I didn’t catch “Allied” when it came out in theaters for its all-too-brief run -- and I was hardly the only one who missed it. The film got lost in the shuffle of Oscar hopefuls stampeding into theaters in December and never found a large audience.
I finally caught up during my effort to see all the Academy Award nominees -- it got a well-deserved nod for costumes -- and was surprised to find a splendid war drama/romance.
Brad Pitt and Marion Cotillard play spies working for the British government during World War II. He’s Max, a Canadian, she’s Marianne, a French resistance legend. They meet up in North Africa, posing as a married couple, so they work hard at appearing familiar with each other -- a little too hard, it would seem.
Their assignment is to assassinate the German ambassador to Casablanca, so they know there’s a high likelihood one or both of them may not survive.
But they do, and get married and have a sweet baby girl, while Max takes an office job in London. But with the Normandy invasion coming up, his superiors start to suspect that Marianne may not be who she claims.
So he’s ordered to perform a “blue dye” operation on his wife. I’ll spare you the details, but the important part is that if she fails the test, it becomes his duty to execute Marianne -- personally. Failure to do so is considered treason.
Director Robert Zemeckis and screenwriter Steve Knight give us a gorgeous-looking movie filled with fraught sequences and keen emotional anguish. How much of Max and Marianne’s ardor is genuine, and how much is the result of circumstance and espionage intrigue? Does one’s patriotic obligation extend so far as to demand you kill the person you love?
Give “Allied” a look-see on home video, and you’ll find a well-made film that goes beyond typical spy stories.
Video extras are pretty decent, though you’ll have to shell out for the Blu-ray combo pack to get them, as the DVD version contains none.
They consist of 10 making-of featurettes: “Story of Allied,” “From Stages to the Sahara: The Production Design of Allied,” “Through the Lens: Directing with Robert Zemeckis,” “A Stitch in Time: The Costumes of Allied,” “‘Til Death Do Us Part: Max and Marianne,” “Guys and Gals: The Ensemble Cast,” “Lights, Pixels, ACTION! The Visual Effects of Allied,” “Behind the Wheel: The Vehicles of Allied,” “Locked and Loaded: The Weapons of Allied,” “That Swingin’ Sound: The Music of Allied.”
A bold mix of steampunk fantasy and historical revisionism, “April and the Extraordinary World” is a French/Belgian/Canadian production that’s decidedly different from the sort of animation we’re used to seeing in the U.S. – for both good and ill.
It’s about April, a girl separated from her scientist parents in a 1931 version of France where the Napoleonic era never ended. Europe is united but a grim, dank place still powered by steam and coal, fighting a war with the Americas for control of the Canadian forests. Ten years later and now a young woman (with the voice of Marion Cotillard), she becomes the red herring everyone’s chasing after.
It’s a world of talking animals and laser weapons but also retrograde technology and sclerotic morality. All scientists are expected to labor for the good of the empire, which is secretly controlled by genetically mutated lizards that use giant exo-skeletons to dominate the humans.
Tonally, the film is an odd and not entirely pleasing blend. The simple, old-school animation style, keystone cop pratfalls and straightforward characterizations would seem aimed at kids, but I don’t know how much those under age 12 would respond to this world.
The dragon-robots can be quite scary, whereas the humans act as the comic relief. There’s a scampy talking cat named Darwin (voice of Philippe Katerine), the result of experimentation by April’s mom, dad and grandfather (Macha Grenon, Olivier Gourmet and Jean Rochefort, respectively).
At one point he gets blasted through the chest and dies, which would be quite disturbing to small children.
Darwin is revived, for the second time, with the Ultimate Serum, something April’s parents were working on for the Empire before they escaped. It was intended as a super-soldier formula for the emperor’s armies, but had unintended consequences on the test animals. Now April has the last batch of the serum, so she’s being hunted.
Chief among those seeking her is Pizoni (Bouli Lanners), a mustachioed police inspector who let her family escape from his clutches when she was a girl. He seems to burn with a Javert-like unholy obsession, but he’s more bumbling than fearsome.
