$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.

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.

$9.99 is a series of unique short stories. However the tales are a bit uneven and get a little artsy at the end leaving you a bit confused.

$9.99 is a stop motion claymation film that centers around an apartment complex in Australia and follows the tale of about eight or so of its inhabitants. To give you a sample: there is a boy who loves soccer and is saving up for a soccer toy. There is a father who witnesses two deaths right before his eyes and has two son's who aren't exactly successful. There is an old man who everyone ignores because he yammers constantly about his dead wife. And there is a stoner/alcoholic who gets faded and hallucinates about three miniature druggie friends.

I have to say... the intro to this film is really enthralling. I won't give it away but it definitely grabbed my attention. It's quirky, sad and violent which definitely covers the multiple tones of this film.

The characters and stories are sporadically interspersed and no one story gets priority over another. And I think because of that indecision it sort of holds the movie back. Some of the stories aren't that interesting in the beginning but about 20 minutes into the film one of the characters turns out to be a living Angel, with wings! Now the Angel of course is the most intriguing of the stories, which is why he is on the cover of the movie poster and also probably why an Israeli funded commission helped fund this film. Now I think if the film didn't have the angel $9.99 wouldn't have kept my attention the way it did. I stayed attentive because I wanted to know the significance of the angel. However the Angel story doesn't come to a conclusion like some of the others which drove me crazy! All the other stories had a solid but not always satisfying ending. However the angel story just sort of "dropped off" (inside joke). I understand the angel changed these characters lives in some way and manner but why did he change their lives and why not all in the same manner either positive or negative?

Perhaps there is some biblical homage that I don't understand because I'm not that well read in religious texts but I find this to be the biggest detraction from the film. Also I don't mind the surreal hallucinations by the druggie but the story about the man who shaves himself to satisfy his lover - WTF happened at the end!? Is that real or not real? I can't tell you what happens because it ruins the surprise but lets just say some world mechanics were definitely broken.

All in all the film is quite idiosyncratic and moves at a very odd pace. I think if I were stoned this movie might have been too much to handle, but definitely check it out if you have an open mind and like seeing weird things.

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!

Made up of Israeli writer Etgar Keret's several short stories, $9.99 is a black comedy satirizing social manners and discontents of today's urban nation. Within a high density of morbid humour, the purpose of black comedy is somewhat achieved. Israeli animation director Tatia Rosenthal is trying to provoke discomfort and serious thought about the social matters that makes life unbearable, in the audience. From couple years earlier another animation of her "A Buck's Worth" seems to be the nucleus of $9.99.

Besides the production values, technical values are at a very low-level. Of course, it's not fair to expect a flawless claymation like they do in Hollywood, but still the characters look and move very distractive. Audio mix is not satisfying either. Plus it's very silent and the music is very boring, while the social lampoon is in charge of the mood. Alongside with the unpleasant characters, these are the main reasons why a lot of people hated this film.

4 households of one apartment block form the main characters and the plot. The first one is a broken family, a father and his two adult sons leaving apart from the mother of their home. Dave, the youngest kid is the leading character in the story. He is a very likable kid; honest but dupe, helpful and skillful but unemployed. His brother works as a bailiff; smart, self-confident, happy-go-lucky. The father of the family is self-disciplined, strict, introverted, snooty; throughout the story Dave's father always ignores his son and always extremely ironic incidents happen to him, thus he becomes depressed and turns out to be pessimistic. While the story comes to a resolution, he no longer has any eagerness to do a thing; he loses his aim of life. That's when Dave comes to his rescue, offering him fresh ideas of finding the hidden meaning of life.

Opening with a dark view of life, that view becomes brighter and softer even though the story develops with sad and ironic incidents happening to regular people. Rather than some intelligent black humour, there's nothing interesting or to be of liking. I watched this film with my friends and their friends altogether on a boring Saturday afternoon, and everyone hated it, so we turned it off in the middle; since no one really cared whatever is going to happen to those unpleasant and uninteresting people. Then after a while, I watched it on my own forcing myself to see how the conclusion is going to be. I've seen much more awful animations. This was somewhat tolerable.