Behind the Nine

I rented this movie from my cable pay-per-view last night, and being interested in the Atlanta film scene and what it has to offer, I had been eager to check this movie out for a while.

I won't say I wasted my money, because even the worst movies are fun to take part in. I won't even say it wasn't a good effort to make a movie. I will say that it IS one of the worst examples of transparent attention-whoring I've ever seen in my life. I had to stop watching after about 30 minutes because I couldn't take any more.

From what I gathered, the movie is about pool-playing. There are lots of shots of billiard balls. There are lots of shots of a red pool table. There are lots of shots of people who can't act, acting like they are playing pool. And, for some unknown reason, there are girls kissing each other. This always leads to nothing other than random titillation for random titillation's sake. Also, someone involved with the production owns a big, pretty house, like you would find in any Atlanta suburb--white, drab, with loads of mini-blinds and some sort of art on the walls. He or she must also know everyone in the cast, because they almost all act like they got the part based solely on looks. And, whoever owns the house owns a pool table.

Wow. Is that where they got the idea to make this? If they would have spent a little more time doing something good instead of doing something that they thought would be cool, I would have enjoyed the movie even with the acting problems. (Having said that...there is a good performance by--well, I don't know her name, but she was the only girl to not be involved in a completely needless lesbian almost-sex scene within the first 20 minutes. This is how engrossed I was--I can't even remember the actor or character names.) There was ONE thing I liked about the movie. Toward the beginning, there were a couple of slow-motion shots that looked great. They were ruined by a voice-over, but they still looked less like video and were impressive for a few, brief moments. Yet, they also represent the same problem I mentioned earlier...it seemed like the shots were added simply because they looked "cool," even though they were completely unnecessary.

Honestly, I wanted to like it, and maybe I missed the good parts by shutting it off after a half-hour. But, also honestly, I don't care what I missed. What I saw was an in-joke of a movie that I didn't want to be invited to in the first place. One out of ten. That's a bad game of pool.

I love billiard movies. But when reviewing them, I don't feel it is fair to any film to compare them to the flicks of the past. With that said...

Behind The Nine is film about an underground 9-Ball tournament that pays $500,000 to the winner. This drama/suspense/comedy story is slow. It feels like the movie was 2 hours when it is only 1:18 long. The plot twists are sporadic at best and try to be ironic. It really never achieves the true goal of surprising you. The acting is bad. The one-liners are not delivered well. The dialog is choppy and doesn't flow well from one character to the next. The pool table and shot scenes are as bad as it can get. There are many continuity screw-ups during the games, like shooting balls numbers out of order, the sound of the last ball hitting other balls during a miss, or even showing the exact same shot or break more than once. All of this really can disrupt the flow of the film.

However, the scene/screen interruptions/notations are entertaining. The camera angles and the shooting seemed well done. If you are a pool player, I suppose you will have to see this, just to say you have. Otherwise, as much as I wanted to like this flick, I can't really feel OK about recommending it to anyone.

Behind The Nine I think had great potential, I think the story is cool as well as the way it was shot. The dialogue was awful at times and ending was really bad and unrealistic but hey it's a movie right!

I have this one a 6 out of 10 stars cause the story was pretty cool how they went through each match and I enjoyed how it was shot with the players bio being paused on the screen for a brief moment although I do wish they would've had some scenes of the actors actually making some decent billiard shots because there was absolutely zero of them in this billiards film.

I also appreciated that their was some actual pool lingo in the film that nobody would really know unless they were into billiards.