Oct 7, 2009

Oscar predictions: you can ignore Nine

Every year there's an Oscar contender that you can safely ignore. It's easy to spot. It's the one stuffed with the most Oscar winners from previous years. And this year, that film is Nine. The director is Rob Marshall, who won with Chicago in 2002. It stars Penelope Cruz, who won an Oscar last year, Marion Cotillard and Daniel Day Lewis who won the year before that, Nicole Kidman, a few years before that, and Judie Dench who is nominated every year. With a pedigree like that, only one thing can be certain: it will be bloody awful.

Remember Chocolat, from 2000 starring Juliette Binoche, who had just won for The English Patient, and directed by Lasse Halstrom, who could not get out of bed without being Oscar-nominated for most of the nineties? Marshall has turned into the Lasse Halstrom of the 00s. Chicago was an unworthy Best film winner but at least it played to the home audience; Nine is a musical fantasia loosely based on a film of Fellini's. In the best of all possible worlds, if everything comes to fruition — the performances, the direction, the dance numbers — it is only ever going to be a form of karoake world cinema, just as Chocolat was an art movie for those who couldn't be bothered with subtitles.

3 comments:

  1. How very open-minded of you. You haven't seen the movie yet, and you have already dismissed it. I read an earlier blog of yours about Daniel day-lewis' best movies. On the list you mentioned the Unbearable Lightness of Being (which I love) but it is a film in which the three leads are not Czechs and are speaking English with Czech accents (directed by an American). Why didn't this bother you--why didn't you dismiss that particular movie as a "art house movie for those who can't be bothered with subtitles?"

    Also, Nine is not about the films of Fellini--it is a musical remake of 8 1/2 specifically. It was first performed on Broadway in 1982. This musical won 5 tony awards including best musical.

    In reference to your earlier DDL list, how could you place the shallow Last of the Mohicans as your number one and leave out the genuinely moving working-class drama "My Left Foot"? (a movie which avoids the disease of the week label because of its honesty, lack of sentimentality and depth of good performances from the entire cast)

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  2. How very open-minded of you. You haven't seen the movie yet, and you have already dismissed it. I read an earlier blog of yours about Daniel day-lewis' best movies. On the list you mentioned the Unbearable Lightness of Being (which I love) but it is a film in which the three leads are not Czechs and are speaking English with Czech accents (directed by an American). Why didn't this bother you--why didn't you dismiss that particular movie as a "art house movie for those who can't be bothered with subtitles?"

    Also, Nine is not about the films of Fellini--it is a musical remake of 8 1/2 specifically. It was first performed on Broadway in 1982. This musical won 5 tony awards including best musical.

    In reference to your earlier DDL list, how could you place the shallow Last of the Mohicans as your number one and leave out the genuinely moving working-class drama "My Left Foot"? (a movie which avoids the disease of the week label because of its honesty, lack of sentimentality and depth of good performances from the entire cast)

    ReplyDelete
  3. I saw a trailer of this movie with a friend recently , and
    our jaws clanged to the floor simultaneously - notwithstanding my devotion (drooling hero worship) to Daniel Day Lewis it was cringingly awful, ghastly in fact.
    I still haven't recovered from the sight of him hoofing a la Roy Scheider. But badly.

    ReplyDelete