The Final Take with Parker Mott

The famously garish Trevi Fountain scene in "La Dolce Vita".

There is an important irony that Federico Fellini’s La Dolce Vita (“The Sweet Life” – 1960) signifies a transition for Italian cinema, while its protagonist Marcello (Marcello Mastroianni) is ostensibly in one himself. The first refers to La Dolce Vita as Fellini’s departure from Italian neorealism and themes of salvation and grace within a bleak Italian social reality. The second – ultimately the consequence of the first – indicates Marcello’s fruitless stroll through a new Italian reality of stardom and media consumption. The social reality was just as bleak, but it was adorned by Marcello’s self-gratifying, insatiable, and ostensibly pleasurable search for “the sweet life”. (continue reading…)

2.5 Stars out of 4
(92 minutes)

These clowns will make you laugh and cry.

The Clowns is a film meant for Fellini. His films were, in their own right, parades casted through a lively cinematic technique. All his characters were colourful, and put on wide smiles and dewy-eyed gazes. All they were missing were red rubber noses. The year 1970 was when Fellini would reflect on his obsession, not with film, but with clowns. He admired clowns the way Chaplin marvelled at the city lights. Both subjects would turn into a title of their later works. (continue reading…)

4 Stars out of 4
(137 minutes)

A most memorable conclusion that, in fact, is a parade of memories.

Federico Fellini’s 8 1/2 is an honest and immersing experience on the life of a director. Fans of Rob Marshall’s Nine eat your heart out because this film (which is based on the 2009 Nine) follows one character characterized by others as a voice of wisdom, whereas he is really more of an obsessive, misogynistic, yet a persistent womanizer. He loves women, he hates them, they haunt him…his dreams. To an extent, 8 1/2 is a surreal film where the dreams are a means of escapism from the stressful life of the director Guido. (continue reading…)