Nine

Movie Summary of Nine by Michael the Moviegoer.

NINE = ****

“Cinema Paradiso”

Rob Marshall continues his reign as the king of unfilmable musicals. After finding a way to successfully put “Chicago” on screen, he now tops that with his film version of the Tony Award-winning musical “Nine”.

One glance at the superb cast list might have you wondering how this film could possibly have anyone singing and dancing in it. It stars Daniel Day-Lewis, Judi Dench, Marion Cotillard, Penelope Cruz, Fergie, Kate Hudson, Nicole Kidman and Sophia Loren. Nearly every cast member is an Oscar winner, but only Fergie has a Grammy.

Well, prepare to be astonished! Each cast member has at least one wildly choreographed big production number, and all, yes including Judi Dench, pull their’s off with flying colors. (Even though it’s hard to top Fergie’s explosive performance of “Be Italian”)

Kate Hudson has the one new song, “Cinema Italiano”, written for the film making it eligible for an Oscar nomination. (It’s a strange dilemma that if the song is nominated, Hudson could be the only cast member to perform at the Oscars.)

The inspiration for “Nine” comes from Federico Fellini’s classic “8 1/2” about a creatively blocked director trying to finish an autobiographical film. In “Nine”, Daniel Day-Lewis plays a famous Italian movie director about to go into production on a film for which he has yet to write the script. The sets are built, the costumes are designed, and the star (Nicole Kidman) is about to arrive, but he hasn’t written a word.

Instead he daydreams about his mother (Sophia Loren) and an impressionable prostitute he met as a young boy (Fergie). He also must deal with real-life issues involving his wife (Marion Cotillard), his mistress (Penelope Cruz), a journalist from Vogue (Kate Hudson) and his costume designer (Judi Dench). And all this is set to the Tony Award-winning songs of Maury Yeston.

Now a note to all the Broadway purists out there. Don’t be a hater. So what if changes have been made and songs have gone missing? “Nine” doesn’t belong on the stage anyway. It’s a show about filmmaking inspired by Fellini. By making the show more cinematic, Rob Marshall has created a loving tribute to classic-style filmmaking. “Nine” is now a lavishly grand piece of epic-scale filmmaking that is quite frankly one of the most exciting cinematic experiences of the decade.

DVD Double Feature: Oh, it’s far too easy to suggest “8 1/2” as a companion piece to “Nine”. So my selection is Bob Fosse’s “All That Jazz” from 1979. Also inspired by the same Fellini film, Roy Scheider plays a fictional film director who eerily mirrors Fosse during a period when Fosse was editing the Dustin Hoffman film “Lenny” and trying to stage “Chicago” on Broadway at the same time. Obviously influenced by the Fellini film, “All That Jazz” takes us deep into the black hole of a director’s creative meltdown.

Michael The Moviegoer