That's one of my fave Fulcis. Although I love the full-on excess of Zombie Flesheaters (as it's known in the UK) I increasingly prefer his more restrained (by his standards) gothic stuff like House by the Cemetery, City of the Living Dead and (his best film for me) The Beyond. I love it when Fulci gets all gloomy.

Yeah, 'disquieting' is a good way of describing it. And you're right, the spider scene is from The Beyond. I suppose Fulci's reputation is built on those kinds of outre set-pieces but in retrospect I think they often cheapened a lot of his movies - I love The Beyond but have to admit some of the set-pieces, like the one including the spiders, while a lot of fun, is ultimately a bit silly, really. The only film that they really work in for me is Zombie Flesheaters, which never takes itself too seriously from the beginning.

unfortunately i must spread more butter, etc. but FUCK YES. on eveyr count.

my favorite moment is when he hides under the table like a little kid.

though maybe i like la dolce vita a little more. or no... asa nisi masa!

i agree with everything you said, its my favorite movie as well. it is also really funny, something that isnt discussed as much. and for me, my favorite is the last scene (and all of the others) i am a big fan of dance and carnival. the last scene of this movie is basically my favorite "thing" ever, as in favorite film scene favorite music favorite imaginary. just perfect.

"
I've never understood why so many people hate this movie. The jokes are funny, Howard is convincing, the cast is wonderful (Lea Thompson, Jeffrey Jones, and Tim Robbins), the crude 80's CGI is great, and the stop-motion animation towards the end is even more impressive.

Every time I watch this movie, I enjoy it. No matter how old I am. This has the same amount of charm as the first Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle movie, except with a raunchier sense of humor.

9/10



My first time seeing it in full. I'm intrigued by Lucas' non-Star Wars related efforts and I've gotta say - I like what I see very much so.

Lucas paints a wonderfully fun portrayal of his beloved decade, and even manages to get great performances out of his cast, which is almost shocking to anyone who has seen any of the more recent Star Wars films (I can't stand Hayden Christensen in anything he's in). In fact, this really reminded me of a Linklater film - except way before Richard's time in the industry. Anyone else feel that? It just feels so free-flowing, without any real central star at all.

I was confused by the ending. Where a few main characters pictures showed up and there was a brief description of what happens to each after the events of the film. Is this based on Lucas' friends and him? I don't quite understand.

Anywho, I'm watching THX 1138 tonight. It looks trippier than hell. I wish Lucas would break through his Star Wars nutshell and make something fresh and original again. His heart obviously isn't anywhere near that franchise anymore.

How is this?

I've always found Svankmajer's stuff to be really rad.

I've only seen 2 Fellini films. I really liked 8 1/2, and loathed La Dolce Vita. LDV left such a bad taste in my mouth.

Amarcord looks very visually stimulating and queer, I think I'd like that one a lot. Satyricon seems it would bore me.

ha



That's a pretty fair assessment. I'd probably score it with an 8.

What exactly is so good about La Dolce Vita? I've never understood it. I hear it praised all the time.

EDIT: serious question

7/10
The film is a bit awkward at times, I think it gets better in the second half when things get darker.

Only once, and honestly I didn't even bother finishing it. Which is a crime, I know. I definitely at least got 3/4 of the way through though.

I don't think the symbolism really spoke to me at all, and I never really picked up on the dreaminess of it, like with 8 1/2. But I can see where you're coming from. The fountain scene and that statue do stick out in my mind, but I cna't remember much anything else.

Funny how what you took as dreamlike and beautiful, I took as boring events in a fancy pair of high heels. Like literally, that is odd to me. ha I'd like to think I can agree with you more times than not. I do appreciate hearing what you liked about it though. Maybe I'll try and go into it with new eyes. I am a bit older than when I previously watched it.

I don't think there's anything particularly personal behind the ending, besides Lucas likely having had schoolfriends who graduated and then went straight off to Vietnam. In that sense I took it as one of those 'end of innocence' stories, and was maybe the key film in ushering in a kind of teen nostalgia (people like Corman had always focused on contemporary youth cults). It seemed to solidify a kind of cult-of-innocence around that whole early RnR era, that obviously inspired later films like Grease, Peggy Sue Got Married, Porky's and the first Back to the Future or TV shows like Happy Days and The Wonder Years.

