WasAnnon
Slow pace in the most part of the movie.
Tobias Burrows
It's easily one of the freshest, sharpest and most enjoyable films of this year.
Cody
One of the best movies of the year! Incredible from the beginning to the end.
ladytrol
True masterpiece, in all its complexity - fun before everything (and this movie certainly contains everything life is about - growing up, family, political, mental health, loss and various life issues presented with such warmth, wisdom and humor).
I have watched Amarkord a dozen of times since I first saw it in the mid 1990's - since then I watch it every couple of years and enjoy the movie everytime even I know it by heart.
classicsoncall
I guess I'm just not meant to be a Fellini fan. I've seen three of his films ("La Strada", "Nights of Cabiria", and "81/2"), and though I've rated them well enough based on his visual style and technique, they didn't really engage me in a meaningful way. This film is most similar to "La Strada" in regard to the randomness of the situations presented. There really is no coherent narrative to the story and scenes proceed along rather arbitrarily. If the idea is that Fellini is conjuring up nostalgic memories from his past I'd be okay with that, but I miss the structure of a story with a sound beginning, middle and ending. In this picture, the director appears to be satirizing his youth perhaps, turning daily life into something of a circus with adolescent desires and male fantasies abounding. A particular thought occurred to me regarding the wandering narrator who kept popping up from time to time. I thought he might have been the adult Titta (Bruno Zanin), all grown up and reflecting back on his youth, but that was not the case. In retrospect, that might have been a way for Fellini to more effectively tell his story. For this viewer, I'll have to content myself acknowledging that when it comes to Fellini, I'm just not going to get it.
tomgillespie2002
Translated as 'I Remember', the great Italian director Federico Fellini's Amarcord is a series a comedic vignettes that look back at his childhood in a 1930's coastal town. Apart from the intertwining inhabitants, there is nothing thematically or even tonally linking the stories together, much like memory itself. The film takes places over the course of a year, with nothing signifying the passage of time apart from the subtle changes in seasons. Apart from the film's brief focus on the rise of fascism, this is Fellini at his most satirically light, with his usual mocking of the bourgeoisie making way for some amusingly childish humour and some beautifully photographed scenes.True to Fellini's style, Amarcord is occasionally outrageous and always flamboyant. We see the majority of the film through the eyes of the closest thing there is to a protagonist, the young, rosy-cheeked Titta (Bruno Zanin), and therefore everything in the film feels exaggerated. The sexual aspects especially are often juvenile, but true to the experiences of a young, hormonal man, so when Titta shows off his strength by lifting the large, buxom tobacconist (Maria Antonietta Beluzzi) he so often fantasises about, he is rewarded by having a grope of her ridiculously large breasts in a scene that could have been called Carry on Fellini. There is also the local nymphomaniac Volpina (Josiane Tanzilli), who seems to hover around touching herself and growling hungrily at any man who glances in her direction. These are true Fellini grotesques.The comedy aside (and special mention must go to the hilarious segment in which Titta's crazy Uncle Teo (Ciccio Ingrassia) comes to stay and escapes into a tree), there are as many touching and profound moments that display Fellini's outstanding talent. The scene in which Titta must watch his mother's final moments on a hospital bed is brutal in its simplicity, with Titta's naivety failing to grasp the seriousness of the situation while his father Aurelio (Armando Brancia) lingers in tragic silence. There's also moments of beauty, namely the arrival of a peacock in the winter snow displaying it's covert feathers, or the sight of a giant ocean liner, seemingly meaningless moments that stuck with Fellini for decades. For me, this is not Fellini's finest moment - that would lie with 8 1/2 (1963), arguably one of the finest films ever made - but this is still one of the most accurate depictions of memory and beautiful ode's to nostalgia I've seen.www.the-wrath-of-blog.blogspot.com
Yaiza
I was laughing out loud while seeing this movie in the theatre yesterday, and so was much of the audience. But of course! There are scenes in this movie that are so honest and so clean that you can only laugh at them, or laugh at yourself, which would be the same thing. Because this movie is about you, me, all of us: Our dreams, our frustrations, our desires, our disappointments. Denying it would be hypocrisy, which we see a lot of in movies today: The obsession of hiding harshness, of being politically correct (and I have to say that the fact that the majority of very negative reviews on this title come from the USA speaks for itself...). We have all been there, actively or passively, maybe only watching, but there. People are the same everywhere! And it is just wonderful to see these portraits of people made with such honest love, without bad intentions or double morals, without prejudices. Maybe a little bit too much nostalgia, but hey, this is a movie of reconciliation with life, after the disillusion of La dolce vita and the sour sweet 8 e mezzo. Fellini is now accepting life with all its beauty - and its miseries. Fantastic. And great fun!