Nine

Seen at: AMC Flatirons, Broomfield, Colorado 2:00 p.m. on Jan. 14

Holy cow! What is wrong with people?

All I've been hearing about is how bad this movie sucks. It seemed to get no good reviews at all. I guess this is one of those times when I am going to be an opinion of one, because I really liked Nine.

It was a fun outing today to see it. Because it got chased out of Fort Collins after only a few weeks, one of the first out of the holiday movie pool, I found myself driving all the way down past Boulder on the Foothills Parkway to the Flatirons lifestyle center.

It was my first trip there, and I have to say that it impressed me, as a new outdoor shopping center, especially the part that feels like a ski village in winter, which is where the theater is. The AMC itself there is a really a crown jewel of the AMC system, on par with anything I've seen on the east coast as far as the both the lobby and the auditoriums. It should be good---the matinee tickets were eight bucks.

So like I said, I expected Nine to really be a dog, but I decided to give it all the benefit of the doubt, and I'm glad I did. To me it was definitely in the top quarter of the movies that came out this year, easily, and maybe higher.

Certainly it is not a perfect movie. I didn't see the Broadway musical upon which this is based, but there is no mistaking that one is seeing a close adaptation, in the same way that director Robert Marshall did Chicago.

The musical numbers often feel like you've heard them before in other shows, but I'm willing to go with all that.

The film is at its worst in a few places where the Broadway-i-ness really sticks out, as did does it certain scenes with Daniel Day Lewis in solos that seem straight out of the vampire puppet show in Forgetting Sarah Marshall.

But I get deal with that, and I did. What I saw was an earnest and pleasurable attempt to make spectacle on screen and deliver interesting historical commentary on Italian film in the 1960s.

I knew I was going to like this movie when I began noticing that there were far less crotch-thrusts from the female dancers at the beginning than in, say, Chicago. The dancers were wearing more clothes. I very much like that, and then--bang--this turns out to be something that actually becomes part of the movie itself. At that moment, it rises to being not only spectacle, but spectacle about art.

But by far the best part of this movie was the dancing. There were almost no good dance movies this year, with the exception of the remake of Fame. In an otherwise empty year, Nine really stands out.

I would give it best musical, but for the fact that it's an adapted Brodway show, and I'll stick with a genuine movie musical in that category.

But I will give some awards:

Best performance in a dance number: Kate Hudson in Nine, for "Cinema Italiano"

Deal with it!

Also for reasons previously mentioned, Nine receives the first of the special awards given out this year. It gets the Berkeley, and anyone who knows me knows that this is one of my favorite to give out.

The 2009 Busby Berkeley Award for Outstanding Achievement in the Use of Dance in Film goes to: Nine

Berkeley wouldn't have understood the dialogue in Me and Orson Welles, let alone been able to comprehend any of the dancing he say. But he could walk right and sit down and watch this movie and know that his legacy lives on, at least in one movie.