Tagging along is Julius (Marc-Andre Grondin), a street thief recruited by Pizoni to shadow April, but who gets caught up in her adventures and falls for her. She resists, then reciprocates, in the unalterable cinematic tradition.
There are some dashing and imaginative action sequences. I liked how Pops built an entire mansion that’s actually a vehicle/weapon, crawling about on spider legs and even swimming underwater. There are also hybrid helicopter/airplanes and a whole island of gadgets a la “The Incredibles.”
In the end I liked the idea for the movie than the film itself. It has a great premise that just wasn’t executed in a very satisfying way.
"Rust and Bone" isn't about the relationship between two characters so much as their intersection.
These are people leading separate and very different lives until a random encounter at a bar. She gets into a drunken scrap, and he is the bouncer who helps her get home. Things would probably have ended there, except that she suffers a horrible tragedy and reaches out to someone, anyone who can serve as a lifeline. He's available and willing, and they form a bond that is something more than friendship, but less than soul mates.
Marion Cotillard gives a brave, understated performance as Stéphanie, a woman who trains orca whales at the French equivalent of Sea World. She loves her job, though it's clear from her expression during a performance that it's gotten a bit stale for her. Then an accident occurs, the stage supporting the trainers crashes into the water tank, and Stéphanie wakes up in the hospital to find both her legs have been amputated.
"What have you done with my legs?!?" she shrieks at the helpless nurse, in a scene that pierces us with its emotional thrust.
Director Jacques Audiard ("A Prophet"), who co-wrote the screenplay with Thomas Bidegain based on a short story by Craig Davidson, is circumspect about what exactly happened to her. Shots of the killer whale approaching with teeth thrashing would suggest that the panicked animal bit off her legs. No one else from the show was apparently injured, so this seems the best explanation.
Ali (Matthias Schoenaerts) is a young roustabout with a 5-year-old son, Sam (Armand Verdure), in tow. When we first meet them, they are riding on a train, hungry and desperate. Ali scrapes together leftover food from the empty seats to keep them fed. He boosts a phone from a store, fleeing the security as Sam stands a few feet away.
We're not exactly sure what has happened, but the pair is completely indigent. They are traveling to Ali's sister, Anna (Corinne Masiero) for refuge. Ali has worked itinerant as a security guard, and manages to cobble together a couple of jobs at the bar and night security at a big-box store.
At the latter he meets Martial (Bouli Lanners), who installs secret cameras throughout the store. Ostensibly these are to monitor the customers, but Martial confides they are actually to spy on the employees. Martial also runs a side business managing street fighters, and recruits Ali. It's fast money, and a lot of it, so he's eager to dive in, shrugging off the threat of injury.
Neither Ali or Stéphanie are perfect, or even necessarily good, people. Stéphanie confesses that her relationships with men involve her teasing and taunting them, getting them turned on and then dumping them when she soon grows bored. There's no hint of what happened to her current beau after her accident, but either he took off her she shut him out. She spends a few months isolating herself in a convalescence home, seeing virtually no one until she gives Ali a call out of the blue.
Ali is both easier and harder to understand. He exists as pure id, a man comfortable with physical brutality who does not seem to spend more than a few seconds pondering anything. When people ask him how he is, he tends to just say "normal" or "OP," meaning operational. To him, as long as there is food, work, a place to sleep, someone to watch over his kid (something he tends to slack off on) and occasional sex, life is grand.
To say that Ali is not in touch with his feelings is an understatement; he's not in touch with anyone else's feelings, either. Sometimes we get the sense he's unacquainted with the very concept of feelings.
The push and pull of their relationship goes back and forth. At first she is the driver, leaning on Ali (literally) to help get her out of her shut-in funk. He takes her to the beach for a swim, out to social events, and even offers to sleep with her to find out if her libido has survived her ordeal. (It has. Libidos tend to survive just about everything.)
But then Ali starts to subtly push her away. He waits until they're fairly deep into their friendship before he even
reveals he has a son. He takes her with him to his illegal fights. He takes her to a club and then picks up another woman and leaves with her.
