Nine Days

I rated this a good 7/10 upon first watching. An already great note. But after watching this again today and paying much more attention to its small details, I have to admit Iiked it even more. It deserves a little more remarkable mark. A solid character driven drama. I hope to see more movies like this in time. Feels refreshing even if they are not that flawless. Go and see it!

After seeing this movie at Sundance, I made my way up to the stage so that I could shake Edson Oda's hand. I had to do it because I felt like I was going up to shake Orson Welles's hand after watching "Citizen Kane." I told him I had watched movies all my life and I believed this was the best movie I had ever seen. He looked shocked by that comment but thanked me. He hasn't been around long enough to be arrogant and condescending, I guess. Obviously, Nine Days strikes different people differently. I enthusiastically encourage you to see this movie to find out how it strikes you and I can only hope you have the exquisite experience it was for me. I am absolutely certain that Mr. Oda has created a masterpiece that will be much more highly respected in the future. I can hardly wait to see his future creations but, if he never makes another, he will have accomplished a life's work with this one.

This really rubbed me up the wrong way, on a matter of principle, because it's just too close to its source material, while adding nothing. This is 'After Life' by Kore-eda, my favourite film, only this 'visionary director' inversed the premise. Which ultimately makes little difference, it's still an exploration of what constitutes a meaningful existence on this earth.

It's beyond homage. Masquerading and marketing such plagiarism as a breathtakingly unique, original indie film (and fooling the press) is so much more insidious to me than the inevitably over-schmaltzified remake once-proposed in the 00s.

'Nine Days' takes the setup, the tone, the limbo setting, the bureaucratic elements, the interviews, the metaphysical questions, the down-to-earth quality, even the analogue VHS tapes and lovingly-crafted staged sendoffs. Even the minor plot developments were tonally the same. Zazie Beets and Benedict Wong are great, but performances become overwrought towards the end. The cinematography is beautiful. Yet in every aspect of actually feeling something, this pales in comparison to After Life. Much like when a knockoff design company changes a couple of small things on the product it's copying to avoid a lawsuit, but the final product isn't nearly as good as the original, this film doesn't provide anything approaching the quiet emotional resonance After Life does, instead descending into overwritten quasi-philosophical discussions which left me cold.

I don't mean to take the experience away from those who found it meaningful but it angered me most because I love cinema, I love unique voices, and I can't stand lauded frauds. When this guy's taking the Marvel money in a couple of years' time, Kore-eda will still be evolving his genuinely-authentic craft.

As you contemplate this film -- and you will -- is that is if all films were like this, had the same high standards of scripting, acting, direction, editing, then maybe the world itself would be different too.

I may have ultimately found this somewhat more intellectually stimulating than emotionally, regarding the many philosophical and moral paths and implications that go into what one does in a life and how one regards violence and being violence or passive and of course what creativity brings about. The filmmaker Edson Oda - first feature as a writer-director and by itself that makes this a pretty major achievement to me - pulls off that tricky thing pretty well of exploring the ideas of simply living a "good" life or being a person wrought with inner pain and anguish (and what hiding that does to those who care about them) without falling into pedantry - in brief, it tackles empathy by putting it through the characters' perspectives. He provides a captivating backdrop, spare but interesting, without over explaining the mechanics of how these subjects are right at this place

There is an obvious point that is a flaw which is just how exceptional and perceptive Zazie Beets is (like once she's there game over you know). Buy Winston Duke is great at channeling a lot of preprinted thoughts and feelings, sometimes so explosively it could go the other way and not work but he always holds it together, and it is a surprisingly moving moment when he just talks about when his character was alive and performing a monologue he had to memorize last minute... to that end Walt Whitman (or at least his seminal work) makes an appearance!