Laemmle Theatres celebrates one of the first foreign films to figure prominently in the Academy Award voting. La Dolce Vita earned four Oscar nominations in 1962, including Best Director Federico Fellini and Best Original Screenplay and it won the Oscar for Piero Gherardi’s elegant costumes.
Fellini’s sardonic epic about the decadence of modern Rome was one of the most influential of foreign films, and its influence can still be seen today in films like the Oscar winner from 2013, The Great Beauty.
It is a world also evoked in Nine (a film based on the maestro’s 8 1/2) whose director Rob Marshall recently participated in “All That Jack (Cole)” at The Museum of Modern Art in New York.
Cruise along the Via Veneto with Marcello Mastroianni, then take a dip in the Trevi Fountain with the voluptuous Anita Ekberg.
Fellini even added a new word to our vocabulary when he introduced the character of the celebrity-chasing photographer, Paparazzo.
Friend-of-arts·meme Stephen Farber, the president of the Los Angeles Film Critics Association, will introduce the movie at Laemmle Theatres’ newly refurbished and (re)launched Monica Film Center.
Fun! We’re going.
How can you compare La Dolce Vita to “Nine” and not to “8 1/2”?