soha_bayoumi

Fellini's 8½ is a great movie. It has inspired the efforts of other great filmmakers, from François Truffaut's La nuit américaine (Day for Night) to Rainer Werner Fassbinder's Warnung vor einer heiligen Nutte (Beware of a Holy Whore), and from Woody Allen's Stardust Memories to Bob Fosse's All That Jazz, among other, albeit less significant, films. One of 8½'s influences is manifest in Arthur Kopit, Mario Fratti and Maury Yeston's Broadway musical, Nine.

Recently, I watched Rob Marshall's film adaptation of Nine, the Broadway musical. I was extremely excited, for I knew that Rob Marshall was a promising director. His film adaptation of Chicago, the musical, was great. It had a clear vision, smooth editing and beautiful cinema. His Memoirs of a Geisha, was a disappointment to me, because of its orientalist esthetics, silly plot and ill-suited cast. I somehow felt that I'd rather he stuck to directing musicals, but maybe I was wrong. When I saw Nine, I found it to be a total flop. What was he thinking?

The movie parades a dizzying full cast of stars of the first magnitude: Daniel Day-Lewis, Marion Cotillard, Penélope Cruz, Nicole Kidman, Judi Dench, Kate Hudson, Sophia Loren and Fergie. The cast alone could have promised a great movie, had it not been for, well, everything else...

8½ is a masterpiece of the cinematic art: a movie that excels in using, in a beautiful and experimental manner, and to the full extent, the tools available to the makers of cinema: photography, lighting, color (in this case, black and white), camera movement, music, plot, performance, editing, you name it. It uses all these elements to express cinematically the beautiful confusion (the working title of 8½ was La bella confusione) of a filmmaker suffering from director's block, mixing life and art, reality and fantasy with utmost sincerity and very few, if any, moral precautions. 8½, as it is, is a complete, simple, beautiful and much appreciated work of art.

The Broadway musical, like many other musicals adapting material from other sources, is based on using the tools available to musical theatre, including music, song, dialogue, dance, costumes, lighting, etc. By these criteria, Nine, the Broadway musical, was a successful play. It even won five Tony awards. It attempted to express, using these tools, that same beautiful confusion, albeit in a more theatrical, less cinematic manner.

The problem, then, is in Nine the movie. The movie does not attempt to seize the musical and apply a cinematic vision to it. It simply tries to shoot a good Broadway musical. The musical numbers end up feeling redundant, because we, as movie watchers, get the idea or the emotion without having to listen to it 'explained' in song. The rhythm ends up being extremely boring, because we're more interested in following the plot than in listening to what we already know, simply put in song (and not very good songs, for that matter). I find most of the lyrics and tunes of the musical numbers quite mediocre and easily forgettable. Besides, the musical numbers are not smoothly integrated into the script. You feel them coming at you like an uncalled-for statement. One other major turnoff was the language: why in the world would the actors have to speak English with an Italian accent, that turns simply wrong in many cases? Marion Cotillard and Nicole Kidman spoke with unidentifiable accents. Penélope Cruz spoke with a heavy Spanish accent (while her character was Italian). Judi Dench spoke with some hybrid British accent (while her character was supposedly French)... Why didn't they just speak plain English without accents? We'd imagine they were speaking Italian.

As for the performances, they vary pretty much: Daniel-Day Lewis, one of the finest actors of all time, is struggling with the role and screaming "Get me out of here! I don't belong in a musical". Penélope Cruz's role was beautifully performed, but was too abruptly chopped off. Nicole Kidman felt like she was there against her will. Her performance was pale and her presence was spiritless. Dame Judi Dench was classy and fun (yes, she sang!). You feel that she's probably the one who most enjoyed her role, but was in a way limited by the script. Sophia Loren's very short appearances were nicely executed. Kate Hudson did what she could, which is not to say much, in the unchallenging small role of the American fashion journalist. Fergie was enjoyable in her number 'Be Italian' which is, in my opinion, the best musical number in the movie (all while I think that its lyrics are silly), even though 'Cinema Italiano', performed by Kate Hudson, was the one nominated for the Golden Globe for best song. Marion Cotillard was, hands down, the best in the movie. She always makes me feel, though, that she is not a genius artist (I don't know yet of a way a person can be a brilliant artist, while believing that moon landing and 9/11 are lies). She somehow makes me feel that she exemplifies that type of empty-headed actors who just have that god-given talent of acting and expressiveness. They're like good clay that a director can mold. You tell them what to do, and they just do it, wholly and brainlessly. She amazes me.

