La Dolce Vita

I'm sure most of you are thinking that you have never seen or heard of Frederico Fellini's 1960 movie La Dolce Vita. You might not have seen it, but you have for sure been affected by it. A word we hear every day comes from this movie, was invented from this movie - paparazzi, taken from the character of Paparazzo. He is a  photojournalist, and Fellini used the word as it means an annoying sound, like a buzzing. I know this is sort of unexciting, but I really love things like this. Language is pretty incredible, and it's really interesting to me to find out where words come from. How odd, I thought, that paparazzi is a relatively new word! Bah, of course this is boring.

8 1/2

Tb

This is the first film from The Great Movies that I haven't ever seen. I know of Federico Fellini, but I've never actually watched any of his films, which is sort of embarrassing to admit. So, the first Fellini film I have ever seen, officially, is 8 1/2 (1963). Unfortunately, I had a less than ideal viewing experience - I was trying to watch this film on Netflix, where it was streaming. Strangely, the captions at the bottom were cut off on my TV, and you could barely make out the tops of the letters. I ended up having to watch it, windowed, on my computer, which was much more frustrating and uncomfortable, obviously. I still really enjoyed this movie, though. Being so unfamiliar with Fellini, I feel like I might not understand it very well yet. The more films you see by one director, the more you are comfortable with the types of characters they use, the visuals they tend to rely on, things of that matter - but I don't know anything that Fellini does normally. In Ebert's review, he writes a lot about 8 1/2 as compared to Fellini's other films, so I am lacking some appreciation for it. Maybe as I go on and watch more of his works, I will be able to come back and watch this again when this project is over, and maybe I can better understand what Ebert was writing about.