Old men tend to make art that is shallow, imitative of their earlier, better works, and which would never garner an ounce of praise were it not for their backlog of greater works somehow letting their patina still rub off.

In America, the best proof of this nostrum is the awarding of the lifetime Academy Award to a film director, or actor. Apparently, Europe is not immune to such worthless laurels either, for, in 1987, Federico Fellini's disastrously bad film Intervista won the Cannes Film Festival's Fortieth Anniversary Award and the Grand Prize at the Moscow Film Festival.

In it, one can see many pastiches from earlier Fellini films, much as Ingmar Bergman cribbed ideas and scenes from his earlier masterpieces for his disastrously bad last film Saraband, the way Akira Kurosawa tossed random ideas together for Dreams, and the way Woody Allen has constantly reworked themes from his 1970s and 1980s great films into his last decade's worth of mostly mediocrities.

That said, even the worst of Allen's recent films, like The Curse Of The Jade Scorpion, were better than Intervista. Fellini might take some solace in the fact that Intervista is a better film than Bergman's incest-ridden Saraband, but it's a minor comfort, at best, and this shoddy film still falls well shy of even Dreams.

Fellini's worst critics have called his films, even the great ones, self-important, self-indulgent, meandering, pointless, etc., and it feels almost as if Fellini wanted to give them a film to finally justify their lowest and worst expectations. There really is no point to the film. It's ostensibly a film within a film within a film, but it's a rework of 8½ in that sense, save wholly lacking in anything new to say about Fellini or the art of filmmaking.

The premise is that a Japanese TV crew has come to interview Fellini on the set of a new film based upon Franz Kafka's disastrously bad, uncompleted, and semi-comic novel Amerika. Thus, we watch them pander to The Maestro, as he refers to himself, and then see him filming his own entrée into Cinecitta film studios a half century before.

What this has to do with the faux film of Amerika is a good question, and one that goes unanswered. The Fellini stand-in, Sergio Rubini, playing himself as a character, looks and acts nothing like Fellini; his scenes are pointless, and when we watch him watching the film being made into a film, we don't really care that he is a boob, or that he lusts for a cute blond (Antonella Ponziani) on the trolley, or that he longs to interview a famous film star (Paola Liguori).

When that episode plays out, we see the Amerika film wrapping up, a thunderstorm hits, so the crew sleeps the whole night under a plastic wrap tent. Why? The studio is less than a hundred yards away, but then American Indian actors could not attack the crew with television antennae, so that the film ends up another film that Fellini is making within Intervista's confines.