Nine

Entertainment: 3/5

Cinematic Value: 2/5

Not Rob Marshall's best work. Chicago put him on the map as the go-to guy to make musicals accessible to the general non-theatre going public, Dreamgirls proved that he was on a winning streak, but with the make of Nine, Rob Marshall might be proving that Hollywood is getting the better of him.

An all-star cast with mediocre singing talent and range; What they didn't have in musical knowledge they made up with acting. People may be raving about it because these stars don't get a lot of exposure in terms of singing, but there were some starry surprises.

Fergie can act? Who knew. "Be Italian" was the show-stopper. Kate Hudson can sing? Well, Goldie Hawn DID play Maria in West Side Story back in high school. Talent just runs in that family. Judi Dench manages to charm past all flaws of her performance. You barely notice them. Penelope Cruz is fiesty, as always-- but couldn't understand a word she sang. "Unusual Way" is too difficult a song for Nicole Kidman's straight-tone to tackle, Sophia Loren just smiles and lights up the stage. Not much more than that though. Daniel Day-Lewis, talented actor that he is, should've spent more time on his accent and Marion Cotillard was robbed of her moments throughout the whole piece.

Why? Because Rob Marshall has created a niche in which songs are never sung aloud for others to hear-- they are cabarets inside characters heads. The shots during songs shift back and forth between real time and character-thought-time that you don't get enough of the musicality and dramatic sweeps of the piece. At a certain point in the musical, it should be difficult for Guido to distinguish what is real and what is not, "his interior world sometimes becoming indistinguishable from the objective world " (Wikipedia. Reliable source.)

In every musical number, Daniel Day-Lewis was seen. Perhaps, the musical numbers were in his mind? Does he think of his whole life as one huge film? Definitely. But then, that downsizes the agency of the women in the piece, and that I do not like one bit. The problem is, the worlds never collided-- we never truly saw what the consequences were of Guido seeing the world in this way. Yes, his marriage is strained; yes, he is thinking about all the other women in his life; yes, he cannot write this film. But perhaps there is more to Guido's madness that could be translated that Rob Marshall did not do.

But, imagining the piece in the theatre wouldn't be too bad. The impulses were too big for the screen. Film is supposed to scale down the beauty of the world into one shot-- for me, the world was too big. Translated onto the stage, the huge wash of black with just a spotlight on Guido would've been more effective on stage than on screen. Or, when Fergie and the ensemble pull tambourines out of the sand-- in film, the element of surprise is lost on screen. Imagine if "Be Italian" had been performed live, right in front of you, and out of nowhere tambourines rise from the sand where they hadn't been before... I would be wildly impressed!

Perhaps my review is too harsh? I just think that if you're going to make a musical for film, you need to fully understand what it takes to create a musical and what it takes to create a film. In a medium where reality and naturalism are the proponents of the form, breaking out into song and dance does not go over well. Something is broken in the audience's mind. Rob Marshall has done a wonderful job in the past of bridging the gap between the theatricality of the stage, downsized onto one small frame of film-- but this time, I think he should've explored other ways of approaching the piece without the same old tricks.

Neo-Decadent Value: If Rob Marshall had treated the piece with less modern tactics (speaking to the "stupid audience": a mindset or tool in which creators answer many questions through symbols, motifs, etc.), the piece may have been more stimulating in terms of thinking about the way artists see their lives alongside with their work. What are the consequences? What is the beauty?

We'll go with 1/5. The piece did create some beautiful pictures.