Quarantine Watch: All That Jazz

Remarkably, the works of Bob Fosse have so far escaped me.  I’m acutely aware of his importance to Broadway musicals, a discipline which I have never fully embraced.  I also saw Cabaret when I was a teenager, foolishly catching up on Best Picture winners as though that would give me a worthwhile head start on film history.  I don’t recall much of it, and it’s certainly due a rewatch.  Of his other works, I’ve only seen parts of the much lauded Star 80, though I’ve always taken that film to have earned its reputation during the rise of film twitter.  I am aware of the stature of All That Jazz, but perhaps some interdisciplinary snobbery on my part led me to sit on it for a very long time.

Quarantine Watch: La Dolce Vita

During quarantine, I’ll be occasionally writing for 30 minutes on any film I happen to watch.  Today is La Dolce Vita, spurred on by a crossword question.

Having never fully embraced Fellini, other than a few notable films, including this one, I realized I hadn’t seen La Dolce Vita in its entirety since I was in my early 20s.  It was a film I actually watched semi-frequently owing to it being one of the few DVDs I owned when I first moved overseas.  It’s the most famous film from one of the most famous directors in history, so there’s not much I can add to the discourse that hasn’t been said time and time again over the decades, including in Roger Ebert’s fantastic Great Movies essay on it from the 90s.