8 1/2 (1963) **1/2 Federico Fellini's Bergmanesque meditation on a brilliant but burned out director is illuminative, but for more reasons than it's typically credited for. Starting with the title (by his own reckoning he'd already made 7 1/2 films) this film is, not only depicts, a squalid dry hole of creativity from a mind that can still set up telling face shots, dialogue sprays of semiprecious intellectual stones, scenes of transcendant whimsy, and negotiate philosophical hairpin curves at will. Don't show up late, the opening scene is tremendous. Marcello Mastroianni is wonderful but reasonably unreadable as the Felliniesque director at the center of a maelstrom that never gains critical mass but instead nags. Marcello is having problems with his characters, and Fellini no less so: out of a cast including Claudia Cardinale and Anouk Aimee, only Barbara Steele manages to break at all free of the crude cliché character casts within which Fellini has entombed them all, and she only by doing a very amusing mating dance with an older guy. Volcanic eruption on the scale of which Fellini built his reputation is out of the question here, the percolation that does occur crests as pithy, but important metaphysical truisms abound ("What do the spirits say about me?" "You are totally free. But you must learn to make good choices...you do not have much time."). I appreciate that down the stretch Fellini transparently debates whether or not to even bother with completing the film, and his reasons for doing so are worthy of support if not unrestrained adulation. Frankly though, the UFO movie looks more entertaining.