Great Movie, Bad Edition
Added 9/22/2009
Warning! -- Avoid this edition. The subtitles are hideous, yellow, and intrusive. They are laid over the picture and absolutely ruin the image. I know there is a letterbox edition where the subtitles are white and appear below the picture. Find and purchase that edition, not this one!
0 out of 2 people found this helpful.
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THE DVD CASE CAN BE USED AGAIN...
Added 8/26/2009
I NEVER let boredom get in the way, and always watch a picture til its end. I had to take a nap in the middle of this one.
It's one of the most unbearable, boring films I have EVER watch, and I've seen a few (10 in the last week). Lars Von Trier's "Antichrist" was pure fun and action in comparison!!!
Once it was over, I saved the case and threw the movie away. There's not plenty of room in my house...
0 out of 8 people found this helpful.
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sublime movie
Added 8/6/2009
I never get tired of watching this film. It's like a dream. Makes me dream some more.
0 out of 0 people found this helpful.
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Simultaneously, a dated cultural artefact and a hugely thoughtful deconstruction of modern life
Added 7/16/2009
This is one three-hour film that needs its entire running time to make its point. I have to confess that, with the sole exception of Nights of Cabriria, I am not a big Fellini fan, so I approached this film with some misgivings. And the first hour, which includes some dreadful parodies of American movie stars and British journalists speaking very wooden English, begins to feel excruciating. It's this first hour, too, that plays into all the "Felliniesque" cliches, with the big-busted Anita Ekberg and the Bacchanalian party scene. All this "swinging Rome" stuff seems pretty dated. But then there's a point suddenly at which Fellini's overriding structure for this film - successive nights of partying and dissipation forming a sort of downward spiral in the life of the protagonist - becomes clear and the film becomes increasingly engrossing. The film begins to rise above being a sensational cultural artefact of the 1960s into a real portrait of a disintegrating Italian society that seems timeless and important. In these successive nights, Marcello Mastroianni's character parties with pseudo-intellectuals and decadent aristocrats and fails to make emotional bonds, except for one small, quiet conversation with a teenage girl in a roadside cafe that ends up being, perhaps, his only one moment of real connection with anyone in the entire film. As a reporter, meanwhile, he also spends one night witnessing a mob scene at the site of a purported "miracle" (a sighting of the Virgin Mary) that nicely lacerates religion, the working classes who feed on it, and media hysteria, all in one astonishing set-piece that Spielberg clearly looked at when designing the end of Close Encounters. Visually, La Dolce Vita is misleadingly bland and even a bit cheap-looking in its opening scenes, but, starting with the late night odyssey through Rome with Anita Ekberg, it suddenly develops a real visual poetry and vocabulary all its own. It's that rare film that seems to grow in importance and depth as it progresses towards an elliptical ending of surprising impact. I'm still not a huge Fellini fan, but this one I like.
0 out of 0 people found this helpful.
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Excellent film, deplorable commentary
Added 6/15/2009
The film is fascinating, and the remastering and restoration excellent. What a shame, then, that Mr. Schickel's commentary is so persistently banal, doing little more (when it's accurate) than stating the obvious. The film deserves a much more distinguished critique than this.
1 out of 1 people found this helpful.
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Great Movie, Bad Edition
Added 9/22/2009
Warning! -- Avoid this edition. The subtitles are hideous, yellow, and intrusive. They are laid over the picture and absolutely ruin the image. I know there is a letterbox edition where the subtitles are white and appear below the picture. Find and purchase that edition, not this one!
0 out of 2 people found this helpful.
|
THE DVD CASE CAN BE USED AGAIN...
Added 8/26/2009
I NEVER let boredom get in the way, and always watch a picture til its end. I had to take a nap in the middle of this one.
It's one of the most unbearable, boring films I have EVER watch, and I've seen a few (10 in the last week). Lars Von Trier's "Antichrist" was pure fun and action in comparison!!!
Once it was over, I saved the case and threw the movie away. There's not plenty of room in my house...
0 out of 8 people found this helpful.
|
sublime movie
Added 8/6/2009
I never get tired of watching this film. It's like a dream. Makes me dream some more.
0 out of 0 people found this helpful.
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