The Great Beauty (La grande bellezza)

Well Italians (well Romans) seem to have to go clubbing at a much higher age than In Brighton. This film..   Tree of Life meets Human Traffic, but with a 65 year old protagonist, a tremendously expressive and interesting portrayal of writer turned playboy Jep Gambardella by actor Toni Sevillo - he's got such a great face, aged but young, deeply jowled and wrinkled but shapely.  A lot of the women characters are old too - they too have wrinkles and jowls, they're not perfect, but they are still partying and snorting lines of coke off the kitchen table in front of the disapproving, but tolerant eye of Jep' housekeeper. 


 The party scenes are a  continual visual and aural cinematic experience that gets you bouncing in your seat to them dancey rhythms, but a lots and lots of changes of pace, of perfect witty cameos of the characters  and situations that surround him, great satire ) and surreal scenes that suddenly envelop the screen seamlessly and effortlessly. Always interesting - this is a long film, a long winding non-narrative that has to change gear abruptly at times, as we see into 


Wants to have its cake and eat it with the Catholic church - the cardinal and  future pope hopeful is always describing his recipes, the Mother Teresa figure is so old and decrepid, stage managed in all sorts of pictures and events on her trip to Rome, but she also has some of the best lines
"You cannot speak poverty. You have to live it".

Karl Ove Knausgaard - Boyhood Island (My Struggle: 3), New Statesman magazine(pitiful again)

A while ago I picked a copy of the New Statesman in London (thinking about it, it's over a year ago), and except for a brilliant piece by Will Self on Costa coffee it was nauseatingly familiar in its snipey I know better than you tone. I really didn't like it. So when half way though Boyhood Island I stop and look up some of the reviews, and read the New Statesman review it was truly sick making in its superior tone as it said how bored the reviewer was reading the book:

  "To a loud anglophone minority, he constitutes a thrillingly boring alternative to boringly diverting invention"

- what a condescending piece of shit that sentence is.  Of course he has to say that the book is good (which it is, oh yes it is, a searing portrait of child hood I'd say, both because I mean it and because I can't be bothered to think up a less cliched phrase). He does say

 "he also displays a tremendous and irreducible zeal for penetrating what Karl Ove, ...  calls 'the inner core of human existence' ".

But he says it begrudgingly. It's a really bad review (you can read it here if you want to: NS Review) , because it's pretentious, over- intellectual ( being intellectual isn't bad, being a clever little show off is) and really hasn't opened up to the experience of the book (if I can loosely call it that). Because  Boyhood Island is intense raw "ordinary" childhood, written so clearly, so fiercely and so boldly, in simple everyday language that makes it punch you hard, in the head, in the gut, in the soul. Above all he captures the distress and panic of being a child where small things in themselves figure as cataclysmic tragedies , and the highs and joys as well, which arise out of similarly small things. And there is true horror in his terror of his probably alcoholic angry father. It makes you rethink you own childhood, and if you are a parent, your own parenting.