{"id":1730,"date":"2014-03-25T08:09:50","date_gmt":"2014-03-25T12:09:50","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/?p=1730"},"modified":"2014-04-03T08:15:17","modified_gmt":"2014-04-03T12:15:17","slug":"oscar-winner-the-great-beauty","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/?p=1730","title":{"rendered":"Oscar Winner: The Great Beauty"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"The<\/a>Wanted to see The Great Beauty<\/i> (trailer<\/a>), the Paolo Sorrentino\u2019s movie that won this year\u2019s Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film. And could have won for cinematography\u2014in it, Rome is The Great Beauty. Nice score, too. Toni Servillo makes the essentially selfish main character actually charming.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s the story of Jep Gambardella, who won fame with one novelette many years before and survives as merely a social creature, someone who knows everyone and whom everyone knows. The send-ups of performance art\u2014and artists\u2014are genuinely funny. But most of the film is linked together only by being in some way over-the-top, with the only authentic exchanges ones Jep has with his maid. You keep waiting for Jep to wake up, because scenes\u2019 link to reality seems so tenuous. The botox clinic, the man with the keys, the giraffe.<\/p>\n

The disconnected scenes\u2014from the profane to the sublime\u2014just didn\u2019t add up to much for me. Roger Ebert<\/a> liked it better than I did. Rotten Tomatoes rating<\/a>: critics (91%); audience (79%).<\/p>\n

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