$9.99

It's an animated feature film, showing life and struggles of a few people in a city. They belong to different age has different background. There are a few good elements, but, not really great. They should have developed the Angel character and added more depth and connection to the stories.

$9.99 came and went from theaters, but it sticks out very nicely on On Demand, which is where I ultimately saw the little 70-minute claymation movie (I could say stop-motion animated, which it is, but it is very much in the clay tradition of practically being able to see the fingerprints on the characters' bodies and faces). It's about... I suppose how to live a life, I suppose, and that's emphasized by the book that keeps popping up periodically in the film- which you can buy for $9.99 (in the movie, not in real life, I think anyway)- that tells what the Meaning of Life is... that is, it gives a lot of other offers for books on how to deal with this or that in life. It almost looks like a coupon book, which is a shame since the character who is most in love with it, a nice kid, seems very much engrossed by it.

But the title of Tatia Rosenthal's film is more like rounding off reality, perhaps. It's not a full $10, but the characters do try to make that price in their lives. To put it another way, no one character in this film is quite happy, but they keep trying, and maybe life will have some meaning when they can attain some happiness - or not, as case might be. Rosenthal's film, based on short stories Etgar Keret, focus on a group of people who have some, um, quirks to them, or are just painfully normal. The film begins with a middle-aged businessman turning down a homeless man a dollar for a coffee, and the homeless guy pulls out a gun and shoots himself. He later returns as an Angel and hangs out with an old guy on his porch, smoking cigarettes and wondering what Heaven is like. The businessman's sons: one is the Meaning of Life book-reader, and the other is a repo man who falls hard for a sexy (as sexy as claymation can be) model, and proceeds to shave his whole body with hair - and then takes a cue from the organ-less men who removed their body parts until they were heads and blobs. All for love, I guess.

Other stories are a little more ordinary, more or less. More: a little boy is told by his father to put away fifty cents in his piggy bank so he can save up to buy a toy, but he finds that he grows attached to the piggy bank, who he names, and finds the piggy's smile very comforting ("I put money in, he smiles, I don't put money in... he smiles!"). Less: a guy whose girl really wants to settle down and marry and have kids and all of that, but finds that he would rather spend time in his room, listening to records with his three little "friends", little men ala Gulliver's Travels, and getting wasted on beer and pot. So the stories are mostly by themselves, but intertwine by certain events (such as the Angel doing a test "fly" off of the patio and with everyone else looking out the window), or by thematic context.

The stories have a lot of humor to them, with one-liners that zing ("I found that there's not one meaning to life, there's six!"), and the look of the film feels similar but is original in its own right of character design and approach (and, for once, we get a rated-R claymation movie, including full frontal nudity!), but it also goes for deep moments and resonance, and Rosenthal strikes some good ground here. She doesn't try and over-do the messages, but lets them speak for themselves through the stories. It's genuinely odd, but it also gives heart-felt scenes and passages, such as the little boy with the piggy bank (the end of his story with the bank is quite touching), and it values the power of human responsibility with fantasy in equal measure. If it were a little longer it might really be something great, but as it stands it's a curious little find.

One character in this beautifully crafted film buys a book entitled "The Meaning of Life." While we never discover exactly what that book contains, "$9.99" peruses questions about life's meaning with poignancy and affection. It's sad, silly, very human characters are people we know, and real enough so that we might occasionally forget we are watching animation.

This is not a film for the young — there is no "action," no "romance," and little to make a viewer laugh out loud. Rather, we are offered a wryly comic look at human nature, best suited for those who have lived enough of life so as to be able to identify with the film's pathetically flawed characters, and look on them with affection rather than impatience or contempt.

Human beings, the filmmakers suggest, are rarely able to communicate with other human beings, even to express love to those they love most. They are even less likely to fulfill each other's hopes and expectations. It is a pessimistic outlook, to be sure, and rather depressing — but, in the end, we are left with the message that love not only is possible, it is the only thing that gives life any meaning at all. Love — crazy, misguided, or bizarre as it may be — is all that matters.