It also gets a lot of credit for its innovative approach to soundtracks, using nothing but pre-recorded pop music. That was apparently a big influence on Scorsese (although Scorsese argues it was Kenneth Anger's Scorpio Rising), as well as the way scenes were kind of synchronised to the music, without the film being a bona fide musical. (Again, Scorpio Rising did it first but more people obviously saw American Graffiti.)

I think AG is a massive film on so many levels: ushering in an entire 50s nostalgia industry that still remains; translating previously 'underground' ideas into viable mainstream ones; etc.

hm let's see the first time i saw it i came home drunk at 3am and it was on tv and i was like "what the fuck is this???" it was the part with the dad and the dancers in the sad cabaret and what happens after.

anyway eventually i saw it in full, i've seen it a bunch of times, i saw it when it was bought and restored by scorsese & it was shown in all its glory at the national gallery of art. it was fucking gorgeous.

anyway, about the movie

first, if you have eyes you'll have to agree at least that the cinematography is delicious. the editing is also perfect enough to be invisible. so thats takes care of that.

now for the story which is what i supposed bored you.

***SPOILER ALERT***

la dolce vita tells a pretty straighforward linear story, which is that of the successive degradation of a sellout who throws away the chance of being an artist in order to chase money and meaningless relationships. he goes from promising writer to journalist to pr sellout.

this happens in a kind of progressive spiritual void-- the church isn't there, philosophy isn't there (his philosopher friend kills himself), his father isn't there, he can find no love, the old nobility is a bunch of inbred degenerates, divorces get celebrated with parties, and when he has a chance to hear again his muse (the little girl at the beach) he quickly abandons her for the noise & racket of "the world". which is why at the end she reappears, remember? and he can't hear her anymore, he walks away with his party friends, and there's a chasm (literally, some sort of formation on the sand) between them. this all works on the images--no subtitles necessary really.

f you look at parallels, claudia cardinale in 81/2 is the same muse figure, the woman who inspires him to make art rather than fuck (his mistress) or feel terrible about himself (his wife). this is almost classic plato. 81/2 is in many ways the same story as la dolce vita, except that this character chose art and is able to find some sort of salvation or escape. by the way, woody allen almost literally ripped that off for deconstructing harry.

now this tale of degeneration is all a pretty clear and obvious narrative and not revolutionary in any sense, you could go back to balzac's "lost illusions" for its sources, or even further, you could look at picaresque literature and find the same themes of progressive corruption of its hero--even going back to the satyricon. still, the way he does it is wonderful and 50+ years after he made it still relevant to our media-centric time of tmz and perez hilton.

give it another shot if you can or maybe watch it with the commentary on.

but anyway, hm, the problem i think you have relating is that the world where marcello ends is the world where you begin-- the world of kim kardashian and jerry springer and nihilism. fellini saw this era coming on and his vision turned out pretty prophetic, but looking back with no reference to a world that had meaning you might not get a sense of anything lost and therefore not see the tragedy.

Don't worry about it. Have you seen Chris Morris' Nathan Barley? There's a scene in it where the hero, a journalist for a style mag, finally sees this empty self congratulating hipster world that he's a part of, for what it is. He then announces that 'the idiots are winning' and has a kind of nervous breakdown. You think he's gonna rebel against it all but he ultimately just joins them. That's pretty much La Dolce Vita's message.

And in a way, that's why La Dolce Vita, more than almost any other art movie I can think of, has endured so well. Marcello Mastroianni's character remains a kind of contemporary archetype: relateable to anyone who's ever found themselves in a scene they think is drowning their true potential but who lacks the drive or sense of purpose to move beyond it. It's two and a half hours of someone on SYG announcing that this place is a waste of time and that they're leaving, only to come back a week later feeling a little bit disgusted with themselves. Read el symbols response again and apply it to this place. Almost uncanny. But where's the girl on the beach?

i really enjoyed little otik. i have seen a few of his shorts as well as alice. this is definitely a bizarre film, but also much more "normal than the other things of his that i have seen. i really like the fairy tale quality to it. i would definitely see it again.

