Originally Posted by !@#$%!
the first time i saw la dolce vita i came home drunk at 3am and wanted something to eat and on the kitchen tv (i was still living w/ my parents) there was this crazy-ass scene of a dude, his dad, and some hookers that got my attention, and i was "what the fuck is this"? and watched till the end. it was la dolce vita. i must have been 18 or 19.
since then i've seen that movie maybe 10 times, it's my favorite movie ever.
maybe this doesn't make sense to you in a world of tmz and perez hilton, but back in the post-war era the world was changing, in many ways for the worse.
la dolce vita is not about dreamlike beauty, it's about the progressive degradation of an artist when he fails to find answers in his work, in god, in philosophy, in his own family, in women, in art, and gives up writing his promising novel altogether to end up being a publicist for hire who doesn't give a shit about anything and jumps from one meaningless orgy to another. i qualify this with "meaningless" because there are good ones--but i digress.
when you watch it again (if you watch it again), first make sure you have a proper screen and the right aspect ratio (many old versions were chopped off to fit TVs); then pay attention to the "parts" that the movie is divided into-- because of its episodic nature, the film works like a novel (most movies work like a short story with one main plotline). there are lots of symbolic elements in the thing, i.e., the girl at the beach resort that he sees again at the end (but can't hear this time); his friend steiner the intellectual whom he runs into (significantly) a church--and what happens to him later; the fucking helicopter jesus for fucks sakes! and all of this comes together in a way that works like an essay, not a straighforward manifesto but a meandering exposition of the life of an artist progressively lost to what's worst in the XX century (in the XXI century it's not "worse" because there is little to compare, it's just the universe in which we live, or-- there's worse even-- like 2 girls 1 cup).
anyway, check it out again before you throw away your film dreams and end up making gangbang porn in some lost hovel of the san fernando valley (then again, this might be your dream, so i don't know).
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