Amarcord - Criterion Collection

Amarcord - Criterion Collection
by Federico Fellini

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Actor: Armando Brancia, Bruno Zanin, Ciccio Ingrassia, Magali No?l, Pupella Maggio
Director: Federico Fellini
Cinematographer: Giuseppe Rotunno
Writer: Federico Fellini
Editor: Ruggero Mastroianni
Producer: Franco Cristaldi
Writer: Tonino Guerra
DVD: 2 Layers, Region Code 1
Audio: English (Original Language), Dolby Digital 1.0; Italian (Original Language), Dolby Digital 1.0; English (Subtitled)
Format: Color, DVD, Letterboxed, NTSC, Subtitled, Widescreen
Picture Format: Letterbox, 1.85:1
Running Time: 123 minutes
DVD Release Date: 1998-04-01
Audience Rating: R (Restricted)
Studio: Criterion

DVD Reviews of Amarcord - Criterion Collection

DVD Review: Did Not Function, was a gift
Summary: 1 Stars

Contacted seller as initially given as a gift. Seller resonded that Amazon will be in contact. As of 2 weeks later, not heard from either as I had the defective product shipped back to me to include the original paperwork. Very disappointed in both Amazon and seller.

DVD Review: Amarcord
Summary: 5 Stars

A great classic movie that I had to buy as I loved it so much.This Criterion collection is great because apart from being a very good copy of the movie,it comes with a story book and lovely packaging.

DVD Review: Memory Play
Summary: 4 Stars

Fellini's 1973 AMARCORD was hailed by critics in both Europe and the United States as a return to the standard of quality of his earlier works. It certainly was more controlled than several of the films that immediately preceded it (like FELLINI'S ROMA and FELLINI SATYRICON), and it's one of his most visually striking films, with celebrated images like the famous peacock flying in a snowfall or the torn turning out to greet the great ocean liner Rex passing by the harbor (shown to be as impossibly large--and as artificial--as the townspeople had hoped). But the film lacks much of a sense of human suffering which always provides the emotional resonance of his best films, and those few moments when it does--such as the town beauty Gradisca pouring out her hopes for a conventional marriage to the townspeople while waiting for the ocean liner's passage--are the best of the entire film.

The film centers upon an entire seaside resort town on the Adriatic in the mid 1930s, during the height of fascism, and it truly stars the entire town, and centers in a cyclic, seasonal way on the few times they all come together: for fascist holidays, a funeral, a ritual bonfire, the greeting of the ocean liner. Gradisca (the voluptuous Turkish actress Magali No?l) makes the biggest impression on the audience; golden-haired Titta (Bruno Zanin) is meant to be the key figure and stand-in for Fellini himself... though, perhaps ungallantly, he is the only physically attractive male character in the entire film (most of his friends seem practically deformed). Indeed, since this is late Fellini there are more physical deformities among his characters than seem fully plausible; but this is all a memory play--showing us Rimini not as it actually was but as the artist remembers it. (This seems to account for the excess of bathroom and bedroom jokes, which are amusing but sometimes repetitive.) You do wish for more sometimes if you've seen Fellini's thematically similar, but far more richly scripted, I VITELLONI; but this is one of the later Fellini's best and most pleasing films.

DVD Review: emotionally resonant and visually memorable
Summary: 5 Stars

A Fellini movie is never about the "plot" -- it's about the images, the music, the mood and the vast tapestry of human lives being lived that he conjures. In this affectionate memoir of growing up during the Fascist era in a seaside town, the old master delivers a final, wistful performance. What we get here is a complete picture of an era shown through the eyes of an adolescent.
Yes, the familiar Fellini types inhabit this movie -- the women with massive breasts and bums, the toothless men, the priests, the temptestuous family members -- but in this movie the caricatures are toned down. A professorial narrator shows up from time to time, lecturing us on the history of the town -- and greeted with contemptuous farts by onlookers.
The music as usual is superb.
There is also a serious side to this gentle movie. The bumptious fascists are ridiculed for their ridiculous parades but they are also capable of serious abuse bordering on torture.
Of many stunning images, the scene of a huge luxury liner looming through the mists is perhaps the most memorable. But for me the final scene of a country wedding carried the biggest emotional wallop. The camera slowly retreats as the party breaks up until it is literally saying goodbye to the guests, the party, the memories -- and life itself. I don't know of any other scene in a movie that has the actual feel and quality of a memory.

DVD Review: Fellini in second gear
Summary: 4 Stars

Federico Fellini's 1973 Amarcord is a film that has often been linked with Ingmar Bergman's Fanny & Alexander as films by old men looking back on their youth. While this is true, in the main, the fact is that Amarcord has a loose narrative structure, in which the lives of many characters are detailed in comic vignettes, whereas Fanny & Alexander is a straight drama. The film that Amarcord shares a deeper affinity with is one which was obviously influenced by it; Woody Allen's grossly underrated and terrific Radio Days. Which of those two films is better is debatable, although Allen's film is tighter, shorter, and a bit deeper in characterization. Allen's opening classroom scenes in Annie Hall also owe a debt to this film's school-based scenes. Amarcord is not a masterpiece, on par with earlier Fellini classics like Nights Of Cabiria, La Dolce Vita, nor 8?, but it is a very good and enjoyable romp, which opened the 1974 Cannes Film Festival and won the Academy Award for Best Foreign Film that same year.
Reportedly, the proper Italian for `I remember' is `mi ricordo', but Fellini used his own native Romagnolo dialect's version of the term a m'arc?rd, to limn his lost boyhood in the coastal town of Rimini- which is the central character of the film. Regardless, the film he constructed is a very good one, which follows a year in the life of a town and its citizenry- from one spring to the next, although it heralded the weaker and even more loosely constructed films that ended his career. This is the last film that most cineastes even to bother arguing the greatness of. Yet, many of the labels applied to it simply are not correct- it is not surreal, for it is grounded in reality, even as flights of fancy take place; it is not a satire, even though there are satirical elements. The very impulse to always definitively characterize something as this or that, without allowing comfortable straddling of boundaries says more of the flaws of the critic than they do of the film. Also, despite the picaresque nature of the film it does not move too quickly. Most of the famed scenes plat out in seven to ten minute stretches where small details filter into the subconscious without even knowing it....The musical soundtrack, by Nino Rota, is stellar, and the best thing in the film, although the cinematography by Giuseppe Rotunno is not far behind, especially in the sunset scene where Uncle Teo is coaxed down from the apple tree and back to the asylum. Yet, Amarcord succeeds because its totality is greater than any of its great to mediocre parts. It may not be a great film, but it is a great display of artistic excellence to marshal such disparate elements into a film that succeeds far more often than it doesn't. Federico Fellini, in this film, shows that he is a great artist, even when his art is not great.

Description of Amarcord - Criterion Collection

In this carnivalesque portrait of provincial Italy during the Fascist period, Fellini satirizes his youth and turns daily life into a circus of rituals, sensations and emotions. Adolescent desires, male fantasies, and political repartee are set to Nina Rota's music in this beautiful transfer of Amarcord.

Federico Fellini's 1974 fantasy-memoir of life in his hometown during the Fascist era is basically the full palette of experience--sex, families, politics--with his surreal twist. As a general picture of the 1930s community carrying on rituals but with an element of government harshness in the air, the film is quite memorable (especially in scenes set around the town square). Less satisfying is Fellini's tighter focus on certain, forgettable individuals. The ironic title translates into, "I remember," but here memory is more a matter of loving vision than actuality. --Tom Keogh

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