I enjoyed "Rust and Bone" for its strong performances, even as I never really felt like I got under the characters' skins. Ali exists as a Stanley Kowalski-esque primal beast, and her attraction to him is laced with an undercurrent of repulsion that's difficult to grasp.
The story is organic to the point of feeling unstructured, as events unspool without much rhyme or reason. The characters drift about, crashing into each other and then sliding away, so the impacts aren't as forceful as they might be. A little more narrative coherence would have served the filmmakers better.
The conclusion of the Batman collaboration between director
Christopher Nolan and star Christian Bale is a big, ambitious film just
like "The Dark Knight." And also like its predecessor, "The Dark Knight
Rises" is overburdened with too many supporting characters and secondary
plot lines.
As the story opens, it has been eight years since
Bruce Wayne last donned the caped crusader's cowl. Peace has reigned
throughout the land, but then a mysterious terrorist named Bane (Thomas
Hardy) arrives. He handily defeats Batman in personal combat and takes
the reins of Gotham City.
Meanwhile, super-thief Selina Kyle (Anne
Hathaway) plays the lines of loyalty between the two, whispering
ominously about a storm brewing to wipe the city's veil of security
away.
The biggest problem with Bane, other than the fact that he
pales in comparison to Heath Ledger's Joker, is that his motivations
never really come into clear relief. Hardy's choice to play him with an
odd speech cadence, coupled with Bane's metallic face mask, also make
him difficult to understand.
Familiar faces return, including
police commissioner James Gordon (Gary Oldman), loyal Wayne family
butler Alfred (Michael Caine) and weapons guru Lucius Fox (Morgan
Freeman). New on the block is Joseph Gordon-Levitt as a young police
detective whose importance becomes clearer late in the going.
It's
still a worthy piece of filmmaking, especially for those who like their
superhero tales in the dark-and-portentous mode. But I can't help
thinking the finale would've been better stripped down and sleeker.
In
terms of extras, Blu-ray is the only way to go for the serious
videophile. The DVD comes only with a single featurette chronicling
Bruce Wayne's journey from zero to hero.
The highlight of the
Blu-ray edition is "Ending the Knight," a comprehensive making-of
documentary examining virtually every aspect of the filmmaking process,
from the story concept to special effects. It also includes a gallery of
images and a documentary on the Batmobile, chronicling all five of the
dark knight's motorized chariots.
And so the Batman saga ends, not with a bang but an allegory. Director/co-writer Christopher Nolan has made it clear "The Dark Knight Rises" will be the last movie about the caped crusader -- at least that he will make -- and this knowledge seems to have freed him to make a superhero movie that's different from any other in the genre, one in which the superhero has grown tired of the mask and has to be convinced to put it on again.
It's notable that Christian Bale spends far more screen time out of the Batman costume than in.
It's a big, epic, sprawling movie that, like the last entry four years ago, is too overstuffed with tertiary plot lines and secondary characters for its own good.
And, of course, nothing can replace Heath Ledger's unique, disturbing presence as the Joker. Even though he was captured at the end of the last movie, and at one point Gotham City's prison is busted open for all the criminals to escape, there's no half-hearted (and misguided) attempt to cast another actor in that now-iconic role.
As the story opens, eight years have passed since the events in "The Dark Knight." Wayne has not donned Batman's cowl since then, with the populace mistakenly believing that he killed Harvey Dent, who actually went mad and became Two-Face. Dent has become a symbol of the peaceful good times that have endured since -- thanks in part to some draconian laws put in place in Dent's name.
When we first see Bruce Wayne, he seems to have aged 20 years. He has graying hair and a lined face, and walks around with a cane and a severe limp. He's become a recluse, rarely leaving his mansion despite the urging of loyal butler/henchman Alfred (Michael Caine) to do so. You quit being Batman, Alfred tells him, but you didn't start a new life.
