This film was viewed at the 2009 Ottawa International Animation Festival.
Do Robert Altman films give you heinous gas? If so, click here to escape now.
As for the rest of you, $9.99 sees first-time director Tatia Rosenthal (whose day gig is animating Wonder Pets) channeling the spirit of Altman in this stop-motion tale of interconnecting lives in a downtown apartment building. It's a compelling flick, but too many stories and lack of narrative rise-and-fall do it no favours.
Tatia Rosenthal Directs Anthony LaPaglia, Geoffrey Rush in $9.99, based on Etgar Keret's Short Stories
In an apartment building in an unknown city (the architecture says Tel Aviv while the actors speak in Australian accents), a group of people live interconnecting lives.
Here are just a couple: unemployed philosopher Dave Peck (Samuel Johnson) forks over the titular fee for a book that claims to divulge the Meaning of Life. Dave's aimless soul-searching frustrates his father Jim (Anthony LaPaglia), who's still reeling from seeing a homeless man (Geoffrey Rush) blow his brains out in front of him. Meanwhile, Dave's older brother Lennie (Ben Mendelsohn) encounters a supermodel with an unusual fetish.
As for the aforementioned homeless man, he suddenly finds himself back on Earth and sporting angel's wings. What happens next is a stop-motion Robert Altman film, as plots and characters collide in strange ways.
While Rosenthal's stop-motion animation gets the job done with style, the script isn't the slam-dunk it could have been. Doing Altman may have been Rosenthal's way of tipping her hat to a cinematic idol, but isn't necessarily a good idea (Heck, not even Altman could do it well: witness 1994's Pret a Porter). Scriptwriter Keret – adapting his short stories for the silver screen – makes the rookie mistake of throwing in too many plotlines which detract from the main narrative flow. At least one plot (a man contemplates his life after his girlfriend dumps him) could have been easily excised with no harm done to the rest of the film.
Be aware that $9.99 is not for the kiddies. These characters inhale various illegal and controlled substances, walk around without clothes (some scenes sport full-frontal male nudity), have sex and occasionally die in graphic ways.
The Final Analysis
Many observers wondered why Rosenthal decided to create this movie in stop-motion instead of live-action. However, that's not the point: for this film, it's the message, not the medium that matters.
$9.99 may suffer from too many plots, and the message seems frustratingly vague – best guess calls it a meditation on the inscrutability or life or, to quote the philosopher* Didactylos, "Things just happen. What the hell." – it's still a compelling slice-o'-life flick, and further proof that animation doesn't automatically mean kids' entertainment or fantasy.
$9.99 gets an 6/10.
*Fun Fact: Whoever recognizes the above quote wins a virtual cookie.
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