Watch Roma For Free

Simply Perfect

Story: It's very simple but honestly that is fine.

One of the most extraordinary films you will see this year. Take that as you want.

By the time the dramatic fireworks start popping off, each one feels earned.

I have accidentally stumbled upon this film. I have watched his known masterpieces and liked them very much. But this is something special. This really breaks with the common use for film as a simple way to illustrate an epic story and goes beyond. Something achieved only by few, say Akira Kurosawa in Yume / Dreams. This is also unique as far as I know because the main / only character is a city. That has been tried even in the recent years with Paris, je t'aime, but they failed. Sure, if your kind of entertainment is Xmen Meet Rambo to Kill the Out-of-space Infidels you can bet you are going to be bored out of your head. Otherwise this is worth every minute of the two hours. And every time you get to see it more details and symbols are going to reveal themselves.Contact me with Questions, Comments or Suggestions ryitfork @ bitmail.ch

Of the five movies so far I have seen of Fellini's, Roma is my least favourite, but that doesn't mean at all that it is a bad film. It's just that I think La Dolce Vita, 8 1/2 and Amarchord are masterpieces and La Strada a near-masterpiece.Roma while perhaps being the most personal of Fellini's films for me was just very, very good. For my liking, Fellini occasionally shows a lack of intellectual rigour and when he is reminiscing and chatting with the likes of Marcello Mastroianni while mostly companionable and insightful there is the odd occasion where he comes across as a tad overbearing.However, Fellini more than makes up for it with a very interesting and insightful experimental/documentary-like approach to this film. Mastroianni, Gore Vidal and Anna Magnani are a delight to watch, the film does have a subtle message and told with a lot of heart and Nino Rota's score is atmospheric, nostalgic and lilting. Like all his films, the visuals show a genius at work. The cinematography is spellbinding and The Eternal City is gorgeous. Here Fellini's images are at their best in the 1940s music hall show, the unearthing of the ancient villa and the fashion parade.All in all, enchanting and interesting if not Fellini's best. 8/10 Bethany Cox

Federico Fellini's love for his adoptive city was unique. It was only natural he would make this film in which his awe and admiration for what became his playground is captured in vivid images which only could come from one of the most important masters of the Italian cinema of all times. The film is both a comedy and a sort of documentary in which we watch the director, himself, performing the role of what he did behind the camera, for our benefit.The film is autobiographical in many aspects. We watch as the young Federico, an aspiring journalist arrives in Rome from his native Rimini. His new home is in an apartment where he has been recommended to stay by relatives. The place was pure chaos with the many different Roman characters he found there. The heat of the summer brought everyone to the streets where dining was an art. The food in great proportions in spite of a war going on. Fellini is an observer of his new surroundings. The woman street singer that goes through the tables, reminds us a little bit of Gelsomina, an immortal character created by the director, and also of Cabiria, the fun loving prostitute.Rome, being a the chaotic place it was, is presented at a dizzying speed by the director who has taken his camera outside along a busy highway as fans from Naples arrive to attend a soccer match against the local team. The autostrada is some is a metaphor that emphasizes the confusion and the chaos anyone feels when arriving to Rome. Fellini ends it all in a massive car tie up in the street around the Colosseum. Fellini renders homage to his city in the last sequence as well taking the viewer through a night ride by motorcyclists that passes by all the best known monuments of the city.We are also taken to a neighborhood music hall that presents vaudeville acts. The atmosphere was typical of the one found in such places where everyone went to have a good time with their friends and neighbors. These places attracted a rough crowd that made a tough place for performers in which to act. Theater in Italy, although not remotely close to the scene Fellini shows, is a place where the real drama is not presented on stage; the real show is given by all the people that go to be seen without shame of behaving in strange ways.The subway excavation sequence offers an interesting aside in which the present day and the olden times come together when the workers discover a Roman home underground. The magnificence of the images that are discovered reveal the proud past of one of the oldest and most artistic civilizations of all times. Alas, it is only short lived because of the air that penetrates the hidden frescoes found under the rubble make them disappear.The brothel also played a big part in the sentimental education of the maestro. We have seen prostitutes in all of of Fellini's films in one way, or another. He wants to take us to two different kinds of pleasure houses, one for the common citizen and a high class one that closes up when important celebrities decide to have private fun. Fellini juxtaposes the scenes at the brothels with a gathering of the Catholic Church higher ups that have come to Princess Domitilla's palace for an ornate fashion show for ecclesiastical fashion that is decadent in the excesses presented. Like with other Italian creators, Fellini had an ongoing love-hatred by the institution that has ruled the lives of Italians for centuries."Fellini's Roma" was a great creation by Federico Fellini. It is as important as some of the other films because it captured the soul of the city Fellini loved so much. This was possible because of the images cinematographer Giuseppe Rotunno, a amazing photographer of many of the director's work. Nino Rota's musical score is also an asset in the film. The cast is enormous to single out anyone, they all contribute to make this film a tribute to Rome, the eternal city.

