Eat Italian!

I have posted about it in the past; I was a berserk little musical theatre queen as a child, a youth & even as a young man. I got off the musical theatre boat about the time of Cats & Miss Saigon (the exception being the brilliant & always enjoyable Little Shop Of Horrors), but I climbed back on S.S. Musical with the movies- Moulin Rouge, Chicago, & Dreamgirls. Throw me a life preserver, because I fell overboard after spending 2 hours with something called Nine. I give director/choreographer Rob Marshall most of the credit (along with screenwriter Bill Condon) for making Chicago work as a film. That show is one of my favorite musicals. When I lived in NYC in the mid-1970s, I was a Chicago groupie, seeing the original at least 5 times. The stage classic seemed to be unadaptable to the screen & it was amazing to see it not just work, but to watch as Chicago-The Film, garnered awards, Oscar nominations, & reintroduce the pleasures of the Musical Movie to a new generation & those of us that gave up on the form. Why didn’t Nine work for me? Chicago has 1 of the great scores of all time, with not a wasted musical moment. Nine has a 3rd rate score of forgettable & sometimes laughable musical numbers (My Husband Makes Movies). The entire enterprise is very odd to me: a musical movie, based on a stage musical, based on a film about not being able to make a movie. So many odd moments: Fergie plays some sort of Sea Whore & performs Mein Herr, Dame Judi Dench portrays Sally Bowles in her 70s, who is now a British costume designer. Dame Judi suddenly has a French accent for her musical number, which seems like it was cut from the original production of Cabaret. Nicole Kidman (who I love) has the best song – the lovely A Very Unusual Way, but her character could have been played by anyone. It was as if the producers put the actresses names in a hat & just threw out 1 number per woman (well, Marion Cotillard gets 2 songs, but they are so awful, they add up to 1). Penelope Cruz wears some very fancy underwear & has my favorite line- “I will wait for you with my legs spread”). Sophia Loren wanders in from the film version of Man Of La Mancha, after 38 years of looking for Craft Services. Only Goldie Hawn comes off really well, with a hullabaloo number, looking really great for 65 years old! I don’t know the source material, but the film is a movie version of a stage musical (which seems to have won 5 Tony Awards & has even been revived). The big musical number had me confused. I thought they were singing- Eat Italian!, & somehow the filmmakers had snuck in an Olive Garden commercial, but the Husband insists the lyrics were- Be Italian!. I didn’t notice. I was daydreaming about the Cell Block Tango from some long ago musical film that really did give me a thrill. The Husband- “well, that is 2 hours of my life that I will never get back”. I give Nine a C+ (for Daniel Day- Lewis’s abs & lats, looking excellent with his shirt off at 52 years old). Eat Italian! Love to!