The word "basic," I believe, was also used. "Simple," maybe.

Then why is it so fucking long? And why does 8 1/2 feel just as long? Do films about self-indulgent people need to be so damned self-indulgent?

I Vitelloni and Nights of Cabiria are my two favs. I'm sure they bore a lot of viewers, but La Dolce Vita bores me, so there you go. And the last time I watched 8 1/2, I fast-forwarded to the bordello scene (which is still mighty impressive) and skipped the rest.

But then, Bergman is my favorite director. I'm sure his stuff bores most people to tears, but I find damn near every frame a thrill. To each their own.

???

i'm sure synonyms happen.



I'd ask Fellini, but he's dead.

But if you ask me why it goes over and meanders so much, i'd say it's because it's concerned not so much with its hero but also the world around him. so each "episode" covers something different-- religion, the cult of celebrity, the failure of philosophy, the failure of the family, etc. it's a big complicated world and fellini dared to take on the challenge of surveying it.



I suppose it's cuz you don't like it? Just a guess. Einstein had some ideas about this.



you don't have to like these movies, but "self-indulgent"? you mean it's wrong of a director to pursue teh themes they like? i don't understand the accusation. it's art, you know? "self-indulgent" by definition.

also: ranting on the internet about movies instead of saving hungry children? self-indulgent.

but to accuse la dolce vita of being self-indulgent just because it's long is an error in judgment. the movie is about all sorts of things going on in society and the world, it's almost a documentary, it's concerned with the things that surround us, so no, it's not so much about "self" or little personal obsessions, which is why it endures so well.



great stuff



i'm sure. it's impossible for everyone to please everyone else all the time.

wait, what do i have to do with your boredom? and why does this matter?


and this is relevant because...?



congrats are in order?


yes, but what does this have to do with la dolce vita or why that movie is great, regardless of your own personal tastes? something can be great and boring at the same time. farming, for example. or the fucking illiad and its unending catalogs.


of course. but so?

felikson asked a serious question so i gave him a serious answer. my post above wasn't written for you, but if you feel otherwise i can assure you those feelings are misguided.

anyway, you still could refute what i'm telling him and argue that la dolce vita is not great, or not that important, but doing so with the sole argument that it bores you personally is way more self-indulgent than la dolce vita itself could ever be. yes? yes.

This is too easy.

EDIT: Ok. Fine. I'll take you seriously.

I, like you, was expressing an opinion. That's it. Why take it so personal? My gripe was with Fel, not you. Geez. Chill out. Anyway, none of this stuff matters in the least.

And I'm sure Dr. F appreciated your response. It was well thought out. I doubt he understood it, but that's his fault and another matter entirely.

Hug?

lolol okay sure, but no assgrab.

i though you had taken offense at my commentary or something. i didn't get that you were arguing him felixon via my post. anyway, shit happens, sorry for the misunderstanding.

i'll have to take issue with "i doubt he understood it" though. i like felixon, which is why i took time to write him an explain, and i don't want to get in the middle of your fight if you're having one.

but yeah, peace and love and all that shit, of course. i've said this here before but i don't care so much about agreements/disagreements as i care about people who give enough of a shit about movies to take time to discuss them.

Cool, etc.

This is interesting. My issue with Dr. F--who may very well be a nice fellow in "real life"--is that he wants to be a filmmaker, and his biggest influences are Buffy and comic books. The world doesn't need yet another "filmmaker" like that.

Huh. I guess that means I care too.

alright but felixson doesn't "wanna be" a filmmaker, he is one already. as for influences, we all grow up in our ow time & place and-- buffy rules man!! haha. plus there are some great comic books. look, chaplin came out of vaudeville

okay, the game is ON! gotta go pursue moar hi culture on tv

--I'll give you a hug because a few pages back I recommended that very movie.

--Chaplin was a preachy ballerina. Keaton was the real genius.

