Intervista (2005)

We are not living in a Federico Fellini era. The scruffily capricious legend trusted his eye-boggling imagery to sustain interest until the symbolic narrative got around to making sense. That's a hard sell in the let's-remake-The A-Team-with-Ben Stiller-as-B.A. Baracus 21st century. Intervista, which Fellini called ''a chat with friends,'' winds its way through the maestro's feelings about his dying brand of cinema, the famed Italian studio Cinecittá, his early days as a journalist, even antennae-wielding Native Americans (representing encroaching television). Sublime moments encounter clunkiness and bad overdubbing until it's hard to know what's on purpose, but you certainly envy the Fellini family/crew their experiences in service of a man who so appreciated his life's pursuit (or what he called ''this alibi''). The sight of Anita Ekberg (more formidable than ever) and Marcello Mastroianni watching themselves in La Dolce Vita raises the level of the game considerably. EXTRAS A rustic photo collage and a compendium of key-player interviews, including many of Fellini rhapsodizing and one with a candid, dressed-down Ekberg that will give contemporary publicists coronaries.

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