The Nines

Watching John August’s directorial debut, I was reminded that the best films are the most challenging.  I’m looking at you, Donnie Darko and Southland Tales, L.A. Story and Playing By Heart. They’re the movies that seem lost in themselves, maybe, too clever for their own good, or Frankensteined out of disparate pieces that make no sense outside of their original context.  Just when you’ve almost given up, though, something compels you to stick it out until the end, and the resultant feeling is so ethereal that it defies being put into words, like a good dream or that  weird orgasmic feeling you get when your favorite song plays on your iPod.

I’m (somewhat surprisingly, at least to me) largely unaware of movie writers. For the life of me, I can’t remember the name of the DD/ST tales creator (quick Google search says: Richard Kelly. Oops.).  But I know John August, because he was one of the two judges who gave me the right to tack “Award Winning” as a prefix to my screenwriter label. He wrote Go (which I’ve always liked), and Big Fish, and Corpse Bride and Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.  And Charlie’s Angels, which I’ll hold against McG instead. And — though I can’t find them at the minute, buried as they are in a shoebox in a trunk in my shoebox apartment — he wrote me some very kind script notes which eventually were worked into the short film of Muckfuppet.

Because I recommend watching it — especially if you’re a writer — I will say as clearly as I can that his directorial debut is far better than mine.

The last five minutes of the film — when the pieces finally fall into place and you can start making sense of what’s been happening for the past ninety minutes — are, plainly, breathtaking.  It’s apparent even without the special feature documentaries that there’s a strong autobiographical connection, and it’s made all the more natural and real because of it.

Again, having a hard time putting this into words. But I recognized a lot of Muckfuppet in The Nines, and it’s not a talent or ability thing (not at all — August is, arguably, a better artist (and inarguably a far superior craftsman) than I.  It’s an intangible reality, that place where allegory and the world that we experience every day somehow become one.

All this to say: ignore whatever reviews you’ve heard about the movie, good or bad.  Give yourself two hours distraction-free, and watch the movie.  It’s not without flaws, but I’ll be damned if the big picture revelation at the end hasn’t erased specifics from my mind.  Ryan Reynolds and Melissa McCarthy both do great jobs — anyone who thinks Reynolds is only good for smartass Van Wilder characters can find proof otherwise in this — while Alex Wurman’s score is beautiful and haunting.

And then drop by http://johnaugust.com/ and tell him how great it was.

The Nines

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