Dallas Escorts: The Dallas Morning News Lawson Taitte column: ‘Nine’ reimagines Fellini …
Marshall does something quite different. Nine is the movie adaptation of a Broadway musical that has twice won the Tony Award. That musical is a stage version of 8 1/2. Fellini’s screen alter ego, Guido, is the hero, not some thinly disguised version of Marshall himself.
The movie Nine, in fact, is saturated in Fellini’s own images. At least four sequences are shot-by-shot imitations of 8 1/2. It’s uncanny for anyone who knows the original well.
At the same time, though, Marshall splices in songs, many of them elaborate production numbers. When Guido (Daniel Day-Lewis) remembers his boyhood self leering at a dancing prostitute, Saraghina (Fergie), we jump back and forth between black-and-white images exactly matching the Fellini originals and a hot dance number featuring a chorus line of women beating tambourines against their thighs.