8½ (1963) Federico Fellini One just can’t deny...

12:35 am - Sun, Jun 24, 2012: 34 notes

8½ (1963)
Federico Fellini

One just can’t deny the beauty and the magnificency of this movie. It’s rated for some critics as one of the best — if not the best film ever made about filmmaking. And I may agree. Fellini’s camera is delighting and its actors often seem to be dancing rather than simply walking — like most Italian directors of his generation, he didn’t record sound on the set but post-synched the dialogue allowing him to play music during every scene. The final cut was a surreal-creative film and, as such, it was a complete success for me.

I just had one tiny little problem: I hated every damn character involved in this. Every one of them. Felinni’s biographical story was dull, repetitive, chaotic and even frustrating at times. Perhaps it is because I don’t believe in all that Freudian crap. Every character was only into themselves, their own obsessions and their own fantasies. The emptiness of life. All of Fellini/Guido’s women, his dreams, his frustrations, his doubts and confusions. His work ran wild through jungles of Freudian Christianism, sexual images and a pointlessly compicated life.

The same happened to me with Annie Hall, for instance. Just plain drama and complications put together without a road or an end. It just didn’t work for me.

Technically I think the movie is wonderful, sadly its content is not.

The experts say 8.1 IMDB | 97% Rotten Tomatoes
I say 80.

(Artwork by Needle Design)