Film.com's FREE movie of the week is "Love the Hard Way." Oscar-winner Adrien Brody and Charlotte Ayanna star in this drama about a thief who falls for a curious, beautiful young woman. As their intimacy grows, a slick cop (Pam Greer) is closing in.
The time is the too-near future. Powered and enabled by the invention known as the Great Machine, the world's machines have turned on mankind and sparked social unrest, decimating the human population before being largely shut down. But as our world fell to pieces, a mission began to salvage the legacy of civilization; a group of small creations was given the spark of life by a scientist in the final days of humanity, and they continue to exist post-apocalypse. With their group so few, these "stitchpunk" creations must summon individual strengths well beyond their own proportions in order to outwit and fight against still-functioning machines, one of which is a marauding mechanized beast.
Recently, I had the pleasure of sitting down with the two stars of 9, the new animated feature from Shane Acker (produced by Tim Burton). Elijah Wood and Jennifer Connelly were kind enough to answer some questions and get into the
"Are audiences ready for this startling departure from traditional animation and happier plot lines?"
Southern author Flannery O'Connor once said of one of her characters, "She would have been a good woman if there was someone there to shoot her every day of her life." So then, would this have been a good film,
PETER TRAVERS -
September 10, 2009
If looks were all, 9 would have earned a better rating from me. This computer-animated fantasy — a feature-length expansion of the 11-minute short that brought former UCLA student Shane Acker an Oscar nod in 2006 — has looks that kill. What doesn’t kill or even stab beneath the surface is the story by Acker and Pamela Pettler about a dystopian universe where machines have effectively wiped out humanity (where have I heard that before?). What’s left with a semblance of soul takes the form of nine