If you ever had a dream about having to make a movie only you forgot why you wanted to make the movie and aren't that interested in the movie anymore. In the dream you have producers and various department heads all hounding you for final casting decisions and or approval on trivial details you could care less about. What you do seem to be concerned with is woman...all woman. Woman in the myriad roles they have played in your life. If your dream was something like that only in black and white with everyone speaking Italian and looking extra hip then you have some idea what the movie 8 1/2 is like...sorta. Its a film that is certainly concerned with dreams and or nightmares that bleed into the waking state. Marcello Mastroianni portrays a protagonist who seems to be a passive participant in a nightmare of his own making. That nightmare being an artist out of ideas. The film seems to be a subconscious search for why the ideas have stopped...it has something to do with woman.
Review of 8½
