Claysaba Excellent, Without a doubt!!

StyleSk8r At first rather annoying in its heavy emphasis on reenactments, this movie ultimately proves fascinating, simply because the complicated, highly dramatic tale it tells still almost defies belief.

Loui Blair It's a feast for the eyes. But what really makes this dramedy work is the acting.

Philippa All of these films share one commonality, that being a kind of emotional center that humanizes a cast of monsters.

BoyFabo First, I'd like to let you know the good things about this film:Well acted. It's not a surprise because all these well known stars are good and always have been. Penélope Cruz and Marion Cotillard give the best performances of the film, and of course Daniel Day-Lewis is a believable Guido.Nice musical numbers. The musical numbers are well acted too and have a good photography. Once again, Penélope Cruz and Marion Cotillard give the best dancing sequences, Dame Judi Dench is also very fun in hers and Fergie's voice shines in hers (she's the only one who's a singer). Good art direction and costume design.The bad things.Fergie's performance. She's clearly not an actress. It's not an awful performance, but she's below everyone else. Her best moment comes in her musical part when she shows that voice of hers, nobody sings as good as her. She's got a very little screen time, so don't let this make you not watch the film if you're interested.The screenplay. It's the only (and big) mistake of the film. It doesn't go anywhere since it's only some scene and then a musical number that don't make it advance at all. Without the musical numbers, the film would be like 40 minutes long.So... It's not a bad film, but it's mediocre, the musical numbers are the ones saving it from being a total bore. I'd recommend it if you like musicals and want to see all these good and beautiful actresses work with Daniel Day-Lewis who's also a very good actor. But don't even look at its poster if you want a good story to go along with the singing and dancing.

joey4259 I personally am a big fan of this movie. I think people were expecting to be fun, joyful, and upbeat like Chicago, or other movie musicals in the past. "Nine" is a more serious musical, and I think once people grasp that, they'll be able to enjoy the movie more.Now, there were a few things I would have changed...I would've extended Kate Hudson, Sophia Loren, & Nicole Kidman's parts. I felt they could've been utilized more throughout the story. Such as, when Claudia's agent calls Guido...it could have been Claudia calling Guido herself. There should have been a scene where Guido and Sophia Loren have a long talk...much like Guido and Lilli's conversations. And I don't know how Kate Hudson could have been used more, but I felt like I barely knew her before she started singing "Cinema Italiano". She did great with the amount of time she had, though!!On the plus side, I thought Marion Cotillard gave a wonderful performance! Everybody did a great job, but, her and Nicole Kidman's performances really stood out to me. You can tell everybody gave it their all for this movie and they had a lot of fun doing it. You can tell that by the special features as well as the movie itself! It's not as amazing as Chicago, but it's great in a different way.

