Word: vitae
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...Dolce Vita (1960), 8 1/2 (1963), Amarcord (1974) and 20 other films, overripe images spilled out of his cornucopia: clowns and courtesans, prelates and zealots, overripe creatures from a fantast's bestiary. At first they looked like outrageous cartoons of sensuality and sacrilege. But long before his death last week at 73, from complications after a stroke, it was clear they were previews of a moral system spun wildly off its axis. For 30 years and more, the word Felliniesque has defined not just the director's work but a style at the peacock end of film, photography, fashion, advertising...
...played God: he was the vagabond whom a peasant (Anna Magnani) mistakes for Jesus in Roberto Rossellini's The Miracle (1948). For Fellini, however, God was a goddess and woman was the world -- everything in the world that excites and frightens, forbids and enchants. To Marcello in La Dolce Vita, woman is "mother, sister, daughter, lover, angel, home." How small and sad and funny men are in comparison! At one end of the spectrum they are like the midget bluenose in Boccaccio 70 (1962) overwhelmed by Anita Ekberg as a sexual giantess -- it's the attack...
...novel Orlando, inspired by Woolf's love for Vita Sackville-West, is a gay lark disguised as a historical biography. Centuries and genders fly past, each one bending like a willow to accommodate Woolf's puckish feminist insight and hindsight. Potter's movie, faithful in spirit to the book, is something else. It is, in the best sense, a travesty, a masquerade, a cross-dressing comedy of eros. Yet moviegoers do believe in Orlando, in the breadth of its canvas, the immediacy of its emotions, the palliative power of its wit. They can swim in its gorgeous images: the fruit...
Lately, however, bisexuality has been hard to overlook. Bisexual characters are the newest twist in movies and TV shows, most notably Basic Instinct and L.A. Law. PBS recently broadcast a drama based on the lives of writers Vita Sackville-West and her husband Harold Nicolson, both bisexuals. Authors Camille Paglia and the late John Cheever have confessed their sexual duality; recent biographies claim that Laurence Olivier, Cary Grant and Eleanor Roosevelt had affairs with both men and women...
...bumper cars, where you can smell a man's exhaust fumes but not his breath on the back of your neck. They may figure, too, that old-city competition and corruption are the best metaphor for their mode of doing business. So in between crafting fantasies of L.A. dolce vita, they make occasional fantasies about the towns they left behind...