acky Review of The Ninth Configuration

The Ninth Configuration (1980)

Brilliant, funny, awful and stupid film

[30 July 1999]

This is an extremely funny,brilliant and stupid and awful movie. The beginning of the movie is truly brilliant with endless brilliant speeches riddled wirth vaudeville style one liners. The gothic castle location gives an odd and eerie look to it. But after a half-hour, the one liners begin to wear on you. The films view of insanity is that of the cliched 1960's idealist who believes that people aren't really crazy, it's the system! Which is fair to a certain extent, but to truly accept insanity one must accept the real conditions of it, people attcking their nurses, masturbating in public, p***ing on the floor, the grotesque and degrading side of it as well. Of course many lunatics are brilliant but much more of them are toothless,violent schizophrenics. Blatty has basically just written one universal lunatic that blends all of them together. So after realizing this I was willing to accept it as flawed sort of comedy. But then Blatty's tone changes and the whole film becomes some sort of bible pounding drama (Spoiler coming up) with ridiculous self righteous scenes and a long and ridiculous scene involving two hell's angels. Then apparently Blatty wants us to think of Kane as Christ. But what kind of Christ kills an entire bar full of people? And why is it neccesary at the end to prove that yes, by gum, there is a heaven. I was very frustrated by the cloying sentimentalism that undermined the great atheistic first half.