James Hitchcock "Nine" is the story of a man whose love-interests include both Nicole Kidman and Penélope Cruz. And no, it's not a filmed biography of Tom Cruise. It started life as a stage musical suggested by Federico Fellini's semi- autobiographical film "8½". The film version was directed and produced by Rob Marshall, who also made "Chicago", another twenty-first century film based on a stage musical, something much rarer today than it would have been fifty or sixty years ago. The main character is Guido Contini, an Italian film-maker obviously based on Fellini himself. The action takes place in the Italy of the early sixties, with occasional black- and-white flashbacks to earlier periods in Contini's life. The plot concerns Contini's efforts to overcome writer's block and to complete his latest film "Italia", and also his relations with the various women in his life. These include his beautiful wife Luisa, his equally beautiful mistress Carla, his leading lady Claudia Jenssen, his mother, his costume designer Lilli and Stephanie, an American journalist trying to interview him. Contini is also influenced by memories of Saraghina, the prostitute to whom he lost his virginity. Daniel Day-Lewis is possibly the most talented actor currently working in the cinema. He is certainly among the most versatile. What impresses me about his work is that every character he plays seems so completely different from every other character he has played. He has been equally convincing as the disabled Irish writer Christie Brown in "My Left Foot", as the frontiersman Hawkeye in "The Last of the Mohicans", as the upper-class Victorian gentleman Newland Archer in "The Age of Innocence", as the thuggish Bill the Butcher in "Gangs of New York", as the tormented Daniel Plainview in "There Will Be Blood" and as President Lincoln. Interestingly, although Day-Lewis is English by birth, most of his characters have been American or Irish; Cecil Vyse in "A Room with a View" is a rare example of him playing an Englishman."Nine" represents a new departure for Day-Lewis in two ways; it is his first musical and the first film in which he plays an Italian. (He learned to speak Italian for the role, even though most of his lines are in English). As far as his acting is concerned he is as good as ever, making the smooth, charming playboy film director Contini yet another in his gallery of memorable characters. I have to say, however, that he does not have the world's best singing voice; great actors are not always great singers, as we found out when Meryl Streep, who in her talent and versatility can be regarded as a female version of Day-Lewis, tackled a musical with "Mamma Mia!" (To be fair I should also point out that the reverse also holds true; great singers are not always great actors). On the female side, however, the singing is generally very good. Stacy Ferguson, of course, is a professional singer, but most of her co-stars are actresses whom one would not automatically associate with musicals. (Stacy is here billed simply as "Fergie" but I use her full name lest any British readers should be misled into thinking that our former Duchess of York should have commenced an acting career playing an Italian prostitute. A frightening thought). Marion Cotillard as Luisa has a particularly melodious voice. Kidman is much better here than she was in her previous musical, the dreadful "Moulin Rouge", although I was surprised she won the role of Claudia ahead of Catherine Zeta Jones who was so good in "Chicago". Cruz is excellent as Carla, both as singer and actress, and Sophia Loren's voice is remarkably good for a woman who was in her mid seventies when she made the film, although she looks considerably younger. (She does not look old enough to be Day-Lewis's mother, although in reality she would have been 23 when he was born. Perhaps her scenes are meant to reflect Contini's memories of his mother at an earlier period of her life). The musical numbers are all very professionally done and reminiscent of Marshall's work on "Chicago". Unlike "Chicago", however, which was largely jazz-based in keeping with its 1920s setting, "Nine" uses a variety of different musical styles; some songs are reminiscent of jazz, some of sixties pop, some of the traditional Broadway musical. All the cast enter into the spirit of the film, and I think that it is this spirit which makes the film so enjoyable. The film has a stylishness and an irresistible vivacity about it, qualities which carry us along and make us forget about the flimsy plot or the fact that Day-Lewis is unlikely ever to be crowned as the new Pavarotti. It is perhaps appropriate that one of the film's liveliest numbers is titled "Be Italian!", and another one "Cinema Italiano", because it reminds us of the vogue for all things Italian- Italian films, Italian fashions, Italian design- which prevailed in Britain, America and other countries in the late fifties and early sixties. Italy- and especially Rome- was seen as the place to be. It is the spirit of this time and place which the film celebrates- the spirit of La Dolce Vita. 8/10

