Word: everymanic
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Stop the World-I Want to Get Off is a kind of Everyman coloring book for quasi-grownups. Color Everyman's face white with flour. Dab on a maraschino-cherry nose. House him in a circus tent, and dress him in clown pants baggy enough to hold a pair of baby kangaroos. Name him "He" or "The Man." Make him walk like a mechanical doll, and then propel this symbolic cipher through a life cycle from the cradle to the grave that seems to take almost as long to stage as it would to live through...
...Italian upper class, L'Avventura studies an individual, not a class. It unfolds through personalities instead of tiresome figures transplanted from an Everyman play. And even more gratifying, this gracefully wrought story reveals a person whose uniqueness is respected; it is not a discombobulated tirade against a way-ward society...
...those who wish an appropriate English title for La Dolce Vita, I suggest: "Everyman his own voyeur: an expose in five orgies." Episodic and long, this latest Fellini effort contains brilliant camera work, but little else to recommend itself...
...those seven nights, Fellini guides the hero, a reporter (Marcello Mastroianni) who stands for Everyman, through successive stages of degradation. First the reporter casually leaves the girl (Yvonne Furneau) who really loves him and goes off with a rich bitch who seems to symbolize ancient Rome itself, the Great Whore of Revelation. Then he tries a popular sex substitute, a pumpkin-breasted, pea-brained Hollywood star (played by Anita Ekberg). On the third night, he covers a fake miracle involving a tree in which the Madonna has supposedly been manifested. When the miracle fails to transpire, the crowd attacks...
Worst of all, La Dolce Vita fails to attract the moviegoer as much as it repulses him, fails to inspire his sympathies as well as his disgust. Everyman is passive throughout the picture, largely unconscious of the awful fate that is overtaking him. He therefore puts up no moral struggle against his fate, and without struggle there is no drama. Many spectators will be inclined to agree with the character who remarks in the concluding scene: "Mamma mia, what a disgusting mess...