The Ninth Gate dvd movie.|
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List Price: $9.98 Our Price: $9.98 Features • Anamorphic • Color • Dolby • DVD-Video • Special Edition • Widescreen • NTSC In Theaters : 10 March, 2000 DVD Release : 18 July, 2000 |
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The Ninth Gate description The horror of Roman Polanski is not about spectacle and shock but a goose-pimply sense of evil lurking just outside the frame and hidden behind the faces of slightly unsettling characters. For a while it looks like The Ninth Gate, adapted from the novel The Club Dumas by Arturo Pérez-Reverte, might recapture the beautiful uneasiness of such masterpieces as Repulsion and Rosemary's Baby. A calm, almost sleepy Johnny Depp plays cynical, unscrupulous rare-book hunter Dean Corso, who's hired by demonologist Boris Balkan (Frank Langella) to authenticate a rare volume that, legend has it, was cowritten by Lucifer himself. Dean leaves a Gothic looking New York (re-created in Europe by Polanski as a sinister city of shadows) for Portugal and Paris to compare Balkan's volume with the two copies known to be in existence and uncovers a mystery with unholy ramifications. He also finds himself at the center of a conspiracy that involves Balkan, a widow who will stop at nothing to retrieve Balkan's book (Lena Olin, who gleefully bites and claws her way through the part), and a mysterious guardian "angel" (Polanski's wife, Emmanuelle Seigner) who shadows his every step. The Ninth Gate is full of rumbling menace and deliciously unsettling imagery, but Polanski's languorous direction and purposefully vague story render a film that's eerie without every becoming thrilling. It's perpetually on the verge of becoming interesting--right up to its obscure final image. --Sean Axmaker |
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| ♥♥♥♥♥ | The Doors |
| I liked "The Ninth Gate" for its incredibly long credit sequence at the beginning of the film. The music is dramatic as it sweeps through door after door after door, all of which look exactly the same. After about the fourth door, it becomes silly and laughter sets in. It's like listening to an old vinyl record that is skipping, but not getting up to move the needle.
After this, the movie goes downhill a bit, but Roman Polanski puts on a good show. Particularly interesting is the consummation sequence in which his real-life wife Emmanuelle Seigner plays the green-eyed girl & does the deed with Depp to a background of flames. It's not many men who would want their wives to do that, but Polanski's viewpoint has always been unique. He is a great filmmaker. His Best Director Oscar for "The Pianist," nominations for "Chinatown" & "Tess" plus his screenplay nomination for the legendary "Rosemary's Baby" prove the point. Even if 9th Gate begins to get a bit muddled, he has more than fulfilled his promise since his first film "Knife in Water" got a Best Foreign Language Film nomination back in 1963. Johnny Depp is also usually very interesting to watch. He scored a couple Best Actor nominations for very different roles from "Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl" in 2003 to "Finding Neverland" in 2004. As book dealer Dean Corso, I found the character's moral ambiguity to make him unattractive. You couldn't really cheer for him; but he was interesting as he worked his way through the maze of facts in this old book mystery. Frank Langella has had a long career from "Diary of a Mad Housewife" back in 1970 to "Good Night & Good Luck" in 2005. As the rich book collector Boris Balkan, he was very cerebral, but lacked a certain evil pizzazz to really make you cheer as he bursts into flames. It felt more like he was pathetically weird. Maybe that was what Polanski wanted. Lena Olin is such an interesting actress to watch. She makes you feel like at any moment she could do almost anything. She would work again with Depp in "Chocolat" and had a sole Oscar nomination in the supporting category in 1989 for "Enemies: A Love Story." The role of Liana Telfer maximizes her strengths. She goes from making love to Depp to trying to kill him with a hair-trigger temper. Tony Amoni as her bodyguard with the cropped blond hair makes a visual impression. British stage actress Barbara Jeffords who appeared in films sporadically from "Hamlet" in 1959 to "Madame Bovary" in 2000, makes a memorable appearance as Baroness Kessler, another book collector. The last sequence with her wheelchair banging repetitively into the wall as Corso awakes to find the flat aflame is visually brilliant. James Russo who played Sheriff Poole in one of my favorite films, "Open Range," puts in a good appearance as Bernie the bookseller who doesn't last too long holding onto Corso's rare tome. "The Ninth Gate" isn't the most dreadful film ever. Polanski is far too good a director for that to occur. But it bogs down in plot details that never really seem to fit together. For instance, how did all the pictures in the books once the three editions came together actually enable Boris Balkan? Or they didn't, which is why he burned up -- and if that's the case, then was the film really all about something that didn't exist? Yet, we see the Green Eyed girl flitting about; so we must conclude that something was going on, but what? Did Depp's Corso become like Mia Farrow in "Rosemary's Baby"? Who knows? After a movie as long as this, it should have been clear. Perhaps we should just go to "Pirates 3" and not worry about it. Next! |
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