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by Willie Waffle
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Nine
Lives
This movie is so bad, two lives into Nine
Lives, I started counting how many lives I had to watch until
I could leave. The movie is so bad even Dakota Fanning couldn't save it!
So, in summary, the movie is so bad it is SO BAD.
Written and directed by Rodrigo Garcia, Nine
Lives is a stunt seeking a story. Each vignette portrays 10 minutes
in the lives of each of 9 women to give us some sort of insight or passing
glance at the troubles each one faces. However, Garcia's script painfully
dances around the meat of each story, only alluding to the bigger issues
and histories involved. Robin Wright Penn runs into an old flame at a grocery
store, but we don't learn the depth of the relationship or the implied tragic
events that ended it. Lisa Gay Hamilton returns home after a long period
of estrangement to face down her father, but we are left to wonder why she
is so upset and what, if anything, he did to drive her away. Instead of being
intriguing, the lack of details and plot are annoying.
I, like most people who go to the movies, am very literal and look for a
beginning, middle and end to a story or scene, but Garcia only shows us the
middle. For most of the movie, I sat there wondering where this was all leading,
and no amount of great acting can rescue a scene without purpose. Each actor
has to react to nothingness, which grows tiresome after two lives.
To increase the pretension points, Garcia has other characters from other
vignettes float in and out of other stories, but for no reason other than
to say other characters appear in other stories. A daughter in one scene
is the nurse in another. A mother in one scene is a doctor in another, and
on and on it goes. These characters don't provide meaningful links to each
other together or unite all of the stories in some way that doesn't make
you feel like you wasted 90 minutes of your one life. It's just another pointless
stunt.
Shockingly, many excellent actors appear in this film, and I can't understand
why. Glenn Close, Dakota Fanning, Holly Hunter, William Fichtner, Joe Mantegna,
Ian McShane, Sissy Spacek, Robin Wright Penn and others can all find better,
more meaningful and higher paying work than this, but I guess they were drawn
in based on some sort of unfulfilled promise of participating in a groundbreaking
artistic achievement. Instead, they got to star in a movie most will never
see.
Nine Lives plays more like a movie school
workshop project run amok.
0 Waffles (Out Of 4)
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