Livestonth I am only giving this movie a 1 for the great cast, though I can't imagine what any of them were thinking. This movie was horrible

Casey Duggan It’s sentimental, ridiculously long and only occasionally funny

Nayan Gough A great movie, one of the best of this year. There was a bit of confusion at one point in the plot, but nothing serious.

Roxie The thing I enjoyed most about the film is the fact that it doesn't shy away from being a super-sized-cliche;

SnoopyStyle It's 1930s Fascist Italy. The movie follows the odd quirky villagers of a seaside town. The fascist local government takes control of the eager villagers with comical ridiculousness. The village is obsessed with sex which the Catholic Church tries to suppress.There are some great memorable characters and memorable scenes. The one missing thing is a good compelling lead character. Titta needs to have more scenes as the lead and he needs to be played by a charismatic actor. The vignettes start to get scattered without that central cohesive glue. Some are more surreal than other. The harem in the hotel goes a bit over the top. Otherwise I really like the quirkiness.

tomgillespie2002 Translated as 'I Remember', the great Italian director Federico Fellini's Amarcord is a series a comedic vignettes that look back at his childhood in a 1930's coastal town. Apart from the intertwining inhabitants, there is nothing thematically or even tonally linking the stories together, much like memory itself. The film takes places over the course of a year, with nothing signifying the passage of time apart from the subtle changes in seasons. Apart from the film's brief focus on the rise of fascism, this is Fellini at his most satirically light, with his usual mocking of the bourgeoisie making way for some amusingly childish humour and some beautifully photographed scenes.True to Fellini's style, Amarcord is occasionally outrageous and always flamboyant. We see the majority of the film through the eyes of the closest thing there is to a protagonist, the young, rosy-cheeked Titta (Bruno Zanin), and therefore everything in the film feels exaggerated. The sexual aspects especially are often juvenile, but true to the experiences of a young, hormonal man, so when Titta shows off his strength by lifting the large, buxom tobacconist (Maria Antonietta Beluzzi) he so often fantasises about, he is rewarded by having a grope of her ridiculously large breasts in a scene that could have been called Carry on Fellini. There is also the local nymphomaniac Volpina (Josiane Tanzilli), who seems to hover around touching herself and growling hungrily at any man who glances in her direction. These are true Fellini grotesques.The comedy aside (and special mention must go to the hilarious segment in which Titta's crazy Uncle Teo (Ciccio Ingrassia) comes to stay and escapes into a tree), there are as many touching and profound moments that display Fellini's outstanding talent. The scene in which Titta must watch his mother's final moments on a hospital bed is brutal in its simplicity, with Titta's naivety failing to grasp the seriousness of the situation while his father Aurelio (Armando Brancia) lingers in tragic silence. There's also moments of beauty, namely the arrival of a peacock in the winter snow displaying it's covert feathers, or the sight of a giant ocean liner, seemingly meaningless moments that stuck with Fellini for decades. For me, this is not Fellini's finest moment - that would lie with 8 1/2 (1963), arguably one of the finest films ever made - but this is still one of the most accurate depictions of memory and beautiful ode's to nostalgia I've seen.www.the-wrath-of-blog.blogspot.com

moonspinner55 A jolly man in his golden years recounts colorful episodes of the past which took place in his seaside Italian town filled with farmers, families, students, and 30 visiting concubines. Director and co-writer Federico Fellini based the incidents on memories of his own hometown of Rimini in the 1930s, and the occasionally raucous journey is both a beguiling and amusing one, beautifully filmed by the estimable Giuseppe Rotunno. Fellini's fixation on big bottoms (and on breasts that look like big bottoms) isn't sequestered away for fear of making "Amarcord" look less prestigious. Hardly...the movie is full of low-ball, bathroom humor and sex-jokes, and is at its best when following a group of randy hooligan youths around town, weakest when it mixes political satire with fantasy (while the concubine episode seems to belong to a different picture altogether). An early dinner-table sequence--which, one presumes, features a typical Italian family--is staged for maximum impact (lots of gesturing, shouting and eye-rolling), yet the characters around that table, particularly the natty and unruffled uncle, become quite dear to us. The opening celebration of the coming of Spring is a bit flat, but the classroom montage which follows is hilarious and full of recognizable hijinks; another highlight is the visit with the insane uncle, who refuses to come down out of a tree. Fellini doesn't goose the story with grotesqueness, nor does he make big introductions; he allows the pages to turn and the audience to become absorbed by the vignettes in a lively, funny way. This Academy Award winner for Best Foreign Film is one of the filmmaker's finest achievements. *** from ****

mokono I write this for mainly two reasons: 1. As I clicked through a few pages of reviews, most of them were raving madly about Fellini, not many gave below 10, and then again, not much lower. 2. When I stopped to read a few of them, they contained obvious misinterpretations of the movie (which was funny) and none of them came up with a significant argument as to why the movie was good but just not for my taste.With the disclaimer done, here's my feelings about the piece: Fireworks. Loud, full of cracks, constantly surprising and distracting you with big flashes and quick satisfaction.This movie represents the life in this seaside little city, but does so via caricatures. Very loud, very energetic, very... "Italian" caricatures, you could say. Now, this is not necessarily a bad thing, except that it probably needs to be funny most of the time. Which it isn't. It consists mainly of slapstick humor, slight sexual references, kids being cheeky, the works. Sure, it is entertaining at times, but 2 hours of it?I did not feel much connection to the characters, some, indeed, I did not really recognize in the middle of the constant mess of the screen (admittedly, the woman who dies left me a bit confused). As there is no plot, you don't really see anyone grow, just really pass the time, but I may be a sucker for plots, so enough about that.There are several special events that go on to show how the people at the time lived them. I interpreted them mostly as a mockery of the masses, especially for the fascist parade. Entertaining, in fact, but they're so fast and superficial that.. one's left with a feeling of "..that's what you wanted to show?"One thing I did enjoy from the constant mess was how some scenes were composed of irrelevant people who were bluntly being so. Comes to mind especially the construction scene, where, out of 20 workers, none was doing absolutely anything that could be valued in an actual construction site.So, to wrap-up, outside of a few good jokes, interesting moments (e.g.: poetry) and nice recreations, this film is simply too much for too little. I would consider watching it again, were it shortened to 30 minutes.