The villain here is Bane, played by Tom Hardy underneath a strange metal
mask of tubes and 30 pounds of muscle he put on for the role. Bane is a
brilliant terrorist who's utterly unnerving, but whose motives never really come into clear relief.
He emerges from a mysterious past, supposedly growing up in darkness
inside a pit of a prison, and seems to have dedicated his entire life to
destroying Batman and the city he loves. Why? We're never really sure.
When Bane first appears on the scene, Bruce resolves to get back in the game. He is cocky and confident in his gadgets and combat abilities, despite a doctor's assessment that he has no cartilage in his knees and scarred internal organs. He shouldn't even be skiing, let alone tangling with super-strong madmen.
Bane easily defeats Batman in personal combat and exiles him. Bane then steals something really, really powerful that belongs to Bruce Wayne and
turns it against Gotham. And then he ... waits five months to unleash
the destruction. Which just happens to be enough time for Bruce to
convalesce and return to foil his plans.
Hardy makes a few bold performance choices, some of which pay off and some don't.
Much has been made about his voice, which can be difficult to understand
behind the metallic echo of his mask, which resembles a shark's maw coming at you. Beyond the comprehension issues, Bane speaks in an
oddly-inflected pattern with a stiff sort of formality to it. He also has a
habit of placing his hands on the lapels of his coat or armor, like a
Dickensian barrister puffing himself up.
The other big addition is Anne Hathaway as Selina Kyle, a slyly seductive jewel thief who tries to walk a risky line between loyalty to Bane and Batman. Neither really trusts her, or her either of them, but there's a connection between her and Bruce Wayne. He represents the 1% and she makes Occupy Wall Street-ish threats about "a storm coming" to wash away the privileged, which supplies an edge to their banter.
I should mention that no one ever actually calls her Catwoman, and she doesn't wear a costume, other than some minimalist sartorial adornment. It's a surprisingly beefier role than you'd expect, and Hathaway has a strong presence in it.
Joseph Gordon-Levitt is another important new character as young police detective John Blake -- or, at least, seemingly important. Blake seems to be everywhere during the movie, popping up to assist Commissioner James Gordon (Gary Oldman) with a key bit of evidence or even fight alongside Batman. But after the movie I started thinking about what purpose Blake plays in the story, and decided he's really not that pivotal at all, except for that part at the end where ... well, you'll see.
Matthew Modine is another new add as Gordon's right-hand man, Ben Mendelsohn plays a mercenary-minded industrialist making a play for Wayne Enterprises, and Marion Cotillard plays Miranda Tate, a former business partner of Wayne's who got burned on a bad business deal.
Lucius Fox (Morgan Freeman), Bruce Wayne's R&D man, returns to the fold, and apparently has spare Batman suits and gear stuffed in just about every corner of Gotham. Most notably is a flying machine that's part helicopter, part jet and all seriously badass.
I saw this film in a genuine IMAX theater at the Indiana State Museum. More than an hour of the 165-minute film was shot on special IMAX film, and when that entire picture opens up from widescreen to a massive six-story wall of spectacle, it's quite tremendous. This one is definitely worth the ticket upsell.
"The Dark Knight Rises" isn't as good as the last film, but I wouldn't call it a disappointment. If anything, its faults arise from being too ambitious, too big and too much. A shorter film that focused on the dynamic between Batman, Bane and Selina Kyle might've been a better fit for this material. But that's the sort of movie you make when you're starting out something big, not wrapping it up.
"Contagion" is a well-made science fiction thriller that engages the intellect better than must such films generally do, but sometimes fails to grab our hearts along with our brains.
Director Steven Soderbergh assembles a huge cast of stars -- including Matt Damon, Kate Winslet, Gwyneth Paltrow, Laurence Fishburne, Marion Cotillard, Jude Law and Elliott Gould -- and sets them to encounter an outbreak of a deadly virus called MEV-1. The human population starts dropping like flies, and it's up to a loose consortium of scientists and government officials to race for a cure before mankind finds itself exterminated.
