Best movie of this year hands down!

It's an amazing and heartbreaking story.

It’s fine. It's literally the definition of a fine movie. You’ve seen it before, you know every beat and outcome before the characters even do. Only question is how much escapism you’re looking for.

A clunky actioner with a handful of cool moments.

Set in a small suburban town in the early Fifties, I VITELLONI refers to a group of twentysomething men, all jobless, who spend their days loafing around and their nights playing pool, drinking, and roaming the streets picking up available women. They have no prospects in life; nor do they really appear willing to improve themselves. Vannucci (Leopoldo Trieste) a would-be playwright, spends much of his time pretending to work and ogling a neighboring girl.Things change when Fausto Moretti (Franco Fabrizi) has a shotgun wedding to Sandra (Eleonora Ruffo) and returns from honeymoon with a wandering eye. He makes a pass at shop-owner Rubibi's wife (Paola Borboni), and subsequently enjoys a one-night stand with a local "actress." Sandra absconds, forcing Moretti to rethink his life and make decisions.Shot in grainy black-and-white by Carlo Carlini, Otello Martelli, and Luciano Trasatti, Fellini's second feature depicts a dead-end world of cramped buildings, lonely streets and walls festooned with dog-eared posters. The group of young men adumbrate similar groups as depicted in British neo-realist films such as BILLY LIAR (1962) - testosterone-filled, insecure yet perpetually willing to show off in a world dominated by convention. To succeed in life you need to work, get married, and start a family.There are few moments to interrupt the tedium: one of these is the annual carnival, where the good burghers dress up in costumes of various hues and indulge in dancing, drinking, snogging and other revelries. Fellini communicates the desperation of the occasion with a whirling camera that circles the actors, with the music getting faster and faster ("Yes,sir, that's my baby") until it becomes a blur of jangled notes. Time passes: and we see the aftermath of the occasion, with a single trumpeter playing for an exhausted guest unwilling to go home.The film is not without its humorous elements, notably the portrayal of the fastidious Signior Rubini (Enrico Viarisio) walking self- importantly round his shop, stuffed to the brim with loudly ticking clocks and other curios. Yet the overall tone is one of sympathy for the young men, even Fausto - the forename is symbolic - whose infidelity is attributable mostly to boredom. He keeps massaging the sides of his brilliantined hair, in an attempt to render himself attractive to women; but his life is doomed to be a succession of one-night stands.The film is narrated by Moraldo, one of the group of young men (Franco Interlenghi) in tongue-in-cheek style; at the end he says that social order has been restored, but maybe temporarily. No one knows what will happen to the group in the future - save, perhaps, for Moraldo who is forced to leave the small town in search of work, as well as trying to suppress his homosexual feelings towards the young railway worker Guido (Guido Martufi). There is an overall feeling of dissatisfaction, shared by viewers and performers alike.

