"When two persons in search of a Pokemon clash at the corner of Sunset and San Vicente is there violence? Is there murder?"
-- Werner Herzog, asking The Verge's Emily Yoshida about the nature of Pokemon Go
I am trying to find out something about a movie called Nine Lives, which opens in theaters "everywhere" today.
There are no reviews of this movie available. You will see no blurbs from critics endorsing Nine Lives. The marketing does include some made-up quotes from made-up publications like Vanity Fur ("Purr-fection") and Meowsweek ("Hiss-Sterical") but only the terminally gullible would mistake them for anything other than the groan-inducing cat puns they are.
It is not surprising that EuropaCorp -- a one-stop French motion picture studio that not only produces and distributes its own films but also handles home video sales and other ancillary business -- did not screen the movie for critics. Critics generally don't help movies like Nine Lives. They only make fun of movies like Nine Lives, they only use them as opportunities to show off how clever and sophisticated they are.
Part of this is probably because watching bad movies is often painful for people who enjoy good movies, and reflexive snark is a way of striking back at your imagined oppressor. Part of it is because critics might feel entitled to have some fun sometimes. Anyway, I would have liked to review Nine Lives because it is my job and we try to review every movie that opens in Arkansas in these pages.
On the other hand, I respect the rights of the people who make movies not to screen them in advance for people to say mean things about them. And if we have to miss a movie, it might as well be something like Nine Lives, which does not look especially promising.
But unpromising is not the same thing as uninteresting. And Nine Lives seems weirdly interesting.
Have you seen the trailers for Nine Lives? Do you believe them? Do you believe that Nine Lives is a real movie, and not a Funny or Die parody of '90s talking animal movies like Paulie (1998) and Joe's Apartment (1996)?
I believe that it is a real movie, for it is listed on the Internet Movie Database website and in the "New Movies" feature. I do not believe Nine Lives is a gigantic hoax, I believe it is an actual business venture entered into by adults who have in the past demonstrated that they are capable of making reasonable movies. Adults who have grown rich by making movies that entertain people. But I could be wrong.
Still, I have seen the trailers. (Haven't you?)
They tell us Nine Lives is a live-action movie in which Oscar-winning actor/new head of Relativity Media Kevin Spacey plays a "daredevil" billionaire/New York real estate developer (who seems at least partially based on Donald Trump) who gets turned into a cat called Mr. Fuzzypants by Christopher Walken, a kind of wizard who probably also dances a little.
I did not dream this after mixing melatonin pills and wines.
It confounds me. Neither of these actors seems especially down on his luck and desperate for a payday, though most people do like money and will accept it when offered.
But why was it offered? Will people who like Spacey in House of Cards be tempted to see Nine Lives? Are Walken fans pathological completists? (A lot of people cherish Walken, but his presence in any movie is not a definitive marker of quality.) Who is the joke on here?
Walken is often employed ironically by people who think it a great joke to cast him "against type." He is probably happy to take money from these people, but he might be even happier when someone gives him a real character to play.
I do not know if he plays a real character in Nine Lives, or if his appearance is just a riff on the Walken persona that's been curated by stand-up comics and show biz functionaries like Jay Mohr, Kevin Pollak and his co-star Spacey, who once did a bit that posited Walken as Han Solo in Star Wars.
Maybe Walken turns Spacey into a cat as revenge for that impression, which really is one of the better ones.
I doubt it. From the trailers, it doesn't look like Nine Lives will indulge in any metafictional playfulness. From the trailers, it looks like a painfully earnest movie designed to baby-sit children while providing parents the workable cover story that it somehow imparts life lessons. But I could be wrong. It is dangerous to diagnose a movie from its trailers. The only way to really inform yourself about a movie is to go see it.
But I don't think I will. I believe I will choose ignorance.
Will you? Will you make children watch it? Why?
Is it because it is being shoved out there as an alternative to the inevitably blockbusting Suicide Squad? Is it because you are a cat person? Are you nostalgic for the Look Who's Talking movies?
I am looking for information about this movie because this is the part of the newspaper where we write about movies and if anyone is interested in reading anything about Nine Lives, this is likely where they will look. Nine Lives is not a major news story. It is not one of the major issues of the day. It is simply something someone might be curious about: "Huh, a new movie from the 'maker of Men in Black' is opening. Maybe we should check it out."
Some people think this way. Some people don't know what movie they are going to see until they get to the theater and look at the marquee. Some people think Captain Fantastic (which I recommend) is a superhero movie. The only movie some people will see in theaters this year is Hillary's America: The Secret History of the Democratic Party. And that's fine. The assumption is someone wants to know something about Nine Lives other than what the marketing will tell them.
And there is a chance Nine Lives will be good. Its director, Barry Sonnefeld, once directed a movie called Get Shorty that was very, very good. And as the ads proclaim, he also directed a movie called Men in Black which was very, very successful. And while he undid a lot of that by following up with a pretty unwatchable movie called Wild Wild West, he has soldiered on in his chosen profession. Still, it has been almost 20 years since Men in Black.
Nine Lives is not made by idiots or pranksters. It is a business venture, and at some point someone was probably pretty enthusiastic about its chances for success. And it may very well be successful. It does not look like it was terribly expensive to make, at least not by the standards of global blockbusters, and there's no reason to believe it won't play as well in China as it will in the United States and Canada (where it was mostly filmed).
Yet the very fact of Nine Lives raises some existential questions: Why does it exist? Who is it made for? Are the filmmakers having a laugh? What has become of us?
Email:
pmartin@arkansasonline.com
www.blooddirtangels.com
MovieStyle on 08/05/2016