These are all the films of Fellini’s that made the top 1000, in our 2011 update of the Top Ranked 1000 Films on the Net, all polls - he had nine total, including two in the top 100. [Photos courtesy of Fanpix.net]
Fellini and wife, actress Julietta Masina
1. 8 ½ (1963) Italy, bw #40
2. La Dolce Vita (1960) Italy, bw #74
3. La Strada (1954) #114
4. Nights of Cabiria (1957) Italy #172
5.
Showing posts with label Federico Fellini. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Federico Fellini. Show all posts
REVIEW: La Dolce Vita
Wednesday, March 30, 2011
(dir. Federico Fellini, 1961)
Over and over again, La Dolce Vita has been vetted as a masterpiece and as Fellini's most outstanding work. Entertainment Weekly thought so much of it, that Dolce landed at #6 on their list of the 100 Greatest Movies of All Time, behind the likes of Raging Bull, Chinatown, Casablanca, Citizen Kane, and The Godfather. Pretty good company, huh?
It stars Marcello Mastroianni, one of Italy's great actors and the recognizable face from Fellini's equally famous follow-up, 8 1/2, as journalist and Man About Town Marcello Rubini. The film is broken down into a series of 7 days complete with dawn, afternoon, and night; often, and most interestingly, the blurry line between the transition of these times is jumped. In true Fellini fashion, the audience is told to accept the minute magical elements, and trust that it's part of the theme. The most wonderful of these moments feature Mastroianni and Swedish-cum-Marilyn Monroe look-a-like Anita Ekberg (as film superstar, paparazzi magnet, and resident life-loving bimbo Sylvia) wading in the Trevi Fountain in the middle of the night. Sylvia seemingly christens Marcello with a trickle of water, and boom suddenly we go from night to dawn.
The film focuses on the new (new as in, late 50s early 60s) moral standard of Italy, and often finds juxtapositions with the prior moral standard of the ruling Catholic Church. The Church's presence isn't surprising, given that somewhere in most Fellini film you're bound to stumble on the Catholic Church and probably Catholic Guilt. But nevertheless, the film opens with the second coming of Christ, or as Fellini frames it, a helicopter flying a statue of outstretched Jesus through Rome.
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| Marcello and Sylvia in the fountain |
But what's so fascinating about the film is how well the new moral order comes to order, and how unaffected Marcello seems by it. For starters, he cheats on his fiancée in the first scene of the film, tries to seduce Sylvia, participates in a quasi-seance, and is seduced by a self-proclaimed whore. If his actions weren't enough, he is surrounded by immorality, from his fiancée nearly overdosing to one of his dearest friends committing suicide. And as we settle in for the final scene of the film, we see that Marcello's moral wall has come crashing down when trying to liven up a late-night party suggests a striptease and public sex take place. In this final scene, he proceeds to literally feather a drunk girl as he violently tell her to sober up.
As smart, rich, and clever as it was, I couldn't make myself love it. It didn't have the heart most other Fellini films have, and I thought it unusually cold. Sure the ending may be hopeful, but it's also one of total doubt for the future not only of this man, but of the Italy he represents. The segments never totally blended together for me, and I found it rather difficult to know when a new one has landed. I imagine that's no mistake on Fellini's end, since giving the film a fluidity could suggest a mirroring of Marcello's lifestyle. One aspect of the film I did adore, though, were the Oscar-winning costumes (a rare feat in that category for a modern-day film, the award is usually taken by heavy period pieces). Marcello's suits were killer, and Sylvia's dress was...breathtaking, for a myriad of reasons. If you like this, or want to test the waters with other Fellini works, I suggest 8 1/2, I Vitelloni, and Satyricon. GRADE: B
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I Vitelloni (1953)
Monday, April 26, 2010
****
Country: Italy
Director: Federico Fellini
What a joy it was to rediscover this early masterpiece of Fellini. When I first saw it years ago while in college, I was familiar only with the more flamboyant works of the 1960s, and I didn't quite know what to make of this one. Now I can see it as Fellini's first full-blown masterpiece, a film that bridges the gap between the postwar neorealism of Roberto Rossellini—with whom Fellini cowrote several movies including Open City and Paisan, working as assistant director on those films as well—and the later works made in Fellini's increasingly personal and fanciful style.
