I’m sure  that if you’ve read my article on the Top 5 Films of the 2000’s, then you recognize my blatant hero worship of Daniel Day-Lewis. Characters like Daniel Plainview, Bill the Butcher, Hawkeye, and Christy Brown are so intimately personified by the man that I believe he could go method and play a rock and still make it a powerful performance. So, how does his latest film Nine stack up?

I’ll tell you. Poorly. Not because of DDL’s efforts, he is actually quite good as expected. It’s just that the film around him is so much less than the collection of its parts that it’s almost confusing how it got into such bad shape.

Obviously, this is a huge change of pace for DDL. In his last two major films he has played two very dark, very intense, very demanding characters. Here, we see him embody Guido Contini, an Italian film director who is struggling to prepare his next film “Italia”. Continue reading →