The best kind of magic...
3 December 1998
This film was first recommended to me by a high school friend who typically enjoys a different kind of film than I. He counts Reservoir Dogs and Mean Streets among his favorites; I am partial to Notorious and Annie Hall. But for his sake, I watched Amarcord, and in the past years have found myself returning to it time and again. I haven't seen any other movies by Mr. Fellini, so I can judge this film only against itself. By such standards, it is a masterpiece. Never have I seen Italy portrayed as lovingly, nor the spectrum of childhood emotions - happiness, love, frustration - represented as frankly. The images are spellbinding - sunlight and fog and great dark seas. Yesterdays are perfect, it would seem, and love exists in what we can remember. So my friend got it right with this one. Amarcord is a kind of magic only the very best in cinema inspire within us. It's the magic that makes us remember.
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23 out of 24 people found the following review useful:
Reminiscences of a Great Filmmaker
Author: Benedict_Cumberbatch from Los Angeles, CA
7 March 2006
"Amarcord" was the first Fellini film I saw, about two years ago. It was on TV at 4 o'clock a.m. and I was very sleepy, but I watched it till the end. I wasn't disappointed at all, and I do want to watch it again.
It's not hard to say why this is considered one of Federico Fellini's masterpieces. "Amarcord" (which means "I remember" in the Italian dialect of Emilia-Romagna, the region in which Fellini was born and where the film is set) is one of the most dazzling, personal films you'll ever see. Though Fellini denied that the film is autobiographical (but agreed that has similarities with his own childhood), he made some of the most magic scenes in film history. Nino Rota's unforgettable music score is perfect to highlight the story of a teenage boy's daydreaming (and many other people) in the fascist 1930s Italy. There's a sentence written by the Brazilian author Machado de Assis in one of his novels that is suitable for this magnificent film: "O menino é o pai do homem" ("The Boy is The Man's Father").A well deserved Best Foreign Film Oscar (Nino Rota should've won too – he wasn't even nominated!). 10 out of 10.
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