The movie deals with the adventures and misadventures of five buddies in a postwar seaside town, unnamed but generally assumed to be Fellini's own hometown of Rimini. These men are referred to in contemporary Italian slang as vitelloni, translated as "the guys" or "the layabouts." In modern American slang they would probably be called slackers. Nearly thirty years old and obviously well-educated, they dress stylishly and talk of life in the big city while putting down the hidebound attitudes of their provincial town. Yet they are unmarried, live at home with their families, and don't work (although some have unachieved career aspirations)—clear examples of arrested development. Like the three main characters in Fellini's next film, La Strada (which was actually written before I Vitelloni but not considered commercial enough to be made right away), each of the five represents a character type: a beret-wearing, bespectacled intellectual who wants to be a playwright; a handsome Don Juan; a chubby, talented musician; a goofball (played in his inimitable hysterico-comic way by Alberto Sordi); and an introspective, observant young man named Moraldo who is clearly a stand-in for the young Fellini. At the end of the movie, only Moraldo has actually left to pursue his dreams in Rome, leaving the others behind to continue their avoidance of adulthood in the sticks.
I Vitelloni contains many images that would recur in later Fellini movies. A scene of the pals on the pier in mid-winter gazing wistfully out to sea presages the scene of Marcello on the beach near the end of La Dolce Vita; an episode at the theater, Cabiria's visit to the variety show in The Nights of Cabiria; a priest high up in a tree, the mad uncle in the tree in Amarcord; the Lent carnival, the wild parties of La Dolce Vita, Juliet of the Spirits, and Satyricon; Moraldo's friendship with a little boy who works at the train station (which makes him see how much he has to lose by staying in his hometown) presages Marcello's friendship with the girl on the beach in La Dolce Vita (which makes him see how much he has lost in his quest for success in the big city).
With I Vitelloni Fellini begins the process of taking events from his own life, transforming them, and incorporating them into the events in his movies, a subject he dealt with directly in 8½. Taken together, four of his movies form a sort of cinematic autobiography that pinpoints Fellini's state of mind at various stages of his life. I Vitelloni is Fellini's portrait of the artist as a young man, leaving behind the comfortable strictures of the past for an unknown future. La Dolce Vita (1960) shows its main character on the verge of fame but still torn between the simplistic morality of his provincial origins and the disturbing decadence he sees all around him. 8½ (1963) portrays a middle-aged film director now famous but still haunted by images of the past, fearful of commitment (except to his art), and plagued by an entirely new set of problems, both personal and professional. Finally, in Amarcord (1973) Fellini returns to his more innocent and hopeful boyhood in search of lost time. It's no wonder these films resonate powerfully with audiences, so authentically does Fellini encapsulate the universal in the personal.
But even outside the context of Fellini's oeuvre, I Vitelloni stands as a brilliant film in its own right. Fellini enlivens his realistically observed story with the kind of near-surreal images and episodes that came to be associated with his style: the Miss Mermaid 1953 beauty contest that opens the film, a group of priests walking single-file on the beach, the bizarre shop of religious notions that one of the group is forced by his father to work in, the gilded angel statue he steals from the shop, the simple-minded Giudizio who helps him try (unsuccessfully) to peddle the angel to a nunnery and a monastery then installs the statue on a mound at the beach and adores its otherworldly beauty.
Fellini is masterful at interweaving the stories of the five different main characters, deftly juggling and mingling individual plot lines. And although each of the five vitelloni is an identifiable type, Fellini invests each with a distinct personality. He already shows his brilliance at matching the actor to the part and gets superb performances from all five of his leading men, including his brother Riccardo, who plays the musician. The most famous member of the cast was Alberto Sordi, and in fact Fellini organized the long shooting schedule around Sordi, who was touring Italy with a vaudeville company at the time. Sordi turns in a broad but at times quite touching comic performance as Alberto, the joker of the group. When he attends the carnival costume ball in drag—wearing a short blonde wig and one of his mother's hats and flapper dresses from the 1920s, with overdone makeup including a beauty spot and a comically vampish, pouty, heavy-lidded expression, doing an exaggerated tango with a male partner—just try not to think of Jack Lemmon in Some Like It Hot.
