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This poster is in my living room.

I’m in one of my Fellini Fhases, watching Amarcord (which I have always liked) on Friday and Juliet of the Spirits (which I always haven’t) on Saturday. It just comes upon me, you know? And then I’m back in a world of big-breasted women in heavy eye makeup.

Anyway, I was browsing around looking for some interesting critique on Fellini, and found Roger Ebert’s assessment of La Dolce Vita, one of my favorite movies of all time. Ah, La Dolce Vita…I still remember the first time I saw it, six weeks or so into Yale and dealing with a via veneto set of my own, staring at a scratched print on a ripped screen in Linsley-Chit 102. Outside: autumn leaves and the drunken screams of freshmen; inside: mildew, floor polish, b.o. (and I don’t mean “box office”). And yet I was transfixed, in the process nearly breaking my ass. You know a movie is good when you can sit for three hours in a chair made of curved plywood. God bless the Berkeley People’s Film Society (now defunct) and Federico (now dead)—but great art lives on. Ebert explains it all for you:

“Movies do not change, but their viewers do. When I saw “La Dolce Vita” in 1960, I was an adolescent for whom “the sweet life” represented everything I dreamed of: sin, exotic European glamour, the weary romance of the cynical newspaperman. When I saw it again, around 1970, I was living in a version of Marcello’s world; Chicago’s North Avenue was not the Via Veneto, but at 3 a.m. the denizens were just as colorful, and I was about Marcello’s age.

When I saw the movie around 1980, Marcello was the same age, but I was 10 years older, had stopped drinking, and saw him not as a role model but as a victim, condemned to an endless search for happiness that could never be found, not that way. By 1991, when I analyzed the film a frame at a time at the University of Colorado, Marcello seemed younger still, and while I had once admired and then criticized him, now I pitied and loved him. And when I saw the movie right after Mastroianni died, I thought that Fellini and Marcello had taken a moment of discovery and made it immortal. There may be no such thing as the sweet life. But it is necessary to find that out for yourself.”