess it gets the job done, but the place it ultimately goes to is so sickening, so disgustingly monstrous in its insanity (not to mention absolutely inane), I almost couldn’t wait for it to end.
The thing is, as much as the film flustered and distressed me I still couldn’t take me eyes off of it. I sat on the edge of my seat beginning to end, wondering what other sorts of sights and sounds Keret and Rosenthal were preparing to show me. The film is if nothing else positively magnetic, the whole thing having an intellectual vivacity exclusively its own.
Not that this is enough for me to give it a recommendation. While its strengths are more than apparent, the sour taste $9.99 left in the back of my throat is one I could barely tolerate, and the thought of telling others to experience it for themselves is nearly enough to turn my stomach. I just didn’t like it, and more than that I’m still not sure what the point of it all was, the meaning behind the mayhem one I just couldn’t find.
Film Rating: êê (out of 4)
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