All in all, Nine is a movie that I so wanted to love, tried to, but failed. It is a movie that asks not to be done, at least not like this.

I'm giving this movie a 3 because, despite its esthetic strengths, it's a movie that indulges in self-folklorization and self-orientalism, a movie that depicts a journey by an Iranian nomadic tribe, or rather family, in a folklorizing and essentializing manner: the nomadic tribe is portrayed as an essentially primitive, unemotional, animal-like group of colorful heaps of clothes who don't have a human-like notion of time or space or even a decent grip on reality, who act, sound and move like goats, chicken and wolves. The pseudo- spontaneous esthetics on which this movie relies emphasizes this point by sneaking in convoluted similarities between the nomads and those animals.

The esthetics of the movie is so intricately designed and so contrived, but deceitfully left to be seen as 'spontaneous' in order to quench what the filmmakers take to be an unquenchable thirst of European viewers for 'exotic beauty and oriental esthetics', which the movie relatively succeeded in doing, seeing the acclaim it received in European countries.

The visual symbolism in the movie is so stark that it borders on being unartistic. The depiction of the landscape is beautiful, but this is something you can get if you watch a NatGeo reportage on 'Peoples and Cultures', and not something you would necessarily demand of a cinematic movie.

The movie, to me, was emotionless. It did not harbor any kind of emotion towards the subjects of the movie: hatred, love, empathy, nothing, except probably some curiosity towards those 'cinematically bizarre creatures'.

The soundtrack in the movie was boring, sometimes inappropriate and sometimes utterly annoying because of the constant bleats of goats and the irksome inexplicable howls of one of the heroes.

Besides, the movie is unbearably boring. The contrived esthetics and breathtaking landscape did not prevent me from feeling utterly bored. I had to resist sleep several times during its relatively short runtime of 75 minutes.

I don't recommend watching this movie, unless there's no NatGeo reportage on nomadic tribes in Iran, or you're doing graduate studies on self-orientalism in cinema...

A beautiful movie about art, love and life choices. It is based on the stories and relationships between Federico García Lorca, Salvador Dalí and Luis Buñuel since their friendship in the Residencia de Estudiantes in Madrid in the 1920s. The movie focuses on the complexity of their relationships amidst a turbulent political context in Europe and particularly in Spain, a changing cultural and intellectual life dominated by the avant-garde, surrealism, the influences of jazz and the decadent lifestyle of artists in Europe. It portrays the various choices each makes without being judgmental: the romantic revolutionary choices of Lorca that lead to his execution at the hands of the Nationalist militia at the very beginning of the Spanish Civil War, the narcissistic path of Salvador Dalí marked by genius, excessiveness and conceit, and the emotionally and politically embroiled life of Luis Buñuel who decides early on that his artistic career cannot find a place in Spain.

The editing of the movie could have used a little more smoothness. Some of the scenes and frames seemed superfluous. Some of the lines in the dialogue, wanting to be informative, ended up sounding a bit out of context and unrealistic. The actors' performances were very good, except for a few instances where their performance seemed inadequate mainly because of what I take to be the main problem in the movie, namely that of language.

Two of the main actors are Spanish, speaking English - the main language of the movie - with a very heavy Spanish accent and the other two are British actors speaking English with a fake heavy Spanish accent (which made a few words incomprehensible)!!! This was a major turnoff for me. In movies like these, it's either/or. Either you get a cast that speak English with a homogeneous native accent, or you get a Spanish-speaking cast, and a good Spanish script co-writer and exert some extra effort to make the movie entirely in Spanish. I found the parts where Lorca recites some of his poems in Spanish, with the same actor in v/o reading them in English particularly disagreeable and made me incapable of properly enjoying the poetry... I'd say that the language problem reduced my enjoyment of the this otherwise very beautiful and well-done movie by 50%. I highly recommend watching it though.