La Dolce Vita...

I watched Federico Fellini's La Dolce Vita last night, and as usual found it to be an incredibly rich experience. Every damn time I watch it, I come up with one or more insights into my own life--things to do, not to do, patterns recognized, temptations resisted or embraced and the consequences of each...This, along with 8 1/2, are probably my two favorite movies, and have been since I first saw them as a callow youth at the Yale University Film Society. I doubt they're still showing films like this--sometime around 1990, I noticed that they had switched to more crowd-pleasing stuff like The Matrix, where the audience can experience thrills, chills, and the Great American Sport of nostalgia all at once...Actually, come to think of it, they never showed movies like La Dolce Vita at YUFS--I saw it courtesy of the Berkeley People's Free Film Society, a sputtering relic of the Cahiers du Cinema-era that had somehow survived to the Fall of 1987. By Christmas it had bitten the dust, finally killed off when the undergrad running it emptied its coffers and never came back after Xmas Break...



Roger Ebert has some perceptive things to say about La Dolce Vita, so instead of nattering on, I'll link to his review.