DCist’s highly subjective and hardly comprehensive guide to the most interesting movies playing around town in the coming week.
Federico Fellini’s last real masterpiece was also his most deeply personal, and in some ways most deeply conflicted film. There is a sweet nostalgia in the memories of his youth, presented here in this year-in-the-life portrait of a seaside Italian town much like Rimini, where the director grew up. But that upbringing was also in 1930s Italy, when Mussolini’s fascism not only held the country in its grip, but also enjoyed the wildly popular support of the people. As light-hearted and hilarious as much of Amarcord is, the undercurrent of the complicity of these simple people in such dark deeds is never far from the surface. While it’s easy to write off the more puerile aspects of the film to the fact that its point of view is that of Fellini as a teenage boy, all the fart jokes, leering at big-bottomed peasant-women, and comically stereotyped school authority figures are sharp criticisms of what the director saw as a perpetual state of moral adolescence that allowed Mussolini to prosper.
Fellini isn’t so interested in plot as he is in portraiture here, using episodes in a varying cast of characters from the town, in both reality and fantasy, to present a fantastically nuanced picture of a particular place and time. Woven throughout is the involvement and coming of age of Titta, the stand-in for the younger Fellini. Amarcord contains so many little stories and anecdotes and dreams that it can become overwhelming at times; luckily, the film is gorgeous enough that you can just switch off and enjoy the sights for a few minutes until you catch your breath. Many of the images here are some of the most unforgettable in all of film: the “puffballs” of spring floating over Titta as he stands out on a lonely quay; the villagers sitting out on the Adriatic in the dead of night on rowboats waiting for the passage of a great ocean liner; and most achingly beautiful of all, a peacock lighting on a fountain and spreading its tailfeathers in the midst of a heavy snow. An opportunity to see this on a big screen is not to be missed.
View the trailer.
A brand new 35mm print opens tomorrow at E Street for one week only.
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Crips and Bloods: Made in America
Stacy Peralta is no stranger to documentaries about youth-centric subcultures. But the board-riding subjects of his previous docs, the excellent Dogtown and Z-Boys and Riding Giants, seem fairly innocuous in comparison to his latest, which examines Los Angeles’s two most infamous gangs. But what typified Peralta’s skateboarding and surfing movies is his meticulous research into the genesis of these cultures. Not just a surface look at how they operate and what they’re about, but a finely tuned investigation of why they came into being. It’s this sensibility that he brings to the far more serious subject of how these gangs arose and came to be in such a bloody rivalry, as he tries to make some sense out of years of senseless violence.
View the trailer.
At the AFI on Sunday at 1 p.m. and Monday at 8:45 p.m.