--I don't care about culture, critics, Criterion or the cults that have classics.

i meant the fútbol game! i didn't even get to finish my post cuz transmission had started.

modern times = teh win

Never seen this one before actually, and I'm a bit a shamed for it, but I saw it the other day and I think it was fuckin super!
4/5.

One of the most disturbing fucking movies EVER.

Accattone

I've probably already given my views about this elsewhere on the thread, as I tend to watch it quite a lot. It's increasingly becoming the film I go to first when I feel like wallowing in that whole romanticised low-life thing for a bit. It's pure cultural tourism on my part, and highly dubious if I reflect on it but, whether it's Accattone, Mean Streets (which is really Accattone's American equivalent) or some uber deadbeat Paul Morrissey movie, I just can't help myself.

And Franco Citti really did have one of the best, most beautiful faces in all of cinema.



It's a shame that so many people only know Pasolini through Salo - a film that I really don't like at all.

About the ending - Oh. I guess that makes sense. I still don't really like that part though. It was off-putting and distracted me from the feelings the narration was supposed to provide.

Either way, I loved the film in a big, bad way. It was one of those rides where I felt like EVERYONE must be able to enjoy this. Sorta like The Breakfast Club, or A Christmas Story.

I was mainly surprised by just how modern the film felt. I think that's why I kept drawing the big Linklater comparison. (Am I alone on that one?) The use of pop music helped, I didn't even really think about that, I've grown so accustomed. Funny theory about Scorsese; Anger is much hipper to reference than Lucas, after all.

Still have to watch THX 1138. Maybe tonight or tomorrow. That looks astonishing. I wsh Lucas would step out of his shell and try something fresh again for a change. He's super-talented behind the scenes.



Ha! I'd never heard that before. That's pretty neat. Eraserhead's great - easily my favorite from Lynch. One of my favorite films of all time, actually. I don't think he'll ever be able to top it.



Yeah, I must've missed the boat on that one. I'm definitely one who embraces pop culture though. Maybe not so much - modern pop culture - but I still don't think the message of this film is for me. I'm materialistic as fuck, and I like it that way. Your wording with that post was serene, though.





Maybe I'll give this one another shot with new eyes. Thanks guys.

I was in Kings Cross recently and it's progressively being turned into John Carpenter's worst nightmare. I like the interiors of The Guardian's building, which contain a pretty sweet auditorium and art gallery, but you're right, no respectable low-life would hang around in that area now. Plus, I got this feeling that parts of the scenery have been bitten off by an enormous entrepreneurial mouth.

I re-watched Gary Oldman’s ‘’Nil by Mouth’’ in honour of your earlier mention of it on this thread. This movie is a perennial 10/10 movie for me and it gets better with every watch. I rank it alongside Larry Peerce’s ‘’The Incident’’ as one of my favourite dealing with the more unpleasant things in life. I’ve also found an old Gary Oldman interview, recently, where he talks about the film and explains how it’s one he had to make, particularly because you have movies like ‘’Leaving Las Vegas’’ where the alcoholic seems like he’s been pampered too much to really represent the real effects of rampant alcohol abuse on your body and your relationships with others. In the same interview I was happy to find out that he seems to feel the same sort of irritation for Tarantino’s work as me. You see, I don’t have a problem watching ‘’Pulp Fiction’’ or ‘’Kill Bill’’ for pure entertainment, it’s the sort of geekery they transude that gets me going. I am aware his work is meant to be viewed as a cartoonish regurgitation of his film-watching habits, and with that in mind I can agree that he’s alright as a director. When you hear clueless bloke after clueless bloke proclaiming him the biggest thing that happened to cinema for the umpteenth time though, that’s when you wish he didn’t get the sort of recognition and success he normally gets. This also explains my snide remark towards him when I mentioned Mario Bava’s ‘’Rabid Dogs’’, who’s one of his favourite directors, it seems.

Other movies I watched recently include Mark L. Lester’s ‘’Class of 1984’’. I always liked this film and it was good re-watching it for the first time in years. Timothy Van Patten is excellent as the psychotic kid who leads the gang of little shits making the school a dump to work in for teacher Mr Norris. For some reason I remembered it being filmed in a much grittier style. I think that is probably because the first time I’ve seen it I was 11 or 12 years old, so it must have had a more dramatic impact on me then.

