Not a Review of “Nine”

While the COVID-19 pandemic has been raging on, we—like much of California—have been staying home pretty much all the time, as San Diego County’s numbers were not moving in a good direction for some weeks. Check it out: I’ve been keeping charts.

So what have we been doing with the time we would otherwise have spent maybe grocery shopping or seeing friends or going out dancing? Watching TV, reading, and puttering around the house, mostly. I have a few Teaser Tuesdays and several Not A Reviews on the list to be posted, and thought I would get the movies and TV shows out of the way first, while I still remember the context of our discussions about them and, most importantly, and how long it took them to put her to sleep. And so, first up, we have Nine, a musical starring Daniel Day-Lewis as … An Italian? A Russian? We honestly weren’t quite sure.

Me: “What kind of accent is he doing? Is it Italian?”
Wife: “I thought maybe it was Russian.”

Fortunately the question was cleared up a few minutes later by some explanatory dialog:

Wife: “I guess he’s Italian.”

Unfortunately, despite a quite remarkable cast (Daniel Day-Lewis, Marion Cotillard, Penelope Cruz, Nicole Kidman, Judi Dench, and more), this movie is pretty so-so. The songs were forgettable:

Me: “I don’t think we’re going to get anything here that’s up to the standards of ‘The Cell Block Tango’.”
Wife: “Neither do I.”

And the plot was … there, I guess?

Wife: “This movie seems to mostly be an excuse for scantily clad women to dance around on sets full of fake fog.”

But at least the scenery was pretty. (Pipe down, you in back. I’m talking about the Italian landscape, not Penelope Cruz in a bustier and fishnet stockings.)

Anyway, Nine put my wife to sleep in about 30-40 minutes, and when it was time, a few days later, to maybe put it back on again, we had this discussion about it:

Me: “Do you want to watch more of Nine? Or are we done with that?”
Wife: “I’m done with it if you’re done with it.”
Me: “I’m done with it.”

So there you go—a movie even I didn’t bother to finish. Almost unprecented!* So I guess I would say that if you’re interested in seeing a musical, save yourself a few hours and just watch the “Cell Block Tango” scene from Chicago instead:

Oh, yeah, that’s the stuff.

^{* Almost. Here’s a vampire movie where even I didn’t watch the whole thing. Just try to imagine how bad a vampire movie must be if I turned it off.}