The 1972 film Roma, by Federico Fellini, lies somewhere between his 1968 film Satyricon and his 1973 film Amarcord, not only chronologically, but creatively (The Clowns, from 1970, is a minor work, by comparison). It is a picaresque film, as both the other films are, and has some of the heightened imagery and poesy of Satyricon, while possessing Amarcord's humor and jabs at Fellini's Fascist era youth. That said, it is not as good a film as the two films that sandwich it for the very reason that it sits on that fence the two other films eschew. Whereas Satyricon was a freestyle adaptation from an ancient Roman work of art, with recurring characters in its vignettes, Roma is more of a travelogue crossed with memory, and the only constant within it is the city of Rome. The film was written by Fellini and Bernardino Zapponi, who collaborated on Satyricon, and, like that film, it is a visual orgy, filled with color and spectacle.The two hour film is divided into a series of hallucinogenic vignettes admixed with golden memories that recount Roman history, Fellini's past, and the present of the city. These narrative streams and themes bounce back and forth, as Fellini tries to embody the very concept of Rome as 'The Eternal City' of mythos (as opposed to the 'city of illusions' that American writer Gore Vidal calls it, in a late cameo appearance proclaiming Apocalypticism as a vision)…. Of course, the film would not be Fellinian without whores and midgets, and a slew of other oddities- human or not. This parade of grotesques is not limited to the material, but also to the very habits of the Romans from all eras, such as a scene at an outdoor restaurant, where the lower classes practice vulgarianism unabashedly. The film also has a number of uncredited cameo appearances, aside from Fellini and Vidal- mostly by Italian filmic luminaries such as Anna Magnani, Marcello Mastroianni, Feodor Chaliapin, and Alberto Sordi. The DVD, put out by MGM, is spare in the extreme, with the only bonus being the original theatrical trailer. The film is shown in a 1.66:1 aspect ratio, and is a fine print- the colors really show what a great cinematographer Giuseppe Rotunno was; especially in the shots taken at night, where the lighting and the colors literally blaze in their contrast to the pitch. The art direction and costuming by Danilo Donati also shines, even more so than in earlier Fellini color films- especially during the stellar Papal throne sequence, which seems almost the antithesis (or genial parody) of Francis Bacon's Satanically satiric painted portrait of Pope Innocent X- replete with a throne that seems to explode in color and neon. That said, the only one of the Fellini regular crew who seems to be doing subpar work is the normally fantastic Nino Rota, whose soundtrack is barely an influence on the images. Whether this is because the music is deliberately understated or because the imagery is so overwhelming is debatable, but it's still a notable absence. Overall, Roma is a solid film with great moments, but one that has more value as a work of art that bears scrutiny for its reflection of its creator, rather than standing on its own artistic merits. It is not as daring as Satyricon, not as ribald nor tightly edited as Amarcord, not as probing of the human condition as Nights Of Cabiria, not as intellectualized as 8½, nor is it as all-encompassing as La Dolce Vita. But, after all, how many films are? It is akin to dissing a drama of Eugene O'Neill because it falls short of The Iceman Cometh, Mourning Becomes Electra, or A Long Day's Journey Into Night. If it is best as a baedeker to those greater films in the Fellini canon, so be it, for it is a sojourn worth the undertaking.