Screenwriter Scott Z. Burns cleverly doesn't go for the usual end-of-the-world tropes, in which the disaster is seen through the eyes of a small band of survivors. Instead, he offers a newsier docu-drama feel in which humanity's soaring grace and grimy faults are left to play out with logic and sobering authenticity.
People grow selfish and petty, and governments begin the task of coldly calculating which lives are worth saving and which are not. But amid the panic is self-sacrifice and generosity.
Even though it's better at making us think than letting audiences feel the characters' plight, "Contagion" remains an ambitious, worthy portrait of fear and hope.
Extra features are fair at best. The DVD edition comes with only a single featurette, "Contagion: How a Virus Changes the World."
Upgrade to the Blu-ray/DVD combo, and you add two more featurettes: "False Comfort Zone: The Reality of Contagion" and "The Contagion Detectives."
Obviously, that's not a lot of infectious enthusiasm on the part of the filmmakers to provide extra goodies for those who pass up the Redbox kiosk to plunk down money to add "Contagion" to their permanent video library.
"Contagion" is a gripping movie, but the things that make it good also limit how good it can be.
It's an attempt by director Steven Soderbergh, screenwriter Scott Z. Burns and a large ensemble cast to portray the outbreak of a world-wide epidemic in a realistic way rather than through a handful of descriptive characters and a melodramatic story arc. At this, it succeeds completely.
So instead of, say, a small group of survivors hacking their way through the remnants of a world turned upside down -- "28 Days Later" and "I Am Legend" are a couple of examples -- Soderbergh's film is a docu-drama that covers dozens of stories that intersect. This roving-eye approach allows us to observe as the populace grows uptight and scared, the government response becomes more and more sclerotic, and the center falls apart.
It's a sobering experience, watching heroic doctors and scientists racing against the clock to come up with a vaccine before the mathematical certainty of the disease's spread wipes the human race out. We also see the ugly side of humanity that reacts out of fear or avarice to exploit the situation -- such as Alan Krumwiede, a blogger played by Jude law who's convinced the government is controlling the situation to maximize pharmaceutical companies' profits.
(Great throwaway line from one of his targets: "Blogging isn't writing. It's graffiti with punctuation!")
But as engaging as this method of storytelling is on an intellectual level, the film often fails to grab us emotionally. Certain well-played scenes have power -- such as when one of the central characters, a crusading scientist working to solve the problem, becomes sick -- while others just sort of lay themselves out there, heavy on information but light on visceral impact.
And there's a few too many "science montages" of test tubes spinning in a centrifuge, specimens sealed in plastic, and people hobbling around in funny-looking environmental suits. Those scenes practically needed their own theme music.
I do respect the movie for its willingness to kill off characters without regard to the status of the actor who's playing them. Some famous faces end up thrown in a pit or on an autopsy table -- the latter being incredibly life-like and gruesome.
Likewise, some people who at first seem peripheral to the story, almost background characters, subtly nudge to the fore and become critical players. This "e pluribus unum" approach gives the film a realistic authenticity.
Matt Damon plays Mitch Emhoff, an unemployed house-husband whose wife, Beth (Gwyneth Paltrow), is one of the earliest people to contract the bug, later dubbed MEV-1. Only a partial list of other players includes Kate Winslet as an investigator with the Center for Disease Control, Laurence Fishburne as her do-gooder boss, Marion Cotillard as a World Health Organization expert, Chin Han as a Hong Kong official, Elliot Gould as a private researcher called in to help out, and Jennifer Ehle as a government researcher.
Interestingly, the movie has a few riffs on how such an outbreak might play out on the political front that tweak both the left and the right ends of the spectrum. There's some heartless corporations (are there any other kind in the movies?) looking to cash in, and at one point the nurses' union goes on strike, leaving dying patients in the lurch. Not to mention miles of government red tape to be sheared through.
Sounds crazy, but don't forget that part of the reason behind the slow response to Hurricane Katrina was that volunteer emergency workers were forced to sit through sexual harassment training before being sent to the Gulf.
"Contagion" uses an extreme situation to show us the breadth of our ragged humanity, its grace and its grubby failings. I just wish the movie could have been able to connect with hearts as well as it does heads.
