Nine Songs
Oct. 1st, 2014 05:37 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
chuckroI’m going to be honest, I’m not entirely sure how this got onto my queue. Someone was talking it up somewhere on the internet so I downloaded it? It does have a lot of unsimulated sex in it—the potential for it integrating the sex and the titular nine songs into the plot and/or emotional arc of the movie were likely what caught my attention.
(I’d love to see a movie where plot/important inter-character exchanges/important emotional beats happened unashamedly during sex. Very few movies do this, instead letting the sex scene just be a sex scene. Friends With Benefits actually does it decently. This movie? Not so much.)
If I had to condense the concept of an “indie art film” down into one relatively short movie, this could be that. There’s no real narrative thrust, and no real meaning besides attempts at disjointed emotional poignancy that don’t really work. Segments are show in sorta-flashback—it’s not clear if it’s just a straight retelling with occasional shots of the narrator’s current situation, or if the scenes happen out of order of occurrence. The plot is, “Boy meets girl. Boy and girl have lots of varied sex. Boy and girl go to concerts. Boy loses girl and moves to Antarctica.” So you get lots of nudity, drug use, incomprehensible-but-trite dialogue, random pseudo-philosophy over shots of bleak natural settings, and rock concerts that were (likely deliberately) badly filmed live.
And the sad thing is, I suspect that all of this could work if an effort was made to make it tell something resembling a story! If the songs and their lyrics (which, being British grunge rock, are incomprehensible) tied into the emotional moments of the story; if the sex scenes and concert scenes had more actual character interaction and events gluing them together; if the whole Antarctica thing wasn’t so out-of-nowhere random.
Really, I think this comes down to the filmmakers saying, “How close can we get to making porn and still have it be considered a mainstream film?” The answer is apparently, “You can get pretty damn close, but next time, try to have at least as much plot as a porn film.”
Overall: Meh. Instead of this, watch a slice-of-life romance film, or a concert video, or porn, depending on what you want. This does none of them particularly well, and integrates them terribly.
(I’d love to see a movie where plot/important inter-character exchanges/important emotional beats happened unashamedly during sex. Very few movies do this, instead letting the sex scene just be a sex scene. Friends With Benefits actually does it decently. This movie? Not so much.)
If I had to condense the concept of an “indie art film” down into one relatively short movie, this could be that. There’s no real narrative thrust, and no real meaning besides attempts at disjointed emotional poignancy that don’t really work. Segments are show in sorta-flashback—it’s not clear if it’s just a straight retelling with occasional shots of the narrator’s current situation, or if the scenes happen out of order of occurrence. The plot is, “Boy meets girl. Boy and girl have lots of varied sex. Boy and girl go to concerts. Boy loses girl and moves to Antarctica.” So you get lots of nudity, drug use, incomprehensible-but-trite dialogue, random pseudo-philosophy over shots of bleak natural settings, and rock concerts that were (likely deliberately) badly filmed live.
And the sad thing is, I suspect that all of this could work if an effort was made to make it tell something resembling a story! If the songs and their lyrics (which, being British grunge rock, are incomprehensible) tied into the emotional moments of the story; if the sex scenes and concert scenes had more actual character interaction and events gluing them together; if the whole Antarctica thing wasn’t so out-of-nowhere random.
Really, I think this comes down to the filmmakers saying, “How close can we get to making porn and still have it be considered a mainstream film?” The answer is apparently, “You can get pretty damn close, but next time, try to have at least as much plot as a porn film.”
Overall: Meh. Instead of this, watch a slice-of-life romance film, or a concert video, or porn, depending on what you want. This does none of them particularly well, and integrates them terribly.
