UPDATED: La Dolce Vita (1960) by Federico Fellini @ South Norfolk Memorial

UPDATE: We're switching this movie up, since we just watched an epic David Lean movie and me and Brian were the only ones signed up for Laurence of Arabia.

Instead, I'm putting in a movie I've tried to watch a couple times but never got very far into ... Federico Fellini's gonzo classic (and origin of the term paparazzi), La Dolce Vita!

RUNTIME: 174 minutes (so about an hour less than Laurence of Arabia)

SYNOPSIS: The biggest hit from the most popular Italian filmmaker of all time, La dolce vita rocketed Federico Fellini to international mainstream success—ironically, by offering a damning critique of the culture of stardom. A look at the darkness beneath the seductive lifestyles of Rome’s rich and glamorous, the film follows a notorious celebrity journalist (a sublimely cool Marcello Mastroianni) during a hectic week spent on the peripheries of the spotlight. This mordant picture was an incisive commentary on the deepening decadence of contemporary Europe, and it provided a prescient glimpse of just how gossip- and fame-obsessed our society would become.

BLURBS:
"This is the film of my life. [...] I love it more than ever. [...] Fellini and Marcello had taken a moment of discovery and made it immortal." - Roger Ebert

"What makes Fellini stand out from the crowd is the way he sees those frenzied earlier days of publicity and marketing forces as the onset of greater decay, forces we now know would eventually create Kardashians and their like. Felini sees the future and it's us. In fact, the origin of the word "paparazzi" (plural in Italian) comes from the actual surname, Paparazzo, of one of the dogged celebrity photographers in the film." - Barbara Shulgasser-Parker, Common Sense Media

"In sum, it is an awesome picture, licentious in content but moral and vastly sophisticated in its attitude and what it says." - Bosley Crowther, The New York Times