Review - Kathryn Ryan for The MungleShow

This past summer was a summer of high movie hopes. Michael Bay promised a sequel to Transformers that would wow audiences and have folks clamoring to the theaters. He was right about the latter, but his film was not received very positively for its absurdity, noisiness, and overuse of slow-mo on a certain female character. Crowds were excited to go see another piece of the chapter of John Connor and his pals in Terminator Salvation. Sadly, the approval ratings sank down faster than a T-1000 in molten metal. After such a sad summer of popcorn flicks, the movie-going crowd has learned not to believe too much of the Hollywood hype about movies this fall. There is a lot of hype building for the movie Nine, and quite frankly, maybe it is not warranted.
Nine is a musical film adaptation of Federico Fellini's final film 8 1⁄2. In the movie, the story follows a man named Guido Contini (played by the incredible Daniel Day-Lewis) and he is a man whose life is composed of many different women and the roles each one plays in his life. Each and every one of them from his wife Luisa (who is played by rising star Marion Cotillard) to his mistress Carla (Penelope Cruz) to his muse Claudia (Nicole Kidman) have a special role to play in his life and the shaping of each and every one of his movies. They inspire him to direct and write, but lately inspiration has been hard-pressed, and the studios are hungry for another Contini film. With stress and conflict and longing everywhere he turns, it is only a matter of time before life catches up to him.
Going into the film, the hype had me believe it was a powerful movie with a hard-hitting plot, but what I got was a movie that walks around in a fog and never really presents a straightforward desire to be an amazing movie. With such a star-studded cast, it was quite a disappointment to see how little emotion it evoked out of me. Yes, the songs were interesting, and the basic plot was intriguing, but the movie itself never clearly committed to showing full passion and plot. I will give high props however to the costume and set designers because each scene was beautifully crafted.
It is rated PG-13 for sexual content and smoking. The sexual content in this film is very in your face (just take the one song Penelope Cruz sings) but no nudity occurs and to some extent the sexual content is used to serve as a warning of what will happen if you live a life of such excess. As for the smoking, there is quite a bit of it, and in the way most parents do not like: it makes smoking look cool, very cool. I would recommend this film to someone who has nothing better to see or enjoys musicals to a ridiculous degree. I would definitely not recommend this movie to a person who is a diehard Fellini fan and is very fond of his works; your high-set bar will never be met by this movie.
I give Nine two out of five tambourines. Federico Fellini's films inspired and gave pride to Italy and are regarded by critics to be masterpieces. While I know it is unfair to compare this film by those standards, it would have been nice to see a movie about Fellini that had the same poignancy and beauty as his films always did.