Interestingly, the only one of the main actors who never worked more than once with Fellini is Franco Interlenghi, who plays Fellini's alter ego, Moraldo. Is the fact that Interlenghi is easily the best-looking of the vitelloni—just as Marcello Mastroianni and Bruno Zanin, who performed the same function in later films, were clearly more attractive than Fellini himself—an indication that Fellini was just a bit vain? At any rate, Interlenghi does a first-rate job of portraying a person who is more an observer of events than a participant. The character never openly discusses the subject with any of his pals, but Interlenghi subtly conveys Moraldo's growing discomfort with his buddies and the dawning realization that if he doesn't take the plunge and leave them behind, he will be trapped in the same kind of dead-end life they are destined for.
One of the last shots of the film leaves a lasting impression—a shot of Moraldo looking sadly from the early morning train that is taking him away, clearly fighting the urge to stay, waving tentatively at his friend the station boy, who is walking away from him, balancing on one rail as though walking on a tightrope. Moraldo almost seems to be saying goodbye to his past and to his youthful self. At the same time, images of each of the other vitelloni still asleep in their beds flash by in his mind and he knows that life in the little town will go on without him the same as always, while he is borne away to a new life somewhere else.
Country: Italy
Director: Federico Fellini
What a joy it was to rediscover this early masterpiece of Fellini. When I first saw it years ago while in college, I was familiar only with the more flamboyant works of the 1960s, and I didn't quite know what to make of this one. Now I can see it as Fellini's first full-blown masterpiece, a film that bridges the gap between the postwar neorealism of Roberto Rossellini—with whom Fellini cowrote several movies including Open City and Paisan, working as assistant director on those films as well—and the later works made in Fellini's increasingly personal and fanciful style.
The movie deals with the adventures and misadventures of five buddies in a postwar seaside town, unnamed but generally assumed to be Fellini's own hometown of Rimini. These men are referred to in contemporary Italian slang as vitelloni, translated as "the guys" or "the layabouts." In modern American slang they would probably be called slackers. Nearly thirty years old and obviously well-educated, they dress stylishly and talk of life in the big city while putting down the hidebound attitudes of their provincial town. Yet they are unmarried, live at home with their families, and don't work (although some have unachieved career aspirations)—clear examples of arrested development. Like the three main characters in Fellini's next film, La Strada (which was actually written before I Vitelloni but not considered commercial enough to be made right away), each of the five represents a character type: a beret-wearing, bespectacled intellectual who wants to be a playwright; a handsome Don Juan; a chubby, talented musician; a goofball (played in his inimitable hysterico-comic way by Alberto Sordi); and an introspective, observant young man named Moraldo who is clearly a stand-in for the young Fellini. At the end of the movie, only Moraldo has actually left to pursue his dreams in Rome, leaving the others behind to continue their avoidance of adulthood in the sticks.I Vitelloni contains many images that would recur in later Fellini movies. A scene of the pals on the pier in mid-winter gazing wistfully out to sea presages the scene of Marcello on the beach near the end of La Dolce Vita; an episode at the theater, Cabiria's visit to the variety show in The Nights of Cabiria; a priest high up in a tree, the mad uncle in the tree in Amarcord; the Lent carnival, the wild parties of La Dolce Vita, Juliet of the Spirits, and Satyricon; Moraldo's friendship with a little boy who works at the train station (which makes him see how much he has to lose by staying in his hometown) presages Marcello's friendship with the girl on the beach in La Dolce Vita (which makes him see how much he has lost in his quest for success in the big city).
With I Vitelloni Fellini begins the process of taking events from his own life, transforming them, and incorporating them into the events in his movies, a subject he dealt with directly in 8½. Taken together, four of his movies form a sort of cinematic autobiography that pinpoints Fellini's state of mind at various stages of his life. I Vitelloni is Fellini's portrait of the artist as a young man, leaving behind the comfortable strictures of the past for an unknown future. La Dolce Vita (1960) shows its main character on the verge of fame but still torn between the simplistic morality of his provincial origins and the disturbing decadence he sees all around him. 8½ (1963) portrays a middle-aged film director now famous but still haunted by images of the past, fearful of commitment (except to his art), and plagued by an entirely new set of problems, both personal and professional. Finally, in Amarcord (1973) Fellini returns to his more innocent and hopeful boyhood in search of lost time. It's no wonder these films resonate powerfully with audiences, so authentically does Fellini encapsulate the universal in the personal.
