Nine Lives MPAA Rating: R Entertainment: +2 Content: -3

Nine Lives attempts to weave together the lives of nine women (Elpidia Carrillo, Robin Wright Penn, Lisa Gay Hamilton, Holly Hunter, Amanda Seyfried, Amy Brenneman, Sissy Spacek, Kathy Baker and Glenn Close) to tell a story of quiet desperation. Each womans story is an eight-minute-or-so scene that stands alone from the rest, but each woman is somehow connected to one of the other womans stories. While the film attempts to find a common thread in the nine lives, its plot is often far-fetched and more than tedious for viewers to follow. Its choppy style and unlikely connections from scene to scene miserably fail to challenge, intrigue or entertain. Audience reactions ranged from perplexed to painfully bored. Some even talked aloud during the movie about how ridiculous the storyline was. Rodrigo Garcias film unraveled at every turn.

From the opening of the first scene, Nine Lives assaults viewers with the f-word, the s-word and allusions to sex. Rather than using good writing to convey the desperation in these womens lives, Nine Lives resorts to unnecessarily harsh language that is so overused it distracts from the story. While there is no nudity, the sexual innuendo and dialogue is pervasive among married couples and romantic relationships outside of marriage. In one particularly unbelievable scene, a man and woman have sex at the funeral of the mans wife. In another disturbing scene, a daughter pulls a gun on her father while confronting him about sexually abusing her while she was growing up. The worst part of this movie is that most of the language, sexual dialogue and violence perpetuates the meaninglessness of this flop, earning it a low acceptability rating.

Preview Reviewer: Suzanne Keffer
Distributor: Magnolia Films