Movie Quote of the Day (‘8½,’ on a Director’s Initial Idea for a Film)

Writer [played by Jean Rougeul] [to Guido, on the director’s latest project]: “You see, what stands out at a first reading is the lack of a central issue or a philosophical stance. That makes the film a chain of gratuitous episodes which may even be amusing in their ambivalent realism. You wonder, what is the director really trying to do? Make us think? Scare us? That ploy betrays a basic lack of poetic inspiration.”— 8½ (1963), screenplay by Federico Fellini, Tullio Pinelli, Ennio Flaiano, and Brunello Rondi, directed by Federico Fellini

I burst out laughing the first time I saw Fellini’s classic and heard these lines. I couldn’t help but think that the director heard similar advice from a scribe as he struggled with his own case of writer’s block in creating this movie.

A director struggling with writer’s block who ends up making a film about a director with the same issue. Hmm…sounds self-referential. Not unlike the felt hat that Fellini’s film stand-in, Marcello Mastroianni, wears, almost as if to say, “Guess who all this is about—kind of?”

Quote of the Day (Ogden Nash, Lamenting the ‘Intellectual Prig Apostate’)

“Such a one is so erudite that he frequently thinks in Aramaic,
But he expresses himself in slang long passé in Passaic.
His signature is purple ink in an illegible curlicue,
And he compares baseball to ballet, and laments the passing of burlesque, which he refers to as burlicue….
For the most part, my feelings about him I silently conceal,
But when he comments that ‘The Power of Positive Thinking’ burns with a hard, gemlike flame, I can only cry that he is robbing Pater to paw Peale.”—American poet Ogden Nash (1902-1971), “Just How Low Can a Highbrow Go When a Highbrow Lowers His Brow?,” originally printed in The New Yorker, Aug. 30, 1958, reprinted in Everyone But Thee and Me (1962)
 
This year marked the 50^th anniversary of the death of Ogden Nash, one of the masters of light verse. Yet, as far as I know, no major commemoration marked the sad occasion.
 
But, as the excerpt I’ve quoted shows, Nash was equally erudite and delightful.
 
Want further proof? Well, for this season of the year, are you ready for some football—or, to be more exact, Nash’s tribute to the late Hall of Fame defensive end, Bubba Smith?
 
“Few manage to topple in a tussle
Three hundred pounds of hustle and muscle.
He won't complain if double-teamed;
It isn't Bubba who gets creamed.”