Nine

What went wrong with Nine? The question must still prompt autopsies at TWC, the Weinstein Company. The movie lost a fortune, with a North American box-office take of less than US$20 million. Yet it surely sounded like a box-office bonanza when it was lined up alongside Rob Marshall's debut multi-Oscar-winning Chicago.

What's not to love?, the production team probably exclaimed. Nine is another Broadway smash-hit musical. Marshall's a great choreographer-turned-director. He's back in his element, as he was with Chicago. We've got a star-studded line-up of award-winning acting talents who can actually really sing and dance, like Catherine Zeta-Jones, Queen Latifah and Richard Gere did. We've got more this time in fact. Who wouldn't spend good money to see Nicole(Moulin Rouge) Kidman, Marion (Piaf) Cotillard, Penelope Cruz (gee, she even walks like a song!), Kate Hudson and Judi (Little Night Music) Dench, and we got Sophia Loren! Salivate, guys!

TWC surely now knows it made a mistake casting the central character in the theatrical pageant that depicted the life and loves of Italian movie fantasist Federico Fellini. Daniel Day-Lewis is a good actor, almost too good for this tale of a Lothario with screen-writer's block. He has the intensity Gere rightly didn't in Chicago, the only award-winning performance of his career. That dark menace worked, although OTT for my taste, for Day-Lewis's recent Oscar-winning screen-stealing megalomaniac in There Will Be Blood, but not for a frothy stagy biopic. Maybe, in an unfair slur on Italian artistes, I just don't expect actors with broad Italian accents to fret and frown so psychotically.

The plot's contrived leaps from dramatics to musical numbers, acceptable as stage devices, create an enormous alienation effect in a movie. Include B&W flashbacks from the director's imagination, and the tribute to an unconventional movie director ends up feeling more like a self-conscious parody.

Another negative factor may account for the dire word-of-mouth non-recommendations the movie must have earned during its opening weekend. "How will it play in Peoria?" is a cliche of American showbiz, and it contains a basic truth. "New York isn't part of America", as the Beyond the Fringe team noted almost half a century ago. Going to see a Broadway musical is an integral part of many programmes for tour groups, but their members don't go to musicals back home. Chicago was an exception, because it had a bustling storyline, interesting characters, an infectious sense of humour, effectively happy Amateur Night song-and-dance acts by Gere and Renee Zellweger, some show-stopper routines, jolly tunes and, above all, an all-American joie de vivre.

Nine has none of those plus factors. Neither did another recent Broadway hit, Rent, the movie adaptation of which also bombed, though due to many other negative factors. TWC might well think of relocating its production office to Peoria.