A blog formerly known as Bookishness / By Charles Matthews

"Dazzled by so many and such marvelous inventions, the people of Macondo ... became indignant over the living images that the prosperous merchant Bruno Crespi projected in the theater with the lion-head ticket windows, for a character who had died and was buried in one film and for whose misfortune tears had been shed would reappear alive and transformed into an Arab in the next one. The audience, who had paid two cents apiece to share the difficulties of the actors, would not tolerate that outlandish fraud and they broke up the seats. The mayor, at the urging of Bruno Crespi, explained in a proclamation that the cinema was a machine of illusions that did not merit the emotional outbursts of the audience. With that discouraging explanation many ... decided not to return to the movies, considering that they already had too many troubles of their own to weep over the acted-out misfortunes of imaginary beings."
--Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude

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Wednesday, February 11, 2026

Nine Months (Chris Columbus, 1995)

Julianne Moore and Hugh Grant in Nine Months

Cast: Hugh Grant, Julianne Moore, Tom Arnold, Joan Cusack, Jeff Goldblum, Robin Williams, Mia Cottet. Screenplay: Chris Columbus, based on a screenplay by Patrick Braoudé. Cinematography: Donald McAlpine. Production design: Donald McAlpine. Film editing: Raja Gosnell, Stephen E. Rivkin. Music: Hans Zimmer.

Chris Columbus's Nine Months is a sometimes painfully unfunny attempt to blend slapstick with romantic comedy, centered on the notion that women in their 30s should get married and have children. So when Rebecca Taylor (Julianne Moore) discovers that her birth control has failed and she's pregnant, she and Sam Faulkner (Hugh Grant), who are living together, face the big decision. She's for it, and he's -- well, he's played by Grant at his most dithery. The rest of the film wobbles between treating the pregnancy as a real-life couple might and treating it as an excuse for knockabout scenes. In one of the latter, for example, Sam and his new friend Marty (Tom Arnold), get into a fight in a toy store with a man in a dinosaur suit (based on a then-popular kid's show about a purple dinosaur called Barrney). The movie climaxes in a fight in the delivery room that's supposed to be funny but is more than a little disturbing thanks to the presence of  Robin Williams as a Russian obstetrician who has unaccountably been allowed to practice in America and spouts a lot of probably ad-libbed gynecological malapropisms. But even when the film takes Rebecca's pregnancy seriously, it's just tedious. Grant did his career no good by mugging his way through the film, and skilled players like Moore, Jeff Goldblum, and Joan Cusack are wasted. 

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