David Vining's Blog, page 169

Wonder Woman 1984

This movie was awful. I really wasn’t a big fan of the original Wonder Woman, but it was competent enough to sustain two hours. This feels like a workprint, the first cut of a movie made from all the footage shot and with any inclination to keep in before any judicious editing has occurred. Now, judicious editing wouldn’t have saved the film, but it would have certainly saved me some time. There’s no way in God’s green Earth that this movie should be two and a half hours long. This is an hou...

City of Women

With about thirty minutes left in Fellini’s City of Women, I was convinced that I was going to give this a much lower rating, that the collection of weird sights and sounds that Marcello Mastroianni weaved through, all involving women, was going to amount to little more than a slideshow of Felliniesque images that never amounted to anything. And then, I saw the portrait of Donald Sutherland as Casanova hanging in the background of a scene and the pieces began to come together for me. I do wo...

Orchestra Rehearsal

This is often talked about as Fellini’s deconstruction of contemporary Italian society, and that obviously has merit. However there’s something at this little television movie’s center that seems so blindingly obvious to me that it feels remarkable that more people don’t talk about it. Fellini was one of those directors who made incredibly personal films all the time, and I don’t think Orchestral Rehearsal is any different. I think that the presence of unions, artists, and a conductor point ...

Fellini’s Casanova

Fellini followed up one of his easiest films to love with one of his hardest films to love, and that has a lot to do with how the production of his Casanova came together. Dino de Laurentiis, the famed Italian producer who had worked with Fellini on La Strada and Nights of Cabiria, felt that Fellini and Casanova were the perfect marriage of artist and subject, but Fellini disagreed. He found Casanova, the historical figure sketched by himself in his memoirs written in prison, to be a disgust...

Amarcord

Out of all of Fellini’s work, this feels like the one that comes from the purest, most innocent, and most nostalgic part of Fellini’s mind. Born from his memories of his childhood in Rimini, Amarcord acts as a companion piece to his previous film, Roma, as well as feeling almost like a prequel to I Vitelloni. Largely about a group of young boys in Fascist Italy, it’s a collection of memories and events strung together in almost dreamlike fashion from the end of one winter to the end of the n...

A Second Look at Fellini Satyricon

So, as I wrote in my review of Roma, the similar structure and differing opinions I had between that film and Fellini’s Roma made me want to revisit Fellini’s weird look at Ancient Rome. I got the movie with the Essential Fellini boxset, but I was torn about whether to watch it again. I had already reviewed it, and I didn’t really like it the first time I saw it. So, with Roma coming to an end and a surprising amount of time left in the evening, I decided to just do it. I threw in Disc 1...

Fellini’s Roma

Watching this, and enjoying it, made me think of my review of Fellini’s Satyricon and feeling bad about it because both are episodic series of events that may or may not tie together, but I was simply more entertained by Roma than by the earlier film. Since it had been a while since I had seen Satyricon (and it had been out of the context of the rest of Fellini’s work), I did end up revisiting it immediately afterwards. I’ll have thoughts on that later, but, in short, my opinion remains the ...

I Clowns

I was going to skip this one in my survey of Fellini films, seeing it listed as a TV Documentary on the IMDb (it did get a limited cinema release in Italy immediately after its television debut), but then I read the littlest bit about it and realized that I needed to watch it. It fit far too well into Fellini’s thematic wheelhouse and sounded like it carried some of his later stylistic choices in their earliest phase (notably including himself as a sort of character). So, after some searchin...

Juliet of the Spirits

This was born from a place of pain, but not Federico Fellini’s pain. Made as a present to his wife, Giulietta Masina, Juliet of the Spirits is the Technicolor parade of the grotesque dramatization of Giulietta’s life dealing with the perennially unfaithful Italian director. You see, she loved Federico, loved him dearly, but his infidelity hurt her. And it’s obvious. There are events in this movie based on their relationship, and, according to what I’ve read, it was all very difficult for Giu...

8 1/2

On the surface, this movie is pure navel gazing on the part of Federico Fellini, and I think that’s definitely part of the whole package. However, Federico Fellini was able to move beyond that self-reflective part of the story and tell a story about statis in life, something that can appeal to a broader audience, instead of just his own qualms. It also represents the complete and definitive break from his neo-realist roots. La Strada represented a thematic move. Nights of Cabiria continued a...