La Dolce Vita

Well, it's taken me five months of turning it on, getting bored and turning it off, but I've finally done it. I've finally finished "La Dolce Vita." And if that achievement means anything, it means I'll never have to see it again.

Watching this movie was like an endurance test. I'll gladly sit through a six-hour miniseries like "The Best of Youth;" "The Decalogue," ten hours of the Ten Commandments, is at the top of my NetFlix queue, very closely followed by nine hours of Holocaust memories in "Shoah;" heck, I'd even like to see the 15-and-a-half-hour-long "Berlin Alexanderplatz" when they release it on DVD in November. But I could hardly stand a comparatively lean three hours of "La Dolce Vita."

In three hours of screentime, nothing much happens. A self-hating journalist covers various stories, hangs out with his friends, abuses various women, and parties all night long. Somehow, nothing really happens in three hours of screen time. On a discussion board I go to, a lot of people said that "The Great Gatsby" was "a bunch of rich fucks bitching and moaning about how much it sucks to be a rich fuck." I guess that's what "La Dolce Vita" felt like: A journalist covering celebrities bitches and moans about how empty his life is.

I can't tell if the movie had a point, but if it did, it probably has something to do with the cult of celebrity. Apparently, Federico Fellini could see the future of Hollywood and the tabloids, with photographers trying to take pictures of a woman as she learns her husband's gone crazy and killed their kids, or trying to take pictures of various stars. If that's the message of the film, then it's sure irrelevant now, since anybody with common sense knows what sick things papparazzi are. (And yes, I know that "papparazzi" comes from the character "Papparazzo" in this film, and no, I really don't care.) Maybe if the film had a spark of life to it, I could forgive that, but it doesn't. It's simply tedious.

I've tried 2.05 Federico Fellini films (this, "La Strada," and I gave up about five or ten minutes into "I Vitelloni"), and I've disliked them all. Call me a snob, but I don't want to sit through movies by somebody without something to say. (Unless, of course, the movie is entertaining, which I haven't found Fellini's films to be.) In both of the movies of his I've sat through, it felt like the movie wasn't trying to make a point, or if it was, it didn't know what the point was.

All the same, I can't help but think, "Maybe I should watch some more of his movies, just to be sure." Maybe I've been brainwashed by too many readings of Ebert's "The Great Movies" books, but for some reason, I can't just dismiss Fellini off of two movies. Maybe I should check out "Amarcord," or maybe try and finish "I Vitelloni," or maybe I could wait for "Juliet of the Spirits" to show on TCM, or...

No. No, no. Fellini's films are just too slow. Somehow, he managed to make movies where I get bored after watching maybe two or three minutes of it. It's like he went out of his way to avoid having plots in his films. I might try and subject myself to a few more of his films, and maybe I'll find a gem, like what happened when I kept watching Kurosawa films. On the other hand, maybe life is too short to sit and watch movies from people I find dull.