9 Songs is a film by Michael Winterbottom, and is called 9 Songs because there are 9 songs pointlessly breaking up an hour of completely disconnected graphic sex scenes. It should have been called "I Slipped in the Art Gallery" because it has pretension rammed up its arse.

The film is about a couple who have lots of sex and go to music concerts, and it gained notoriety because the actors actually have sex in the film, however, as far as I'm concerned, there was no artistic merit to it. It's basically porno for the man who wonders how the couple met. And to be honest, even that man would be disappointed because we never find out.

What happened here was that Michael Winterbottom wanted to make a film where the actors actually had sex to be all cool and edgy. Not a porno. A proper film. So he stuck some random clips of gigs in there to make sure no one thought it was a porno. It is a porno. A very disjointed, badly made porno. The film starts as it means to go on; by showing us a graphic sex scene, followed by what I hope is amateur footage of a gig. There are some very bad shots in the film, where he tries and fails to be artistic. At times it felt like a sex tape, and to be honest, One Night in Paris did more for the world of film than 9 Songs. It led the way for things like Paranormal Activity, by having something banging away behind you while a night vision camera films.

The film seems to want to draw parallels between the music and the sex, but fails quite pathetically. It sets itself up as the classic "sex, drugs and rock 'n' roll" story, but instead of combining the three into a delicious story stew, it's more like a bag of Revels, where you'll randomly get a little bit of sex, then a little bit of drugs, and then a little bit of rock 'n' roll. I can't understand how it failed to combine those elements, considering they go hand-in-hand, but it's something to do with the way the film tries to force parallels that aren't there that makes them seem so separate.

The sex scenes are graphic and have no purpose. They even dabble with bondage, but this has no relevance at all. There's a part where the girl is tied up and saying a fantasy out loud while the man has his face in her nether-regions, but the way she speaks, by putting a little noise and moan after each word, made it sound to me like she was stifling a stammer. The next time I watch The King's Speech, I'm just going to think someone's eating Colin Firth's pussy.

Literally nothing happens in the film right until the end. The girl gets caught using a vibrator and that upsets the man, but then it all blows over when she sucks his willy. Then out of the blue she announces she's moving to America. For no reason. And then the film ends after one more sex scene, with a female orgasm that was obviously put in during the edit. While she's supposedly having the orgasm, we get a nice shot of her arse, so either she farted that, or Michael Winterbottom faked an orgasm for us.

If I take off my asexual reviewer's hat for a second and put on my gentleman's helmet, this is just really bad porn.

My verdict: Wank.