La Dolce Vita (1960)

I came to La Dolce Vita, being curious about such an influential classic and having recently seen 8 1/2, curious to get more of a flavour of Fellini. I thought 8 1/2 was all well and good but it was a little aimless- like it was procrastinating about the matter in hand... but that's almost forgivable since that's basically what the film is about. Maybe I was naive but I thought La Dolce Vita would be more.. focused?, not a magnification of everything that was wrong with 8 1/2 or if i have to be polite, everything i didn't like.
Clocking in at an extreme 3hrs, this film seems like the narcissist's director's cut of 8 1/2, if this film hadn't come first. It's Marcello Mastroianni gadding around Rome, smoking, wearing sunglasses at midnight, romancing and falling for some of the world's most luscious ladies and politely donating his love to some of the world's most desperate women. You know the deal. There's something very wierd about why Mastroianni makes for an attractive man. He looks like a chubby faced Alain Delon, he has this intense gaze but it looks less likely he's concentrating, more like he has an acute migraine. Probably what the perpetual sun specs are for. You should stop all the espresso and fags, mate. But then it DOES work for him. Who is I to complain?
Again, Fellini takes another interesting idea, the emergence of the 'paparazzo' and showbiz journalist and COMPLETELY forgets to use it and investigate it. Why do that when we just spend swathes of time hanging out at private parties, listening to overt philosophical conversions and getting wasted. Admittedly these things do happen and surely as fun is fun, as any designated driver will tell you - drinking and talking shit is not a spectators sport and in fact, there is nothing more sobering than watching people having a good time unable to join in.
But y'know, this is all immutabally beautiful to look at, of course. Everything is perfectly photographed and lit. The way the female actresses move, almost seems balletic but I'm afraid this is the negative intonation of 'style over content'. You can make the most astetically beautiful movie but i don't think you can make it over 3hrs long. It's exhausting to watch because you have to concentrate on this particularly dense and at the end- nothings really changed and we haven't really learned anything we didn't know...

I watched La Dolce Vita (1960), on DVD via LoveFilm.
My 2011 in Movies will return with Freakonomics (2010)...

8 1/2 (1963)

I was talking to my baby sister and we were talking about movies and the film studies class she was taking. She was bemoaning her teacher- 'He's okay but he just likes action stuff like Taken. He doesn't really appriciate movies that i like, like Fellini's 8 1/2...'. I was thinking 1. Here i am claiming to be a cineasté and i haven't seen any Fellini. 2. She's my 16yo sister- she not allowed to know more about anything than me. And dutifully 8 1/2 was chucked on the ol' LoveFilm list,
What i'm going to say next might sound silly but after watching 81/2, i totally understand where that perfume advert style comes from. It was like an eureka moment, that you have when you find something that was the original inspiration for something, that you didn't actually realise was necessarily inspired by something in the first place; like hearing a Muddy Waters record- 'When was this made?...(?!)...Wow.'. I don't know if that all sounds stupid but it made me understand the origins of that style, by which i mean- clean shapes, stark lighting,perspective changing by moving the focus, sparse dense dialogue. I mean if anyone wants to get snooty and talk shit about style over content, just say '8 1/2, what was that?'. I mean i'm into it; it's an eternal classic because it's stylish and artistic and ambitious but i'd tender that it's got so much to say over it's 2hrs, it doesn't really get it together to say anything and i'm not saying it necessarily
has to but it's so concerned with being cool and fresh the story takes the backseat... Style over content.
I thought the idea of a man burdened the need to fulfil his creative potential or return to the level of past glories and the rag-tag circus of producers and actors that surround him charming. We can all relate to that feeling of wanting to make a masterpiece but not knowing where to start and if you've done it before, not remembering how you did it in the first place but i just feel like the dialogue is prohibitively dense and philosophical but may that will change over further viewings. I don't know were i got the idea that 8 1/2 was one of Fellini's first movies. If anything this is an artist hitting the sweet spot of their creativity. I mean, he's just so assured in his choices and it's just proven to be so influential, bleeding into other motion arts like tv and music videos but fashion too. The director played by Marcello Mastroianni dresses just like Tom Ford and Karl Lagerfeld do today, which is not to say he orginated the style but just perpetuated that 'always classic' formal style that Gucci and YSL do...
In a first for a post on the blog, i couldn't just choose 1 picture or poster for the post; i had to choose 3 images to credit how enigmatic the imagery is...