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Features: DVD, Black & White, Widescreen, Aspect Ratio 1.78:1, Dolby Digital Stereo, Dolby Digital Mono, Interviews, Photo Gallery, Biographies, Audio Commentary, English, Subtitled, 2 Discs
One of the most influential and popular works by Federico Fellini, La Dolce Vita follows the "sweet life" of a tabloid journalist (Marcello Mastroianni) who covers the glitzy show business life in Rome. In constant search of the next big scandal, he is continually seduced by the decadent life led by Rome's pampered rich.
Editor's Note
In Federico Fellini's seminal film LA DOLCE VITA, a three-hour masterpiece that shows one man's descent into "the sweet life" of debauchery, Marcello Mastroianni stars as eccentric journalist Marcello Rubini. On assignment to chronicle the lives of the rich and famous Italian aristocracy in a gossip column for a Roman newspaper, Marcello floats from one fabulous party to the next, meeting all varieties of beautiful, extravagant people. While he would never protest this seemingly ideal job, it makes him feel lonely and empty, and he stays up drinking and dancing night after night only to wake up each morning unbalanced and unfocused. The film follows Marcello's ups and downs in an episodic pattern in which each evening is a new story, a new adventure, a new dare, a new woman with whom to fall helplessly in love--but only for that night. Each morning the slate is wiped clean, and Fellini resets Marcello's score to zero. Sprinkled with religious images and gestures at salvation, LA DOLCE VITA is supreme in the beauty of its all-encompassing symbolism that is expressed through lavish sets, an alluring script, overemphasized physical movements, roller-coaster jazz music, and helpless emotions.
Plot Summary
Director Federico Fellini's portrait of a hedonistic 20th century Rome centers on a handsome journalist (Marcello Mastroianni) in constant pursuit of the extravagant, the sensational, and the absurd, who works for a scandal sheet and becomes intimately involved with the decadent high-society individuals his publication so often maligns. The immoral lifestyles he witnesses nearly paralyze him with shock and outrage, yet he struggles with his complicity.
| Features | Audio Commentary | | Audio: English, Italian Dolby Digital 5.1 Surround Sound | | Collector's Booklet | | Fellini TV | | Interactive Menus | | Interviews | | Photo Gallery | | Scene Selection | | Subtitles: English, Spanish | | Widescreen Presentation | | Audio: English, Italian Dolby Digital Stereo, Dolby Digital Mono | | Subtitled: English, Spanish | | Restoration Demo | | Biographies | | Filmographies | | Cinecitta - The House of Fellini - Musical montage of Fellini's beloved studio | | Fellini, Roma and Cinecitta - Interview with Fellini | | Extensive Photo Gallery | | Audio Commentary by noted critic and film historian Richard Schickel | | Fellini TV - Collection of Never-Before-Seen Fellini shorts | | Remembering the Sweet Life - Interviews with Marcello Mastroianni and Anita Ekberg |
| Technical Info
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Release Information
| | Studio: Koch International |
| Release Date: 9/21/2004 |
| Running Time: 167 minutes |
| Original Release Date: 1960 | | Catalog ID: 3012 | | UPC: 00741952301295 | | Number of Discs: 2 |
Audio & Video
| | Original Language: Italian | | Available Audio Tracks: English, Italian | | Available Subtitles: English, Spanish | | Video: B&W |
Aspect Ratio | | Anamorphic Widescreen 2.35:1 |
| Cast & Crew
| Awards |
Academy Awards (1961) |  | Winner, Best Costume Design (b&w) | |
Cannes (1960) | | Winner, Palme d'Or | | Federico Fellini, Winner, Palme d'Or |
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| | Professional Reviews | Los Angeles Times
"...One of the key works of the modern cinema. A brilliantly conceived epic fable..." 04/10/1992 p.F15Chicago Sun-Times
"...The movie leaps from one visual extravaganza to another....The movie is made with boundless energy..." 01/05/1997 p.5 Los Angeles Times
"With its shimmering, beguilingly familiar Nino Rota score, Otello Martelli's ravishingly lighted black-and-white cinematography and its endless processions of the foolish, the grotesque, the jaded and the merely young and beautiful, LA DOLCE VITA is truly unforgettable." 04/30/2004 p.E4 Entertainment Weekly
"[A] peerless, protean act of visual choreography." 09/24/2004 p.89-90 USA Today
"[T]his remains a mesmerizing spectacle with gonzo casting." 09/24/2004 p.10E Premiere
"[A] piercing depiction of moral failure with a palpable sense of desolation at its core." 11/01/2004 p.103 Sight and Sound
"[Fellini] highlights the triviality and absurdity of a culture in which every banality uttered by a star obsesses the press..." 12/01/2004 p.76 |
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