Shockingly lazy, decadently bourgeois, socially useless, mother's pets or daddy's boys, skirt chasers or fame dreamers, the singular paradox characterizing Fellini's 'Vitelloni' is that the emptiness governing their lives doesn't empty their lives for all that.The film is a rich and insightful character study of the lives of five men in an age where being married, having a honorable profession, and raising a family were socially mandatory. These achievements never belonged to our antiheroes' priorities, they'd rather seize the present in a careless rebellious-like detachment from the future, swinging between pool bars and the beach, walking in the deserted streets of their small town, holding each other, and joyfully hopping and singing in unison. That's the primary mood of the film, embodied by Nino Rota's playful music. Fellini doesn't tackle their condition in a judgmental way. After all, if they don't take themselves seriously, why should we?Fellini's direction and the Oscar nominated script creates the feeling of an episodic film during which the 'Vitelloni' deal with stuff happening to them, highlighting the inner passivity of their situation. Leopoldo, the dramatist and intellectual, meets his idol, Alberto found himself alone with his mother after her sister left the town with her lover, Fausto, the older and leader of the group, is forced by his father to marry the innocent Sandra, who carries his future child, and Moraldo, Sandra's bother witnesses these events, with a palpable melancholy making his passivity even more tragic. He's the core of the film, the one whose life's emptiness echoes a more existential issue while each 'Vitelloni' has an occasion to shine, to live a pivotal moment or to be struck by a flash of realization. The 'Vitelloni' are passive but reacts actively, except Moraldo who lacks in both the acting and reacting department.The 'Vitelloni's passivity tends to be more severely portrayed as the story progresses. These are men who enjoy life without earning their pleasures, and while honest people are asleep, they spend the night gossiping, drinking and seducing gals. They enjoy holidays, summer and carnivals and spend the rest of the time waiting for the next occasion to have fun. The storm interrupting the beauty pageant contest is an allegory of a more serious time's arrival, where some men ought to take their responsibilities, starting with Fausto who pays the biggest price for a night spent with the freshly elected 'Miss Siren'. Fausto acts with women like the 'Vitelloni' with society : as parasites, taking and never giving, sometimes cheating and stealing. These men enjoy the benefits of life with no individual or collective contribution whatsoever, each one holding a fallacious alibi. Alberto takes care of his mother, Leopoldo prepares a play, Fausto fulfills his fantasies, and Moraldo, well, Moraldo … ultimately, they all are useless. In a comic relief scene, Alberto makes an obscene gesture to road workers before the car engine suddenly stops, allowing the proletarians to have their revenge. Beyond the laughs, the script's intelligently ridicules our characters portraying them as the true opportunistic parasites without the common decency to respect people who, at least, are productive.There's a vulgar word in French that perfectly describes the inner condition of the 'Vitelloni', it basically means: the 'masturbators'. Sorry for the crudeness, but this quite reflects the sad reality of men basically deprived from their manhood, and this is precisely the main misinterpretation that surrounds the film. I don't think there are deliberately homosexual undertones; I mostly felt that the characters were unconsciously becoming effeminate as if their parasite condition spilled over their virility. Women, in Italian patriarchal and macho societies, were either mothers, sisters, objects to conquer, to protect or to be taken care of. Men were meant to conquer and women to be conquered or possessed, something that can be extrapolated to penetration for men and fullness for women. The emptiness in the 'Vitelloni''s lives mirrors the female's lack of a sexual organ that provides their desire of fullness. Instead of conquering, going ahead, the 'Vitelloni' don't have the tools to build their lives, therefore they wait for their lives to be filled by destiny, at the risk of being literally screwed.Fausto, despite his virile magnetism, seduces women like a reverse nymphomaniac, he's obviously pleased whenever he's seduced, Leopoldo is victim of an inconvenient misunderstanding when his idol invites him to read his play in a dark and intimate place in the beach, and Moraldo develops a strange, maybe unsettling friendship with a young boy working in the train station. Moraldo talks to the kid with eyes full of respect and admiration, telling a lot about his asexuality. The boy's activity transcend any sexual consideration, as if it didn't take to be man to be a Man. Alberto, notably during the Carnival sequence, is obviously the most effeminate, totally alienated by his social status. And in a booze-driven lucidity, he realizes he's the one really screwed by life. I can understand how the film inspired Martin Scorsese's "Mean Streets" : despite the stories' simplicity, it carries extremely controversial elements, depicting men as parasite, obvious anti-macho figures, and ultimately, losers, likable or not.But the poetry of Fellini's direction and Rota's music reconciles us with the 'Vitelloni' bunch, portraying them as rather virgin figures waiting for life to deflower them. Fausto is the one whose character's arc is closed and the others will probably find a meaning to their lives, and if Moraldo still doesn't know how to fill the three dots, the best he can do is leaving the town, and find his way.Now, it's impossible not to look at the film without nostalgic eyes, at a beautiful tribute to a lost era where even unemployed and lonely people could enjoy simple pleasures like drinking, dancing, going to the beach and hanging out with friends, a time with more innocence and without the Internet. One thing for sure, today's 'Vitelloni' are probably sadder and more miserable than Fellini's.

Fellini's first masterpiece may not be as well-known as later classics, but it's just as wonderful, fortunately lacking the maestro's later (sometimes overbearing) tendencies to turn to caricature and the grotesque.The director's humanity and the resulting poetic images in beautiful black-and-white photography enrich a basically neo-realist plot and turn it into something magical. We not only care for these five young men, we become them, parts of them, at least.This is deeply emotive film-making.9 out of 10 sad days at the seaside

A marvellous, involving and moving, swirling, humane and believable look at life an Italian seaside town. At first when we are introduced to the bunch of 'young' men, I thought that, as with US and UK films of the period, we were having to accept 30 year olds as 20 year olds. But no! These layabouts, loafing about, picking up girls and older women, are 30 year olds still living with their mamas and expecting everything to fall into their laps (and their lips!). Getting pregnant still a big deal, of course, and if the 'youngsters' think little of the consequences the older generation certainly seem to get together to get some sort of result. There are many wonderful sequences in this, ever beautiful tapestry of life in the 50s and the director even manages to get in plenty of carnival in this early film.