Personally I dig stop-motion animation, for the simple conscious fact that there's a lot of blood and sweat going on behind the scenes just to get an object to move. You can imagine what it takes to get a character to move an arm, and you extrapolate that effort into a feature length film with a lot more things happening concurrently on screen, and you're likely to appreciate this artform a lot more, with new found respect for it.

$9.99 is an amazing piece of stop-motion animation coupled with a tremendously engaging story made up of multiple narrative threads, and a myriad of characters attempting to tackle their respective problems in life. It begins with a bang literally, where a homeless man (Geoffrey Rush) with a gun in hand, asks Jim Peck (Anthony LaPaglia) for a cigarette and a light, before launching into some really clever moments about manipulation. It's an excellent start to jolt you into realizing that this film isn't just another walk in the park, and as it plays on, you'd discover its brilliance in its commentary about life, as seen from the experiences of the residents in an apartment block.

We have a family of three, with Jim who might just need his karma checked for encountering really antagonizing moments involving death, and his two sons Dave (Samuel Johnson) and Lenny (Ben Mendelsohn), the former being unemployed and is found to be central to the narrative, and the latter being a Repo-man finding himself falling, and obsessing over the love by new neighbour and supermodel Tanita (Leeanna Walsman), who has a fetish for a hairless body. Then there's a lonely old man who finds the world contents passing him by with nobody interested in hearing him talk a bit (well, because he's long-winded as well), finding a companion in an angel, whom he asks incessantly about Heaven. Then there's a boy who has a friend in his piggy bank, and a couple on the verge of being married having to fall out because one of them refuses to grow up.

The "$9.99" comes from the price of a catalog of books, one of which touts to hold The Meaning of Life which Dave buys. Unfortunately, the characters here seem to be caught up in living their own lives and falling victim to respective challenges life presents itself, and so every effort that Dave wants to share gets spurned, and we the audience, unfortunately, don't get to hear if there are any insights to that. But of course we all know that there's no silver bullet, and the characters here, though the course of this emotionally moving film, learn of that meaning as it applies in their own, with the old man determined to take a more proactive approach, to a connection between a father and a son, to love found and running parallel to that, a love broken because of sacrifices that one has to make, or the lack thereof, and the maturing of a young child.

I guess nobody scoffs at animation, especially one that targets the mature audience – check out that Dr Manhatten moment. I've new found respect for stop-motion animation, and for the filmmakers involved in producing this fine piece of work. The attention to detail is incredible, never at any moment hinting that they had cut some corners and compromised quality. Definitely highly recommended, and easily one of the few films I thoroughly enjoyed in the festival lineup.

I was so surprised to see so many negative reviews for this movie because I thought it was absolutely brilliant!

Some people found the animation ugly whereas the movement seemed very smooth to me and the realistic expression and emotion they were able to portray with clay faces astounded me! The claymation style was too realistic for me at first, not cartoon-y enough, which gave the movie a very creepy disturbing feel. There are a lot of reds and purples used in the faces that can make the characters seem sickly, but you come to realise that this is a stylistic choice that makes the faces more varied and more like pieces of art than just moving toys. Art is supposed to disturb the comfortable anyhow and this movie does it very well.

I have also heard the movie be critiqued for its jumpy, disconnected plot (it is based on a collection of short stories) whereas I felt that the thematic connections were strong enough that this movie very much felt like a unified whole. The characters are connected by the apartment complex they share and by the kinds of lives they lead and the kinds of problems they face in the plot.

I loved the dialogue in this movie, one of those great works where subtle, very real moments and shifts in relationships are defined by the idiosyncratic way a line is worded in a conversation between characters. I was wrapped entirely in every conversation and each line seemed to carry so much meaning (in a light-hearted kind of way).

The stores range from touching, sweet and hopeful to disturbing and depressing send-ups of life in a post-modern age. You really can take from this what you want- but not because the filmmakers have made ideas vague and unfleshed, but because they have taken so many ideas and fleshed them out in so many different and unexpected ways that you have a whole smorgasboard of meaning to pick, choose, riff on, dissect, abstract and so on.

I don't want to hype it too much because I think part of my love for this movie was due to similarities I have with some characters and how connected this made me feel but please don't dismiss this movie, because it is definitely something very special!