8 and half

I watched 8 and 1/2 today. I watched nine first, then I realized how big 8 and 1/2 was. I finally gave in the temptation.

The Italian was spoken swiftly in 8 and 1/2. I had a hard time to follow the subtitles. One thing certainly surprised me was that 8 and 1/2 was not a musical. Since I was lured in with the knowledge of nine. The two were 85% the same thing. The difference was that each of the women in Nine were more clearly defined. It was not the case with 8 and 1/2, on the contrary there were only 3 women, who made strong impression in me. The others were mostly in chaos. This chaotic feeling could be contributed to my difficulty of following the English subtitles, but only a little bit.

The charm of the story is because of the protagonist, the director. It seemed that the director had a huge gap between him and the world around him, emotionally. To me, there was a strong undercurrent of insecurity that caused him emotionally distancing himself from the world. There are two constant themes in the movie which caught my attention. One of them was when director kept thinking back to his youth, which involved a lot of youthful wonderment about sex. The other was lie and truth, but more of the fear of telling the truth.

The director always had this boyish charm. He is good looking. But he was rarely emotional besides a short burst of excitement. His wife kept calling him a lier, saying he could not tell a truth. Ironically, he never denied it. The director himself kept telling his colleague or friends that he wanted to tell no lie no more, but truth. It seemed that truth was so hard to come by.

I feel that the sexual desire and his youth was somehow related. It could not be separated. The director was surrounded by beautiful women, most of them cling on the director for something. In one scenes he seemed to have a huge authority over the women around him, in his imagination. Although all the women in his imagination turned on him eventually.

I think this movie was a classic to study of male... lol