A jobless 28-year-old residing in an apartment with his single father discovers the meaning of life for a bargain-basement price in this stop-motion animation film featuring the voices of Ben Mendelsohn, Barry Otto, Anthony LaPaglia, and Geoffrey Rush. Dave has made it his mission to discover the meaning of life, so when he stumbles across a book claiming to answer just that question for the low, low price of just $9.99, he can't help but make an impulse purchase. Much to his surprise, the book
contains all the answers he's been searching for, a revelation that compels him to share this newfound information with his neighbors -- an eccentric bunch whose stories gradually intertwine to offer a revealing portrait of their hopes, loves, and spiritual beliefs. ~ Jason Buchanan, Rovi
The conclusion is cheerful -- rather than strain for answers, we should just experience the joy of the moment -- but the road to that resolution is jarring.
Using the medium of Wallace and Gromit and Gumby, Israeli filmmaker Tatia Rosenthal turns her clay figures into real people in $9.99, a wise, wistful study of hope and dread.
There is so much to admire about the skill involved in the stop-motion craft, but all films, regardless of their devices, rise or fall on their story, which is abstract and unengaging in $9.99.
Director Tatia Rosenthal's inspiration was to populate the proceedings with animated 3-D figures; her cerebral, darkly funny film is a feat of stop-motion rumination.
Like most episode pieces, Rosenthal and Keret seem to have chosen the easy way out by not taking the trouble to develop any of the ideas beyond the basic anecdote.
Set in a grim, grimy, often bleak world, a hybrid, densely detailed environment of interwoven stories and chance encounters, with occasional flights of fantasy and rare glimmers of hope.
Playful, light-hearted and fun, with an impressive cast of Aussie stars and some fine stop-motion animation. As it stands, at 74 minutes, it's not quite as smart (or rewarding) as one would hope.
The Jewish melancholy and downbeat humour that oozes from the original writing is overlaid with an Australian idiom, thanks ironically to the great cast, in a transplant that doesn't really take
It's a challenging film with plenty of merit as a handful of unrelated stories criss-cross and involve us in a mountainous thought provoking journey in which we ponder the meaning of happiness
The creation of this world is amazingly detailed; it's magic, really. But maybe the film doesn't quite reach the heights of everyman experience to which it aspires.
I'm kind of getting tired of these "grown up" cartoons like WALTZ WITH BASHIR and PERSEPOLIS. To me, they kind of seem more focused on the gimmicks than the actual story.
$9.99 may not be entirely successful from a dramatic perspective, and it certainly offers little enlightenment about the meaning of life. But the film is so intriguing in other ways that it's definitely worth a look.
The lives of the residents of a Sydney apartment---including a surly angel, three miniature surfer dudes looking for a constant party, and an aimless young man who buys a book promising to give him the meaning of life for the bargain price of $9.99---are explored in a series of interlinked stories, most with an
absurdist edge. The claymation is really not very good; the characters show little in the way of facial expressions, making you wonder if it might have worked better as a live-action piece. The story is too weird for those looking for a straight drama, and too literary to become a cult item.
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