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And, to bring down the level of intellect:



I was addicted to these films as a kid. And as cheesy as this was, I am still terrified by it even now. Dead kids on tricycles ~shivers~

I can't recall if it's 3 or 4 in which puppet strings are ripped out of this suicidal kid's arms. Awesome.

Prometheus was a let-down.

At least Howard the Duck had Lea Thompson's panties. So....soft. so....pink.

Its NOES 3, and I watched that on tv this weekend as well. I remember it fondly for being the one with breasts in it. Although, I think there is a topless girl in "Freddy's Revenge" but that movie is awful.

I was invited to go watch it tomorrow...but I might choose sleep instead.

NOES 3 is easily my favorite in the series. Then the original, and then Wes Craven's New Nightmare - it was such a refreshing change of pace for the franchise, I thought.

I think NOES reached it's ultimate low in the one where Roseanne Barr and Tom Arnold make a not-so-subtle cameo. Part 6 I think? That was lame.

Will be seeing Prometheus with my dad, this father's day.

Aha! Awesome!! I think Brad Pitt is my absolute favorite actor ever. And it's not because his pelvic muscles are cut from petrified canyon rock and his abs are as supple as a strip of bubble wrap ;) - but because he's just a fan-fucking-tastic actor.

I just watched SNATCH last night. Third time through. This time I used the subtitle option on Netflix, and you know what? Pretty damn good movie if you know what the hell is being said! (I love how the Pikeys are "impossible to understand" to the main characters, who are impossible to understand to anyone watching, making the Pikeys doubly incomprehensible to us!)

I tend to think that big train stations in major cities have a duty to be as seedy as possible. They should always make anyone who's just arrived feel a bit apprehensive about what they're in for. Same as I think every major shopping area should have its little crowd of junkies, like the ones that used to hang around all day outside the Astoria or opposite, on the stairs going down to TCR station. They've gone now, too. I remember being particularly impressed by the quantity and quality of low life at the main station in Frankfurt a few years ago, and I always hear good things about the station at Naples, too. I've never been but Naples in general strikes me as a European city that really knows how to do seediness properly. Someone should do a series of guide books that concentrates on those kinds of factors, just for me.


Yeah, I sort of take Nil By Mouth film for granted now but it really is an astonishing piece of work. It's a different kind of seediness, though. More gritty and certainly less romantic than a film like Accattone. Although that might be because I've more experience of contemporary London than I have of 60s Rome. Nil By Mouth disturbs me in a way that few films ever have.


Do people still think about him like that? I remember people talking in those terms around the time of Pulp Fiction but I tend to find mentioning his name nowadays is more likely to generate rolled eyes and dismissive sighs than anything else, even among those (like myself) who quite liked his earlier films.

Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore

One of Scorsese's most underrated films, I think. Maybe because it's one of his least typical (besides Kundun, obviously (which I quite like) and New York New York (which I don't)). It feels more like something Cassavetes might've done. Very much an actors film I think, if that makes sense. One of those films where good acting takes precedent over everything else, like American Beauty, or anything that involves Meryl Streep. The story feels like it could've been adapted from a Dolly Parton or Reba McEntire song. It's Scorsese's most woman-centric film, which kept making me think of Jackie Brown (probably because of Genteel Death's post), which I also think is Tarantino''s most underrated movie.


When I retire, I want to live in that film.

I think Inglorious Bastards helped him quite a bit with the eye rollers, but it still didn't make up for the damage Kill Bill inflicted. I love Kill Bill, but it was too iconic and bombastic and kitschy for all the film school types, who would prefer iconoclastic and intentionally challenging films.

Bastards being 50% foreign language and 3+ hours long definitely helped, but it's nothing like it was in '94 with Pulp Fiction turning "Cannes" into a household word, and Reservoir Dogs being praised for its screenplay. I agree, those days are over. I love all of his films (Jackie Brown included, and Kill Bill possibly most of all!) but yeah name dropping Tarantino is always met with kind of a "oh, come on" look in most social situations.