sashank_kini-1 About one year ago, I went to watch a Gujarati play on the theme of 'harrassment of women by their NRI husbands', written and directed by an acquaintance who was pursuing his Postgraduate Degree in Dramatics. As this was a local play with a completely local cast, I decided to bring a buddy along for moral support in case the play stank. Unsurprisingly, the play proved to be a massive disappointment with its crude treatment of the subject matter and ridiculously unnecessary focus on supporting characters (like making the gravedigger the lead in Hamlet). Yet, to my bewilderment, people cheered on and gave it a standing ovation it didn't deserve. I realized later that the antagonist in the play was a very popular name among Gujarati audiences, and so they cheered him on as he hammed endlessly, while I looked on bemused at all the beaming faces around me.When the seven ladies of Nine (Dench, Cotillard, Cruz, Loren, Fergie, Hudson and Kidman) turn up one after the other in the opening musical sequence of Nine, I sat looking at the screen with the same bemused expression, and the question 'What am I supposed to feel here?' crossed my mind. These seven wonderful dames of acting may have caused a flurry of applauses had this been a live play (Nine is originally a Broadway musical), but they little impact when they such a grand entry on film for the simple reason that the entire thing is 'filmed'.I have not seen Fellini's autobiographical classic 8 ½ either (on which both the play and the film are based), although the DVD does wait for me in the cupboard (will follow Mr. Roger Ebert's advice in his review and catch the film tonight). This makes me more alien towards Nine but not too much because I have seen Fellini's 'La Dolce Vita' four times and regard it as one of my favorite movies. So the parts which evoked a sense of familiary were Nicole Kidman's 'ideal woman' character and Daniel Day Lewis' 'detached persona looking for a centre', which Marcello Mastroianni played excellently in LDV. The main question here is: does Nine work as a musical and a movie independently in its own right? The answer is sadly a no.The experience of watching Nine can be compared to visiting 'Marina Abramović's – The Artist is Present' exhibition without having any clue of who she is or what she has done. The film has characters who represent characters of another film but do not distinguish themselves to become characters of THIS film, thereby seeming like wandering apparitions who don't really care about each other or this film. They function like the (actually) moving portraits in the Harry Potter stories; they wink, they smile, they laugh, they cry like humans but in the end, they remain portraits. And the worst part is that they're given such dark and ugly sets to sing and dance around, robbing all the richness off the mise-en-scène. The reason for such unappealing sets is that all the performance pieces are figments of Guido Contini's often prurient imagination. The protagonist suffers from artistic block after two of his films flop following a streak of critical and commercial successes. After one reporter boldly asks him during a press interview whether 'he has nothing to speak about', Contini performs a great escape and books a room for himself at a hotel under a pseudonym. His next movie 'Italia' does not have a script yet and its cast and crew are left stranded without Contini, who spends much of his time at parties and events dreaming and fantasizing about the women in his life. There's angelic Claudia Jennsen: his inspiration, Luisa: his lonely wife, Carla: his sexy mistress, Lilli: his costume designer, Stephanie: an alluring reporter, Saraghina: a prostitute from his childhood, and lastly his Mamma. And unfortunately, everybody gets a number or two to perform (in Contini's mind). This basically goes on in a repetitive manner till the end, where finally the plot decides to move another inch or two.There is not one song I can recollect now, except 'Cinema Italiano' which too stays in mind only because of its irritating hook. The other reason I think the number is easy to remember is that it's got a livelier and brighter set with performances we can actually see. The rest of the numbers are hampered by lack of light; if one has seen Gene Kelly's super-duper-brilliant 'Singin' in the Rain' he or she would remember the incredibly colorful sets and lighting which instantly evokes the performances to memory. The performers themselves in Nine do not impress us for most part. Fergie, Dench and Cottilard know how to 'sell a performance'; Fergie as most would know is an established singer-performer while Dench has a grande damme showstopper charm. Cruz is predictably sexy (with delectable bosoms) while sex-goddess Loren is motherly. And what about the man of the house: Mr. Daniel Day Lewis?Oh, what a disappointment. Bringing a characteristic method approach to become Guido Contini, Lewis fails to get the 'performance element' that protagonists of a musical require that too in plenty. And I remember actress Meryl Streep telling in her interview with James Lipton that 'she added the element of performance in her acting after being mesmerized by one of Lisa Minelli's performances'; watch 'Mamma Mia' and you'll get what she means. Actors in a musical should have the ability of selling themselves through their characters. Gene Kelly does it best. Lewis however buries himself deep within his character and makes his whole act damn gloomy. And he ain't that good a singer either. Neither is he as addictive and infectious as Streep, who radiates even in her worst films. In fact, Lewis on a bad day digs the grave for his character and the whole film. That's a tragedy.