$9.99

Related Content

• Maayan Nidam: Show Preview
  January 4, 2012
• Village Voice's Lauren Shockey Dishes Kitchen Gossip at Omnivore Books
  October 20, 2011
• "The King's Speech": Colin Firth and Helena Bonham Carter humanize the House of Windsor
  December 8, 2010
• Yes, They Can
  September 28, 2011
• Soulico: Show Preview
  February 23, 2011

More About

• Etgar Keret
• Tel Aviv
• Shira Geffen
• Geoffrey Rush

Like this Story?

Sign up for the Events Newsletter: What's happening in town? From underground club nights to the biggest outdoor festivals, our top picks for the week's best events will always keep you in on the action.

Privacy Policy Cancel Continue

Tatia Rosenthal’s stop-motion animation $9.99 adds a measure of stolid creepiness to co-writer Etgar Keret’s brand of dark whimsy. Like Jellyfish—the live-action film Keret directed with his wife, Shira Geffen, in 2007—$9.99 is an episodic affair detailing the absurd or fantastic encounters between all the lonely people—here, the inhabitants of a particular apartment building. An Israeli-Australian co-production, $9.99 is set in a city that vaguely resembles Tel Aviv, but is populated by Aussie-accented clay puppets: An aggressive beggar (voiced by Geoffrey Rush) shoots himself and returns as a no less irascible angel; a stoner is dumped by his girlfriend and consoled by a trio of heavy-partying pixie dudes; a repo man takes up with a supermodel, whose apartment includes some peculiar anthropomorphic furniture; and a little boy bonds with his ceramic piggy-bank. The movie’s nominal protagonist, a terminally unemployed 28-year-old still living at home with his depressed father, discovers, first, the meaning of life in a paperback purchased for $9.99 and, second, that nobody cares. The various scenarios intersect and comment on each other, abetted by an incongruously airy score. There’s nothing especially spiritual or Jewish about $9.99, but, with its numerologically suggestive title, this curious movie does inspire Kabbalistic reveries. Is it a drama unfolding in one of God’s failed creations? Are these depressed, abandoned beings a race of golems—inert creatures fashioned from clay and brought mysteriously to life?
Tue., Sept. 15, 7:15 & 9:15 p.m.; Wed., Sept. 16, 2, 7:15 & 9:15 p.m., 2009