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Pretty Good

Excellent but underrated film

Awesome Movie

It's easily one of the freshest, sharpest and most enjoyable films of this year.

This is a beautiful Fellini, one the most beautiful he ever made and I don't understand why is so underrated. A joy to watch from beginning to end, a visual gem, a masterpiece; one with which the master confounds the skeptics, shows he's still in top form. I don't remember any other Fellini containing such breathtaking scenes, astonishing in their exuberance and richness in color as that in the oriental set with Maharajahs and elephants or those carrying such evocative power as that of the two aging European sex symbols of the 1960s watching themselves on a white sheet, shedding a few tears and drinking to the good old times. Oh, to be young and beautiful again...(sigh). Oh, and that final sequence of the cast and crew huddling inside the plastic tent during a storm, the collective soul going from joy and euphoric enthusiasm to muted, thoughtful melancholy, while bathed all with the music coming from the back of the truck under the rain. There's also something surreal about that haunting scene, under the rain, behind the rain, that makes it stay with us for a long time, forever: the girl blowing it away in her saxophone and the boy taking it away at the piano, both framed by the big box of the vehicle; a beautiful portrait of ineffable energy and youthful poetry. Oh, and also nobody, nobody but Fellini himself could have done a better job playing The Maestro at his best, with the juices of creativity pouring through each one of his pores.This is Fellini at his best, the full essence of his genius distilled in a single cinematographic piece, where he reaches his own outer limits. For one thing, I noticed here a great number of scenes with deep, ample backgrounds--even in some interiors--except for those where such a thing was impossible--the inside the trailer of the diva for ex.. But you will rarely see here characters in closed, claustrophobic quarters or plastered against a wall. I'm not a film scholar or a psychologist, but to me that means that at this point Fellini had finally become master of his space, that he totally owned his surroundings. He was free at last to do pure cinematographic art without being burdened by ghosts from the remote past, by the heavy load of unsolved traumas; he had finally exorcised his demons—even the resident fascist here is a nice, inoffensive little old man—and so become the filmmaker he always wanted to be. It is in this film where the master has reached his peak. Intervista is a cinematographic gem from beginning to end. The pacing, the acting, the score are impeccable, flawless; so much so, you find hard to believe that any of this could have been prepared, scripted, rehearsed as any regular movie, it feels so spontaneous, so authentic.This is a movie that Fellini had absolutely to make. He owed that to the world, his legacy wouldn't have been complete without it. The world can do without 8 ½ but it absolutely needs Intervista. And Fellini was one of the few chosen who could accomplish such a feat--the only other one I can think of being Buñuel. Because here we see the real man, Fellini in all his humility and humanity, a man in love with movies and people. I have seen enough movie shootings in public places to know that this can be at times a very stressful activity and tempers tend to flare during difficult times but I don't have any doubt that the joy and enthusiasm his collaborators show working with him here is real. I can't possibly imagine Hitchcock or Kubrick getting away with the same thing and I'm even less sure we would have wanted to watch their respective "Intervistas". But Fellini not only shows us how he shoots movies, he makes us also part of his team, we become—in the flesh of the Japanese journalists, the young actors, the crew—part of his family. Already in the introductory shot he makes clear we are his invites in that metaphoric opening wide of the gates of Cinecitta and in the fact that he's himself the one to greet us, no some subordinate or studio bureaucrat. That's enough to reassure us that what we'll get during the next 104 min. will be the real deal.Another thing I loved about Intervista is that it is a movie that doesn't take itself seriously, probably to the image of his creator. There are some hilarious moments that can only be seen as his ironic or sarcastic comments about movie directors in general or even himself: For ex., the director who won't settle for anything less than a pear for lunch. Or the other one who suffers a meltdown when a cardboard cut elephant drops its trunk. I found also the commercials very good and very tasty, said to have been Fellini's concepts. And finally, the score, a put pourri of some scores of other Fellini's films, the kind of music you'll like to be the last thing you hear when leaving this world.In all, perhaps not the best but certainly the most beautiful, most joyful, of all Fellini's. 9/10.

