I give my nine points for originality and the quality of production though, not the likeability of the characters. John Cusack and Cameron Diaz play Craig and Lotte Schwartz, a married couple that are going through the motions and don't seem to realize it. Cameron Diaz is made up to be so dowdy looking that she is initially not even recognizable. They live in a basement apartment crowded with animals (Lotte is an animal lover who works at a pet shop). Craig is a puppeteer who cannot find work in his chosen field and even gets beat up on the street for staging what one beefy dad thinks is a sacrilegious puppet show.
At the suggestion of his wife, Craig goes looking for a regular job, and due to his fast hands he gets a job as a file clerk at LesterCorp. There he meets Maxine, a pretty but sociopathic young woman who, fortunately for society, seems to have no violent impulses, because if she did believe me she would follow them. Craig falls for her. Lotte falls for her. And they both make a play for her simultaneously when she comes over for dinner one night. She rejects them both.
Maxine made it clear from the beginning she considered Craig a pathetic loser, but she needs him to exploit something that Craig discovered - a door that leads to a portal in which anybody who enters gets to "become" John Malkovich for fifteen minutes. At the end of the fifteen minutes the person is spit out on the side of the road at the entry to the New Jersey Turnpike. As a team they reopen Lestercorp at night and charge people 200 dollars apiece to "become John Malkovich". Neither of them knows what this portal is doing there behind a file cabinet and why it leads to Malkovich, but they initially don't care past its monetary value.
It is part drama, part comedy, and even part horror and completely weird. And what the portal is doing there is all wrapped up in Dr. Lester, owner of Lestercorp, who is the only likeable character in the film, and even he has more than a bit of a Dr. Frankenstein/God complex.
Also featuring Mary Kay Place as the object of Dr. Lester's lust who has convinced him he has a terrible speech impediment - he does not, John Malkovich as himself, and Charlie Sheen as himself and Malkovich's friend. It is great seeing Charlie Sheen when he was still healthy.
Very highly recommended. But the plot is so weird you just have to let go of your reason and go with it.
