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3.0étoiles sur 5
It's Fellini !, Oct. 7 2009
Perhaps this isn't the best introduction to Fellini's films but it is nevertheless an interesting mid-career extravaganza. I think some of his earlier black and white films such as "8 1/2", were more masterful, but this and his "Satyricon" are fascinating experiments nevertheless.
If you are unfamiliar with his cinema and are willing and eager to watch something completely different and very personal, then go for it! If you like this free form, collage style movie though, you might prefer "Satyricon" which is much more extravagant in its art direction and cinematography.
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3.0étoiles sur 5
Kind of a mess., Aoû 25 2004
I found it really hard to love this film as I do his others. Same thing goes for Satyricon. This film just seems like Fellini showing off and going on a visual rant. I had the same vibe watching this film as I did watching "Akira Kurosawa's Dreams." I really think the magic in Fellini's films dissapeared after 8 1/2. Roma seems like an attempt at simulating that magic. I will give this film 3 stars for the fashion show segment. Seeing priests on rollerskates made me laugh.
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5.0étoiles sur 5
2757 (Ab Urbe Condita), Juil 19 2004
Would "Caligula" or "Nero" be shocked at what their city, the Eternal City, the City to which all roads once led, has become so many years into the distant future? Or would they (probably more likely) find a way to fit right in somehow? This is one of the "notions" that I found myself pondering as I watched this movie. It really is a great movie, and it is certainly worth any true film fan's time. I may have even liked (some of it at least) better than (again, "some of") La Dolce Vita. Having grown up in a very Italian family - with my father having been born in a "pagliarone" ( roughly, a slang dialect term meaning "stone hut") in an ancient and very rural village probably not much unlike the one Fellini's main character ventures out to Rome from - I myself was definitely "right at home" , so to speak, watching scenes like the famous "dinner on the piazza". (Personally I could watch that scene again and again and not get tired of it, but...maybe it is "an Italian thing", so to speak, and others would not find it so amusing). However there certainly is no dearth of general humor to be found in the antics of the wild cast of characters which Fellini always brings into his films. And Roma of course is no exception to this. For example, the bedridden obese old woman in a hairnet, who owns the building that he stays in in Rome when he first arrives there, who tells him, "now let's just live in peace and not bust each other's balls"! Or the bald old man who does a rather convincing Mussolini impersonation. My personal favorite though would probably be either the ultra-tanned would-be "Continental" kind of guy who approaches the female American tourist telling her, "You VERY bella" and offering to take her picture, OR the guy in the piazza scene (which is supposed to have taken place some thirty years prior to that) who was wearing one of those nylon "do-rags" that rap stars favor today, and yelling up to his dark, beautiful brooding girlfriend to get down to the piazza before he beats the hell out of her ... "again". Sure, these are walking stereotypes, these characters, and negative ones at that. But, as they say, there is a kernel of truth (at least) in all stereotypes is there not? For instance that "dinner on the piazza" scene that I mentioned before? It does perhaps resemble some sort of "prototypical" summer-night-in-Bensonhurst, or somewhere like that, with plenty of gold chains, "dago-t's", and "pane e vino" to go around. On a more serious note however the most touching scene (and this is a point that is usually generally agreed upon, I think, by most of the movie's fans) is the scene of the sudden (and apparently accidental) destruction of the ancient Roman frescoes by the modern Roman work-crew. Obviously this is Fellini's artistic "condemnation" , if you will, of the massive industrialization of the City in modern times, and the (clearly potentially disastrous) effects of what we may call the "godless modern" encountering the ancient and sacred. Cruel and loud machinery encountering the long-buried, the "resting-in-peace", the, once again, "sacred". It is in a way akin to some of the imagery in the much newer film called Fahrenheit 9/11. There we see American tanks and fighter jets turning up the sand with shells and bombs, and setting fires and explosions, in the very "Cradle of Civilization", the land of the very first codified and written-out system of law and order. Such imagery, like Fellini's vision of the vanishing ancient frescoes, is so evocative it can truly make the viewer want to weep. Athough Roma has improved much since Fellini filmed it back in 1972 ( I just left there myself a couple of months ago so I can say this is definitely so), in this film, during the time that he is showing it to us, the City appears to be delusional, vaguely delirious with fever perhaps, or in the throes of a restless night full of tossings-and-turnings and wild "half-waking" dreams. It is these dreams which are in fact the "images" and "vignettes" that Fellini shows to us throughout the film. Overall, in comparison with the (mostly) worthless garbage that is cluttering the racks at your local neighborhood video rental store, this film (ANY of Fellini's films for that matter) would certainly be much more rewarding for the would-be connoisseur of truly good movies to pick up and take home tonight.
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