The Great Beauty

12/22/2015

Mesmerizing movie staging a decadent and beautiful Rome for a decadent character and greatly played by Toni Servillo. Great cast, nice decadent story and, overally, huge directing by Paolo Sorrentino.

4/3/2017

Jep Gambardella: "The trains at our parties are the best in Rome. They're the best cause they go nowhere. ......................... This is how it always ends. With death. But first there was life. Hidden beneath the blah, blah, blah. It's all settled beneath the chitter chatter and the noise. Silence and sentiment. Emotion and fear. The haggard, inconstant flashes of beauty. And then the wretched squalor and miserable humanity. All buried under the cover of the embarrassment of being in the world, blah, blah, blah... Beyond there is what lies beyond. I don't deal with what lies beyond. Therefore... let this novel begin. After all... it's just a trick. Yes, it's just a trick." .........................................................................................................

3/28/2026

I think it’s quite a testament to the performance from Toni Servillo here that he managed to turn a character that I pretty much despised at the start into one I almost pitied at the end. “Jep” is the literary equivalent of the one-hit wonder, but since writing the “Human Apparatus”, he has successfully sailed through his life in Rome until now, with his sixty-fifth birthday looming, he involuntarily begins to challenge the shallowness of his own existence. Sure, he has had the best of wine, women and song along the way and many of his friends are every bit as profligate and vacuous as himself, but now he is facing a trauma-induced epiphany that compels him (and enables us) to reminisce about the excesses of his life and his failure to ever recreate that one success from decades ago. It’s