With a few months' distance, "Inception" is looking more and more like the most audacious movies -- and certainly one of the finest -- of 2010.
Writer/director Christopher Nolan's ("The Dark Knight") fever dream of a sci-fi thriller puts together a team of thieves who steal into their victim's subconscious. Dom Cobb (Leonardo DiCaprio), the best in the business, has spent so much time in "dreamspace" that he has trouble discerning it from reality -- especially a projected image of his wife, who has the nasty habit of showing up to sabotage his missions.
Then Cobb receives the ultimate challenge: Tapping into the dreams of a multinational corporation CEO (Cillian Murphy) not to pilfer information, but to plant an idea that he'll think is his own. It's called inception, and it's dangerous and, most experts deem, impossible.
Yes, "Inception" has a plot so labyrinthine that it may require multiple viewings to make sense of it all -- which is why it's the type of movie that's a perfect fit with home video.
As Dom and his crew navigate twisty constructed realities -- lavishly rendered via computer animation -- the stakes keep getting higher the deeper they go.
What a thrill ride for the intellect.
Extra features are a bit scarce in the DVD version, but upgrade considerably with Blu-ray.
The DVD contains just four featurettes on the making of the film, mostly having to do with production design issues like creating the Japanese castle seen in the opening sequence.
The centerpiece of the Blu-ray features is "Extraction Mode" -- a pop-up feature with about 50 minutes of video covering many aspects of production.
Also interesting is "Dreams: Cinema of the Subconscious," a 44-minute documentary hosted by actor Joseph Gordon-Levitt talking to scientists specializing in dreams. One expert even likens dreaming to the everyday state of psychotic patients.
Other goodies: Art galleries, a 14-minute motion-comic prologue, a digital copy of the film, and the complete musical score by Hans Zimmer.
Here's why I think "Inception" is going to make a boatload of money, beyond the fact that it's one of the most original screen visions we've had this year: Most people who buy tickets will want to watch it again to see if they can figure the thing out.
Mind-blowing, sometimes bewildering, always engrossing, breathtakingly ambitious -- the new reality-bending mystery/thriller from writer/director Christopher Nolan is like a multi-faceted Chinese finger trap. As soon as you think you've got the puzzle worked out, it reveals another layer of complexity to baffle and astound you.
The level of intricacy in Nolan's storytelling is so dense, it makes the alternate-reality world of "The Matrix" -- or even the fevered amnesiac's dream of Nolan's own "Memento" -- seem like a child's toy.
All I know is I was completely caught up in the film for every moment of its 2½ hours.
Dom Cobb (Leonardo DiCaprio) leads an elite team of "extractors" who can enter another person's mind while they dream, with the help of a special device housed in a steel briefcase. He's essentially a mind thief, stealing into the darker recesses of consciousness to pilfer corporate secrets for their rivals.
As the story opens, Cobb and his crew are trying to tap the mind of Saito (Ken Watanabe), head of a multinational corporation. The virtual heist fails, but leads to a much bigger job: Inception.
Inception is different from extraction in that you're not stealing information, but implanting it. The target is Robert Fischer (Cillian Murphy), son of an ultra-powerful businessman, who is on his deathbed and about to pass on the mantle. They want to implant an idea in the son's dream that will clear the way for the competition, while making him think it was his own.
As you might guess, inception is dangerous; in fact, as far as most people in the know are concerned, it's merely theoretical. But Cobb, who's been down in the limbo of "dreamspace" deeper and longer than anyone, has some tricks up his sleeve.
He sets about recruiting a dream team of dream-tappers. Arthur (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) is his right-hand man and enforcer. Yusuf (Dileep Rao) keeps the dreamers safely sedated. Eames (Tom Hardy) is the forger who impersonates others in the dreamscape. The newest addition is Ariadne (Ellen Page), an "architect" -- she's the one who constructs the fake worlds where the dreamers interact.
