Film Reviews
MUSICAL NINE (12A) 120min ●●●●●
Federico Fellini always made such extravagant films that it’s no surprise that they’ve proved ripe for song. Nights of the Cabiria was the first to be reinvented, becoming the Broadway hit Sweet Charity, before the legendary Bob Cabaret Fosse made a movie of the musical in 1969. This time it’s Fellini’s most perplexing and iconic work 8 1/2, that gets the Broadway to movie adaptation treatment with Nine with the patronage of Rob Chicago Marshall in the director’s chair.
Marshall who turned Chicago into a Best Film Oscar winner has opted for a less kitsch and more artistic aesthetic for Nine. It’s a mélange of devices, some taken from Fellini’s classic which places the action firmly in the 1960s whereas the Broadway show, which first played in 1982, had a very 80s feel, the hits from the musical have been topped up by three new tracks and it’s all caked with elements made to appeal to younger audiences, ranging from a succession of fast edits to the use of Fergie from The Black Eyed Peas as a prostitute. Daniel Day-Lewis puts on an Italian accent to play the world famous movie director Guido Contini, who’s suffering from artistic block as he prepares to make Italia, his ninth and most ambitious picture. It’s only the fourth movie that Day-Lewis has made since he went into semi-retirement in 1997, but it would have taken a tough man to turn down a role that involves being fawned over by some of the most famous girls on film, Marion Cotillard plays his wife, Penelope Cruz his mistress, Nicole Kidman his actress muse and Kate Hudson’s a Vogue journalist who’d do anything for a scoop. The only women not bedding Guido are his costume driver and confidant played by Judi Dench and, in a terrifically symbolic piece of casting, Sophia Loren as his mother.
Day-Lewis shows a previously unseen penchant for song and dance. Cruz, though, is the real star turn with a very sexy number. But in parts it’s flat, and some more melodrama or plot would not have gone amiss. (Kaleem Aftab) ■ General release from Sat 26 Dec.
58 THE LIST 17 Dec 2009–7 Jan 2010
www.list.co.uk/film
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DRAMA SPREAD (18) 96min ●●●●●
Lothario, gigolo or Casanova? Shallow, handsome city of angels resident Nikki (Ashton Kutchner) is not really sure what he is, but he knows one thing. He’s too skint to be a playboy. Then one night he links up with prosperous cougar Samantha (Anne Heche, excellent) and quickly moves in to her sunny hillside pile. But Nikki has the morals of an alley cat and while Samantha is away on business he uses her apartment to seduce girls closer to his age group. His comeuppance is inevitable. Trading less on the existential
semantics (inflated by Reaganite free market policies) of Paul Schrader’s thematically similar American Gigolo (1980) than on a kind of slacker fatalism, Spread is a very conventional morality fable. The only real surprise is that it’s directed by ex-Scottish resident and major filmmaking talent David Mackenzie (Young Adam, Hallam Foe) working in America for the first time. To be fair most of the film’s problems are not his, Jason Dean Hall’s abysmal script is an embarrassment of predictabilities and epiphanies and Kutchner in the lead is simply not up to the job – the sex scenes are fine but the rest of the time he’s about as convincing as a clothes horse (let’s not even get started on what the wardrobe department thought they were doing here). Worse, Spread feels oddly compromised, any darkness Mackenzie manages to ring out of the material is hastily usurped, Spread appears to be the work of a good filmmaker at odds with a clueless studio. (Paul Dale) ■ General release from Fri 1 Jan.
DRAMA PAA (12A) 140min ●●●●●
Sixty seven-year-old actor Amitabh Bachchan puts on the prosthetics and reinvents himself as a 12-year-old boy in this tale of lost love and ambition. Auro suffers from a rare genetic defect known as progeria, which makes people age so fast they look six to seven times older than they are. The device also means that his actual son Abhishek Bachan could play the legendary Indian actor’s father in the story. The convoluted plot takes a long time to get going as it’s revealed that father and son do not know of each other’s existence because gynecologist mum Vidya (Vidya Balan) decided that rather than ruin her Cambridge boyfriend’s political ambition by having a child out of wedlock, she’d have the child in secret. 12 years later Amoi is a successful politician who boasts of the fact that he has no demons in the closet, but will learn different when a chance encounter brings him in contact with his prematurely aging son. It’s only when the secret’s out that the pace picks up with 67-year-old Amitabh showing why he has legendary status as he brings his parents back together. (Kaleem Aftab) ■ Out now on selected release.