Satyricon by Fellini

i have one thing to say about the film i watched today.

WEIRD

and rather homoerotic, yet also strangely asexual...

someone was mentioning today (i think it was Will) before the film started that it being a film that has been chosen by Richard D., it will most likely be homoerotic.

indeed it was... and i spent most of the film scribbling on a piece of paper which companies i was going to apply to for internships over summer.

the film is mostly about scantily clad men and women, flaunting their sexuality, bodies, and being totally and utterly weird. men going after men who go after women who look rather manly anyway; homosexual marriage on a ship, which i should mention, doesnt even look like it SHOULD be floating if you think about physics; a court of people stuffing themselves with food that is plain disgusting; someone hand being chopped off as part of theatre (and them showing the stump to the camera); an earthquake that collapses onto a tower of babel sort of housing block; a hermaphroditic demi god who dies from being exposed to the sun; 'fire to the loins'; a barren land with Fellini's signature wind-blowing soundtrack and sandstorms... the list goes on... and i should mention that the people are either fat (and i mean bulging with fats) or super skinny that they are like stick figures and have the most disturbing make-up... brightly coloured eyeshadow ALL over the eyes, two blobs of rouge on the cheeks, painted white faces which are unevenly slapped on so that it looks like it is cracking, bright red lipsticks which make their lips look unrealistically shaped...

throughout the film i was asking Esther whether she understood what was happening because i certainly did not and next to her, Guy was taking a nap. the backrow was chatting and had to be shushed by Chris M., while jake got out to buy a cup of minestrone soup to drink during the screening.

when i got back i went on IMDB to find out and make sense of this weird film that i watched and found these user comments:

"...and because I had read "Satyricon" before I saw it I probably was less baffled by the movie than most people. Very little survives of the content of original story, a few longish bits and lots tiny fragments, sometimes as short as a sentence or a word. All disconnected from each... ...ning and end of Petronius' novel are missing, what we have left suddenly starts in the middle without any background or prelude. And each of the surviving bits is the same way, giving few, if any hints, of how our heroes got there from their last adventure, or how their current one will be resolved. Or even what their current crisis is. We can onl... ...bother making a film of from such a fragmentary source? Because Petronius is wickedly funny and has a gifted insight into human... ...participant in the decadence and depravity, yet judging and commenting on it at the... ...2000 years been read and translated... ...amorallity, but social standards always... ...Fellini captures the spirit not only of Imperial Rome but of... ...doesn't make sense, so like you do in the original, you have to extrapolate based on... ...satiric, sardonic, and visually stunning... ...enjoy..."

"If you're really into cinema, I mean as an artistic media more than as entertainment, you MUST see "Satyricon", as it's to my sense the most *visually* outstanding movie ever made."

i can see the whole significance of the film IF you look at it as a Fellini film. the conematography was good (in some weird ways) and it is true to the nature of the film. i liked the ending of the film though - where the character morphed into a panting of himself on a rock wall and as the camera drew back, showed a bunch of stones erect amongst some ruins and on them had the paintings of the other significant characters.

other than that, the film was hard to digest and the violence and bawdiness of it was too much for me to handle...