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By Cole Smithey

‘$9.99’

Starring the voices of Geoffrey Rush, Anthony LaPaglia, Joel Edgerton, Barry Otto and Claudia Karvan. Rated R, 78 minutes

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An urban Sidney, Australian apartment building is the alternately public and private forum for a disparate collection of humanity represented as animated clay people in Tatia Rosenthal’s quirky yet unsatisfying stop-motion drama that vacillates between a gee-whiz philosophy, surreal digressions of whimsy and twisted sexual expression.

Geoffrey Rush is the voice of a suicidal homeless man who comes back as a disenfranchised winged angel to converse with an aged tenant after having offed himself in the presence of Jim (voiced by Anthony LaPaglia), a widowed father to a couple of grown boys busy searching for the meaning of life in all the wrong places. Surreal elements blend with a prosaic narrative that refuses to ever come to life. The film is significant if only as a first co-production between Tel Aviv and Australian film companies. Intriguing as a flawed experiment in animation, “nine dollars ninety-nine (as it’s spoken in proper Aussie dialect) suffers from a lack of thematic continuity that leaves the audience wanting both more and less — more story and less metaphor.

The most striking aspect of “$9.99” is how simultaneously fantastic yet awful its stop-motion animated elements are. The buildings and set designs are infinitely impressive, while more often than not the clay characters’ faces repel when they should invite audience affiliation.

The films thematically loose title comes from the price that its twenty something character Dave Peck pays for a mail order book that purports to contain the meaning of life. Yet somehow the filmmakers never allow Dave to speak the magic words that he is convinced have given meaning to his existence. It’s a film that sets out to be a “meditation” on the significance of hope, and as such dooms itself to wallow in an over-intellectualized mire of metaphorical experiences.

A little boy who dreams of possessing a toy figure of a soccer player with a ball attached to his toe, gets a piggy bank from his father that will enable him to save up every 50 cent reward he gets for finishing his milk to purchase the plaything. But the child misreads the significance of the bank and becomes so beguiled by the inanimate pig’s smile that he forgets about toy he once wanted, and seeks deliverance for the hollow pig. It’s a subplot that seems to prove the Eastern European ideology that hope is a useless concept.

Adapted from short stories by Etgar Keret, the film’s tag line, that it’s an animated feature that “offers slightly less than $10 worth about the meaning of life,” is unfortunately all to true about a movie whose visuals far outweigh its dramatic reach. For a movie that could only shoot 20 seconds of footage a day, “$9.99” offhandedly gives greater credence to the “Wallace & Gromit” animators, who grasp the narrative demands of their chosen area of stop-motion animation with a fully-realized intentionality. CV

‘My Sister’s Keeper’

Starring Cameron Diaz, Sofia Vassilieva, Jason Patric and Abigail Breslin. Rated PG-13, 106 minutes

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Nick Cassavetes’ three-hankie weepy lurches during moments of music-video sequences, and gratuitous voice-over narration from members of the Fitzgerald family as they struggle with their terminally ill daughter Kate (Sofia Vassilieva). Parents Sara (Cameron Diaz in the best performance of her career to date) and Brian (Jason Patric) made an ethically challenging decision when they chose to conceive a second daughter, Anna (Abigail Breslin), as a genetically engineered resource to physically help keep leukemia-stricken Kate alive. At eleven, Anna decides that she wants to be legally exonerated from her bodily responsibilities to Kate, and seeks medical emancipation with the aid of Campbell Alexander (Alec Baldwin), a successful ambulance-chasing attorney. A court battle, overseen by an especially perceptive Judge De Salvo (Joan Cusack), looms while Kate pursues romance with a cancer-suffering patient named Taylor (Thomas Dekker).

The crux of the drama comes down to Sara’s ability as a mother to see beyond her involuntary urge to fight like a martyr for the life of a daughter whose pain and suffering must eventually come to an end. In spite of some of its less than elegant editorial decisions, “My Sister’s Keeper” is full of terrific performances all around. Cusack is phenomenal as a judge recovering from the loss of her own daughter, and Breslin confirms her status as one of the most gifted young actors in the business.

Co-written by Jeremy Leven and Cassavetes, the film is based on the Jodi Picoult’s 2004 novel. The movie opens with Anna’s narration, showing off her mature-for-her-age comprehension of how “most babies are accidents” because “only people who have trouble making babies actually plan for them.” The language is a little to cutesy for the material and tilts the drama too far toward Anna as a would-be protagonist, while that barley obscured obligation falls much more squarely on the shoulders of Kate, who finds a number of unusual ways to mediate the family crisis that is her life and consequently trickier aspects of the narrative.

Anna is expected to soon donate one of her kidneys to Kate when she enters Alexander’s office to request his legal defense in getting her off the hook for the surgery. After years of donating blood and bone marrow, with the effect of limiting the activities that she can or will ever be able to participate in, Anna’s medical predicament is an especially sensitive one to Campbell, whose own physical defects cause him no end of public humiliations, as we discover later on. Anna’s legal action causes a blow out rift with her mother, who runs both-guns-blazing into Campbell’s office to confront the clear-eyed attorney in a well crafted dramatic scene that sets the stage for the courtroom sub-plot that distracts from Kate’s daily struggles with chemotherapy as a toxic balm to her cancer ravaged body.

“My Sister’s Keeper” manages to encompass the complexities of a disjointed family acting with best intentions in a medical calamity that necessarily involves a battery outside influences. If only Cassavetes could have trusted the film enough to leave out the distancing montage music sequences and beside-the-point narration he could have approached a perfect drama. Nonetheless, with the aid of a great cast, he has made a movie that will relieve six months worth of tears for audiences willing to take its cathartic journey. CV

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