Old men tend to make art that is shallow, imitative of their earlier, better works, and which would never garner an ounce of praise were it not for their backlog of greater works somehow letting their patina still rub off. In America, the best proof of this nostrum is the awarding of the lifetime Academy Award to a film director, or actor. Apparently, Europe is not immune to such worthless laurels either, for, in 1987, Federico Fellini's disastrously bad film Intervista won the Cannes Film Festival's Fortieth Anniversary Award and the Grand Prize at the Moscow Film Festival. In it, one can see many pastiches from earlier Fellini films, much as Ingmar Bergman cribbed ideas and scenes from his earlier masterpieces for his disastrously bad last film Saraband, the way Akira Kurosawa tossed random ideas together for Dreams, and the way Woody Allen has constantly reworked themes from his 1970s and 1980s great films into his last decade's worth of mostly mediocrities. That said, even the worst of Allen's recent films, like The Curse Of The Jade Scorpion, were better than Intervista. Fellini might take some solace in the fact that Intervista is a better film than Bergman's incest-ridden Saraband, but it's a minor comfort, at best, and this shoddy film still falls well shy of even Dreams.

This was the second to last film the famed director, Fellini, made and it was his most personal. Instead of being a traditional film, this is much more like having a personal visit with him as he shows you around Cinecittà Studios in Rome. Sometimes he talks to the camera (or in many cases, the fictional Japanese crew interviewing him--a plot device to represent the audience), sometimes you just watch somewhat random scenes as they are shot and other times you watch Fellini and his friends as they reminisce--such as when Marcello Mastroianni pops by the set and Fellini, impulsively, takes him on a road trip to see Anita Ekberg. While this all seems unscripted and at the spur of the moment, it was all staged for the film but it has a real home movie quality about it. At Ekberg's home, all of Fellini's guests view scenes from LA DULCE VITA (starring Mastroianni and Ekberg) and there is a very strong nostalgic air about the party.The total effect of all these elements was a lot like climbing inside Fellini's mind and it also gave a lot of amazing insights into the film making process. Because of this it was a lot like Truffaut's DAY FOR NIGHT, though a bit different because DAY FOR NIGHT stuck more to a traditional script (a movie about a movie being filmed) and seemed a lot less frivolous and fun. Fellini's is more of a "warts and all" and appears to be more spontaneous and ad-libbed--though because of some of the grand sets and the visit to Ekberg's, it obviously was staged to look spontaneous. My advice is to see this film and DAY FOR NIGHT. DAY FOR NIGHT is rated higher, but because of all the sentimentality of INTERVISTA, I preferred it slightly.While I have never been a huge fan of Fellini, I have seen most of his films and really enjoyed having some insights into his psyche. Most of it came as no surprise (such as the use of phallic imagery--Fellini's sexuality was never repressed in his films), but some was very sweet and charming. It was nice to see him as both director and actor--so why is the film rated so poorly??!! By the way, when the film was made, Miss Ekberg was 56 years-old and Mr. Mastroianni was 63. I was rather irritated with an IMDb review that complained about her being "obese" and him being "wrinkled". This was cruel and shallow, as most women would die to look that ravishing at 56 and most men would love to be a charming old rogue at 63! What do you expect at that age? Hmm? To quote Ekberg in a recent interview, "I'm very much bigger than I was, so what? It's not really fatness, it's development." Bravo.PS--If you like this film, try watching Vincenzo Mollica's documentary on the film that's included on the DVD for INTERVISTA. It does a nice job of explaining some of the plot elements and features clips not only from this movie but several other Fellini films. My favorite part was learning that Miss Ekberg's plunge into the Trevi fountain in LA DULCE VITA was done in February!!

Intervista is one of the best films I've ever seen. The strong sense in all Fellini films that reality is like a big, sad circus is even stronger in this film because fact and fiction, past and present become so confused. The fictitious carnival appears to be reality. And isn't that maybe quite a realistic view?There is not only the usual sense of nostalgia: because the film looks back at decades of Fellini nostalgia, the nostalgia is double. Who can watch the older Anita and Marcello looking back at La Dolce Vita with dry eyes? The only possible critic could be that the film is, like all Fellini movies, little coherent, but then, isn't that as well like life itself?Intervista maybe isn't the most famous Fellini films, it certainly is one of the better ones and with that one of the best films in cinematographic history.