But even outside the context of Fellini's oeuvre, I Vitelloni stands as a brilliant film in its own right. Fellini enlivens his realistically observed story with the kind of near-surreal images and episodes that came to be associated with his style: the Miss Mermaid 1953 beauty contest that opens the film, a group of priests walking single-file on the beach, the bizarre shop of religious notions that one of the group is forced by his father to work in, the gilded angel statue he steals from the shop, the simple-minded Giudizio who helps him try (unsuccessfully) to peddle the angel to a nunnery and a monastery then installs the statue on a mound at the beach and adores its otherworldly beauty.
Fellini is masterful at interweaving the stories of the five different main characters, deftly juggling and mingling individual plot lines. And although each of the five vitelloni is an identifiable type, Fellini invests each with a distinct personality. He already shows his brilliance at matching the actor to the part and gets superb performances from all five of his leading men, including his brother Riccardo, who plays the musician. The most famous member of the cast was Alberto Sordi, and in fact Fellini organized the long shooting schedule around Sordi, who was touring Italy with a vaudeville company at the time. Sordi turns in a broad but at times quite touching comic performance as Alberto, the joker of the group. When he attends the carnival costume ball in drag—wearing a short blonde wig and one of his mother's hats and flapper dresses from the 1920s, with overdone makeup including a beauty spot and a comically vampish, pouty, heavy-lidded expression, doing an exaggerated tango with a male partner—just try not to think of Jack Lemmon in Some Like It Hot.
Interestingly, the only one of the main actors who never worked more than once with Fellini is Franco Interlenghi, who plays Fellini's alter ego, Moraldo. Is the fact that Interlenghi is easily the best-looking of the vitelloni—just as Marcello Mastroianni and Bruno Zanin, who performed the same function in later films, were clearly more attractive than Fellini himself—an indication that Fellini was just a bit vain? At any rate, Interlenghi does a first-rate job of portraying a person who is more an observer of events than a participant. The character never openly discusses the subject with any of his pals, but Interlenghi subtly conveys Moraldo's growing discomfort with his buddies and the dawning realization that if he doesn't take the plunge and leave them behind, he will be trapped in the same kind of dead-end life they are destined for.One of the last shots of the film leaves a lasting impression—a shot of Moraldo looking sadly from the early morning train that is taking him away, clearly fighting the urge to stay, waving tentatively at his friend the station boy, who is walking away from him, balancing on one rail as though walking on a tightrope. Moraldo almost seems to be saying goodbye to his past and to his youthful self. At the same time, images of each of the other vitelloni still asleep in their beds flash by in his mind and he knows that life in the little town will go on without him the same as always, while he is borne away to a new life somewhere else.
Director Point Totals in Critics Top 1000
Sunday, June 7, 2009
I totalled up all the films for each listing in the critics top 1000, and these are the resulting point totals, not that I agree with the results. I decided to go to 120 rather than 100 because of some of those just out of the 100, like Yimou, Cimino, Campion, Reifenstahl, Eastwood.
Photo courtesy of FanPix.com
Director Points
1.Hitchcock, Alfred - US
Photo courtesy of FanPix.com
Director Points
1.Hitchcock, Alfred - US
Director Film Counts in the Critics 1000
Monday, May 18, 2009
Directors with the most films in the critics top 1000.
Top Ten:
1. John Ford (18)
2. Fritz Lang (16)
3. Luis Bunuel (15)
4. Alfred Hitchcock (14)
5-6. Ingmar Bergman (13), Jean-Luc Godard (13)
7. Federico Fellini (12)
8-10. Howard Hawks (11), Stanley Kubrick (11), Akira Kurosawa (11)
10 each: Chaplin, Mizoguchi, J.Renoir
9 each: Scorsese, Visconti, Powell (9 total, 7 w Pressburger)
8
Top Ten:
1. John Ford (18)
2. Fritz Lang (16)
3. Luis Bunuel (15)
4. Alfred Hitchcock (14)
5-6. Ingmar Bergman (13), Jean-Luc Godard (13)
7. Federico Fellini (12)
8-10. Howard Hawks (11), Stanley Kubrick (11), Akira Kurosawa (11)
10 each: Chaplin, Mizoguchi, J.Renoir
9 each: Scorsese, Visconti, Powell (9 total, 7 w Pressburger)
8
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