That violent head butt made me understand many things.

The Great Beauty

(2013)

I’m not the greatest Fellini fan. I know Gilliam worships the guy, and he’s generally praised as one of the masters of European cinema, but he’s only ever elicited a bit of a shrug. With all the talk of Paulo Sorrentino’s indebtedness, not least from himself, I’m wondering whether I should reappraise. Because I really liked The Great Beauty. On occasion it stammers rather than sashays some of the recognisable devices and tics of its biggest influence (it’s much better on the hedonism than the spiritual angst), but more frequently this is a sumptuous feast for the eyes and ears, anchored by a wonderfully persevering performance from Toni Servillo.

Servillo’s Jep Gambardello is a cheerfully louche fellow, a writer who received acclaim early in his career for a single novel (The Human Apparatus) before forsaking hard graft for an easy life of column writing and socialising. He’s the life and soul of the party, for whom morning is an unknown object. But on turning 65 he finds himself in reflective mode, as we follow his odyssey through the streets and habitations and great and not so good of Rome.

It’s a melancholy tale, often a very funny one, and the whole is beautifully photographed by Lica Bigazzi. This may be a commentary on the empty vice of Berlusconi-era Italy, but the materialistic decadence of Sorrentino’s vision is universal. If you needed proof of the Fellini-ness of it all, look out for the little people (also one of Gilliam’s recurrent obsessions) and nuns. It’s in through the embrace of the mannerisms of European art cinema that Sorrentino finds his breadth of vision, unfettered by a typical narrative structure (although less off the wall than the previous year’s Holy Motors).

He has a lot of fun playing with conventions, taking pokes at pretensions both artistic (“I’m an artist. I don’t need to explain Jack Shit” offers Talia Concept, whose pubic hair is adorned with the hammer and sickle and who runs head first into a wall; her boyfriend covers basket balls with confetti; “He’s sensational”) and political (Jep blithely eviscerates Stefania’s claim to authenticity, while taking comfort in his own self-aware lack of the same). There’s the banal mirth at the expense of the botox queues (a woman informs the operating professor she has just come back from India; “I had amazing dysentery”). And did you know, the Ethiopian jazz scene is the only interesting one today? Conversely, the sight of middle-aged and above types larging it to modern dance tunes is oddly beguiling rather than off-putting (Lele Marchitelli’s music choices are exceptional throughout). As much as he is critiquing the vacuity, Sorrentino is celebrating it.

Reflecting Jep’s increasing thoughts of mortality, his journey takes a more sombre path. The daughter of an old friend (armed with erudite flippancy at all times, Jep asks “Why did you have to call her Ramona?”), an ageing stripper, attracts his platonic interest, which is a change for him, and he appears to be mentoring her for a while. But she holds her own darkness, and his tutoring in the etiquette of funeral ceremonies sees him breaking the number one rule (he starts sobbing). Even there, Sorrentino’s wicked sense of humour breaks through, as the wife of an attendee protests “Your back!” when he reluctantly volunteers to bear the casket.

And he throws curveballs too; there’s much dissection of art and talent. Good friend Romano (Carlo Verdone) becomes disenchanted by a city that has used him; he lacks the talent to create, or the looks to attract ladies. Unlike Jep, to whom everything comes easy but who has coasted on unused talent, the city has disappointed him; it is all veneer and no depth, and when depth is demanded there is only hostility (“You’ve written a pile of shit”, dismisses the woman to whom he has enslaved himself).

Then there’s the young girl proclaimed as a painting prodigy; we think this is going to be another piss-take of the shallow elite, until we realise that she really is talented (Jep may or may not be missing the point when he responds to the suggestion that she was crying with “Nonsense, that girl earns millions”). The only problem is she wants to be a vet (it isn’t clear if her cries are rage at parents co-opting her into performance art or this is actually a part of her performance art).

Jep is attentive only to the enriched domain over which he presides, such that he is unaware of one of the world’s ten most wanted men living on his doorstep. And he is surprised by an acquaintance’s revelation that the girl who left him when they were teenagers saw him as his great love. In part it this that reignites his reflection and spurs him on. But the quest for spiritual answers finds Sorrentino on lumpier ground; a food-obsessed exorcist appears to confirm that the religious establishment has nothing of importance to say, while a sister known as “The Saint” shuts down requests for an interview with “I took a vow of poverty, and you cant talk about poverty. You have to live it”. Whether or not it is intended, her genuine depth (she can talk to flamingos) comes across as glibly as Jep’s world.