Ariadne's a newbie, but she soon figures out that Cobb has personal issues that will imperil their mission. His wife Mal (Marion Cotillard) keeps appearing in his dreams as a projection of his subconscious -- as are all the other people populating these imaginary worlds. For reasons I can't share without spoiling, Mal, or at least Cobb's vision of her, keeps sabotaging his missions.
The film is filled with astonishing scenes of CG-assisted hallucinations. In Ariadne's training session, Cobb shows her how to rearrange entire city blocks at will, flipping them like Lego pieces. But there are rules to be followed, tricks that must not be attempted, lest the dreamer fall into a well of chaos from which they may never emerge.
In another memorable sequence, Gordon-Levitt has a series of fights where the laws of gravity are constantly in flux, so the ceiling becomes the floor which becomes the wall, and so forth.
Sound freaky? Well, I haven't even told you about the fact that the best extractors can put themselves to sleep inside the dream, creating whole new levels of constructed reality.
Though "Inception" may not add up to anything beyond a ripping yarn that will keep people talking and arguing, this audacious blend of science fiction and jaunt through the layers of consciousness certainly never fails to grip the audience.
As a musical, "Nine" is fairly enjoyable. There's a lot of pageantry, dancing, gorgeous costumes and equally gorgeous women wearing them. The songs aren't really strong enough to make you want to rush out and buy the soundtrack, but the actors, mostly non-professional singers, carry them off fairly well.
As a story, though, this film version of the Broadway show -- which, in turn, was adapted from Federico Fellini's seminal autobiographical film "8½" -- "Nine" leaves much to be desired.
It's the tale of Guido Contini, a successful Italian movie director struggling to make his 9th film, though he doesn't have a script or even a notion of what it's about. Nonetheless, sets are being built and costumes being stitched, and the flurry of activity at the studio has an undercurrent of panic because his last two flicks were flops.
Meanwhile, his personal life is a shambles as he juggles his wife, mistress and lead actress, all vying for attention.
Now, let me get my biases right off my chest here: I'm not a big fan of movies about tortured artists. Whenever a film endeavors to convince us how much people who paint or write or direct have to suffer for their art, it makes me want to watch them dig sewage ditches or teach at an inner-city high school, just so they'd know what real hardship is.
Filmmakers using their art medium to contemplate their own role in creating it just strikes me as wretchedly narcissistic.
Daniel Day-Lewis plays Guido, who makes us like him a little bit by acknowledging in his opening song that he's a 10-year-old boy housed in the body of a man nearly 50. He knows he's headed for a cliff, creatively and romantically, but he just can't take his foot off the gas.
Day-Lewis nails the Italian accent, and makes for a striking figure with his head and shoulders perpetually hunched like he's expecting a blow. His singing is just so-so, though he only performs a couple of tunes.
The rest of the songs are sung by the various women in Guido's life, swirling through his imagined movie as they represent different aspects of his own fantasies and delusions.
The best song, and singer, is "Be Italian," sung by pop star Fergie (aka Stacy Ferguson) from the Black Eyed Peas. She plays Saraghina, a beach-dwelling prostitute who taught Guido a few things about love when he was a boy.
We already knew Marion Cotillard (who plays Guido's wife Luisa) could sing from her Oscar-winning performance in "La Vie En Rose." So it's no surprise that she pulls off her two songs quite well, particularly the raging emotions of "Take It All."
Nicole Kidman (as Guido's leading lady) also does well with "Unusual Way," as does Penelope Cruz (as Guido's desperately needy mistress) with the torch song "A Call From the Vatican."
Judi Dench, as Guido's longtime costume designer and confidant, is less impressive with her tune, and Sophia Loren's lullaby as Guido's mother is so short it seems tacked on just to give an excuse to include the Italian screen legend.
Kate Hudson, playing a nosy American journalist, has fun with the upbeat "Cinema Italiano," which was not in the stage version but was written exclusively for this film.
Director Rob Marshall ("Chicago") is a dazzling visualist, and the musical scenes hum along under their own energy and momentum. Whenever the music stops, though, "Nine" is revealed as a silly story in need of a chair.
