8 1/2

Year: 1963

Grade: C

Country: Italy

Director: Fellini

Review

i guess the short review would be: i guess i’m not a fellini man. but that’s not very interesting, or very true. i don’t know his work all that well (i’ve only seen four of his films), but i know enough to say that when he starts on his lsd trip i get off the train. i understood what he was doing with this film and it’s interesting, in theory, but it just became a tedious after half an hour or so. the funny thing is that he had me hooked for the first 5-10 minutes, but lost me later down the line. it’s a well-made film in the technical sense – there are all sorts of nice touches and i wasn’t ever lost for more than a few seconds, which is hard to do given the kind of movie this is. i was semi-interested in the protagonist and entirely uninterested in the secondary characters. i did laugh a couple times and the style is admirable for its uniqueness, but there wasn’t much here to keep me interested enough to watch the entire movie. that’s right, after an hour and a half i stopped the movie and moved on…. “adaptation” owes a lot to this film.