Holiday Hits and Misses: A Review of Susan Boyle’s I Dreamed a Dream and Nine

Posted on December 29th, 2009 under Media Review

Pop culture has given us another object lesson this year in the form of an astronomical success and an anticlimactic flop.  I’m talking about Susan Boyle’s runaway success with the release of her first album, I Dreamed a Dream and the lavish holiday musical dud Nine.

Nine had all the trimmings of a Las Vegas Christmas extravaganza with all the rhinestone studded bells and whistles.  Whatever else can be said about this film, it wasn’t lacking in talent.  Daniel Day-Lewis, Penélope Cruz, Judy Dench, Kate Hudson, Sophia Loren.  These movie legends proved that quality doesn’t come with quantity or even proximity.  Push a bunch of stars on stage in expensive costumes, and you have, well, a bunch of stars on stage in expensive costumes.  You can’t take a fashion show and expect a story to evolve to fill in the space between the acts.  The weak story collapses before your very eyes under the boas, sequins and tiaras.

Just to be clear, the movie does have a plot.  The film stalks a famous director as he works on his next lavish undertaking.  The world idolizes him.  His talent, reputation and mystic make him the ultimate sexual conquest for the film’s many leading ladies, his suffering marriage notwithstanding.  A restless celebrity, a deteriorating marriage and a profusion of alluring women set against the romantic Italian coast.  His professional career and his personal life slide in and out of each other as he tries to find himself, whatever that means.  I think you get the picture.

“Flashy” doesn’t necessarily translate “bad.”  But, you take a story pinned together with strings of mesmerizing choreography and sex, you’ve still only got a more grown up version of Fantasia meets Entertainment Tonight.  Where’s the beef?

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