NINE's a bit of an odd, flat musical number?

By Matt Holmes / July 1, 2011

(note: was meant to be posted on Friday night but got a little side-tracked by all the things that happen as lives passes you by...) I tell ya, Quentin Tarantino has got to be loving this. A few days short of the very early release of his Inglourious Basterds on DVD, and another Oscar contender looks to have crashed and burned, all hype no finale, all talk no execution. After Invictus turned out to be a pretty "by the numbers" sporting effort by word of the American reviews, the Rob Marshall directed, (you know... the guy who gave us Chicago, a musical the Oscar crowd went gushy-gushy for), musical Nine starring Academy favourite Daniel Day-Lewis and the who's who of Hollywood's female talent pool, has disappointed some, and angered many. So Invictus down, The Lovely Bones down, Nine down... only Avatar left to go! It's looking more and more like Quentin's film, along with Coen Brothers' A Serious Man, Pixar's Up and Jason Reitman's Up in the Air are the leading four in terms of audience reaction and critical reception. Kirk Honeycutt is first with a full out pan in The Hollywood Reporter... The disappointments here are many, from a starry cast the film ill-uses to flat musical numbers that never fully integrate into the dramatic story. Federico Fellini's 1963 masterpiece takes you inside a man's head. Since he happens to be a movie director, those daydreams and recollections are visually striking but, more to the point, you sense, through the nightmares of an artist blocked from his own creativity, everything that is going on inside this man. In Nine, written by Michael Tolkin and the late Anthony Minghella, you get a tired filmmaker with too many women in his life and not enough movie ideas."With Nine you never get inside the protagonist's head. You just can't decide whether his problem is too many women or too many musical numbers breaking out for no reason."David Poland at The Hot Blog hates it, simple as. Drew McWeeney wasn't kind either... "Nine" is a minefield of artistic mistakes, and all of them ultimately come back to Rob Marshall, who has a lot to prove here. "Chicago" was such a huge debut for a filmmaker, and helped re-establish musicals as a viable commercial genre in American films. The film is hobbled from the very beginning by the main character, Guido Contini. At no point in the movie are we shown anything that actually demonstrates that Contini is a great filmmaker. We're told, but we're not shown. So every indulgence of his, which we're asked to accept because he is a "great man," is simply bad behavior. Considering the entire film basically plays out as an internal landscape, with all the woman in Guido's life moving on and off the stage inside his head, we learn shockingly little about who he is or what drives him. And if he remains a blank, then the film simply doesn't work.

Usually so on the nose and the leading voice of critics, Variety's Todd McCarthy gives one of those so-so reviews that I hate reading, and I'm confused as to whether he genuinely liked it or not. His review is pretty disposable... "Nine" is a savvy piece of musical filmmaking. Sophisticated, sexy and stylishly decked out, Rob Marshall's disciplined, tightly focused film impresses and amuses as it extravagantly renders the creative crisis of a middle-aged Italian director, circa 1965.