How a 9 became a 2

Rating: 2/10 (31 August 2011)

A highly rated movie with rave reviews? How could I resist? The first three quarters of the movie are interesting, an exploration of mental illness, blurring lines between imagination and reality and interesting camera shots that I thought illustrated the workings of a mind of a schizophrenic.
How very wrong I was.
The last quarter of the movie answers a number of questions, and opens up several new ones that you can't understand if you watched a movie. Literarily. You need the DVD commentary and the web site and an imaginary book to understand what happened. After you read through those (the web site includes much of the imaginary book, but it requires you figure out different passwords), you find out the plot is actually on the level of one of the particularly poor Star trek episodes. The mental illness a red herring and the interesting camera shots were ... just that. Interesting camera shots. Not intended to show anything at all, apparently, since all the vital points are in the material that comes with the movie, and so pathetic you're better off not knowing them at all.
Overall I find the movie extremely overrated. I gave it a 2 because if your house caught fire half an hour before it ended and you'd never go back to see the ending and figure out the plot line, you'd be left with an impression of a masterpiece.