Perhaps this is because Sorrentino has set himself up to address the imponderables. And you wonder if he does so because that’s what Fellini would do (à la La Dolce Vita), rather than because he is genuinely asking those questions.

Sorrentino may not have that much to say about the greater mysteries, only questions, so these themes arise more provocatively when he doesn’t attempt to give voice to them. When the content is purely visual. Jep’s final monologue fins him apparently inspired to write again by the truth of the recognition of love itself, from all those years ago, something at odds with the superficiality he has embraced and hidden behind for so long. But Sorrentino’s film delights in the journey rather than the destination; it may be an irony that Jep’s realisation is limited (after all, he does not deal with what lies beyond), or maybe the understanding he comes to is intended as both a release and a restriction.

****

Abandon selective targeting. Shoot everything.

28 Weeks Later (2007) (SPOILERS) The first five minutes of 28 Weeks Later are far and away the best part of this sequel, offering in quick succession a devastating moral quandary and a waking nightmare, immortalised on the screen. After that, while significantly more polished, Juan Carlos Fresnadillo reveals his concept to be altogether inferior to Danny Boyle and Alex Garland’s, falling back on the crutches of gore, nihilism, and disengaging and limiting shifts of focus between characters in whom one has little investment in the first place.

The Bible never said anything about amphetamines.

The Color of Money (1986) (SPOILERS) I tend to think it’s evident when Scorsese isn’t truly exercised by material. He can still invest every ounce of the technical acumen at his fingertips, and the results can dazzle on that level, but you don’t really feel the filmmaker in the film. Which, for one of his pictures to truly carry a wallop, you need to do. We’ve seen quite a few in such deficit in recent years, most often teaming with Leo. The Color of Money , however, is the first where it was out-and-out evident the subject matter wasn’t Marty’s bag. He needed it, desperately, to come off, but in the manner a tradesman who wants to keep getting jobs. This sequel to The Hustler doesn’t linger in the mind, however good it may be, moment by moment.

Doctors make the worst patients.

Coma (1978) (SPOILERS) Michael Crichton’s sophomore big-screen feature, and by some distance his best. Perhaps it’s simply that this a milieu known to him, or perhaps it’s that it’s very much aligned to the there-and-now and present, but Coma , despite the occasional lapse in this adaptation of colleague Robin Cook’s novel, is an effective, creepy, resonant thriller and then some. Crichton knows his subject, and it shows – the picture is confident and verisimilitudinous in a way none of his other directorial efforts are – and his low-key – some might say clinical – approach pays dividends. You might also call it prescient, but that would be to suggest its subject matter wasn’t immediately relevant then too.

I said I had no family. I didn’t say I had an empty apartment.

The Apartment (1960) (SPOILERS) Billy Wilder’s romcom delivered the genre that rare Best Picture Oscar winner. Albeit, The Apartment amounts to a rather grim (now) PG-rated scenario, one rife with adultery, attempted suicide, prostitution of the soul and subjective thereof of the body. And yet, it’s also, finally, rather sweet, so salving the darker passages and evidencing the director’s expertly judged balancing act. Time Out ’s Tom Milne suggested the ending was a cop out (“ boy forgives girl and all’s well ”). But really, what other ending did the audience or central characters deserve?

Your desecration of reality will not go unpunished.

2021-22 Best-of, Worst-of and Everything Else Besides The movies might be the most visible example of attempts to cling onto cultural remnants as the previous societal template clatters down the drain. It takes something people really want – unlike a Bond movie where he kicks the can – to suggest the model of yesteryear, one where a billion-dollar grosser was like sneezing. You can argue Spider-Man: No Way Home is replete with agendas of one sort or another, and that’s undoubtedly the case (that’s Hollywood), but crowding out any such extraneous elements (and they often are) is simply a consummate crowd-pleaser that taps into tangible nostalgia through its multiverse take. Of course, nostalgia for a mere seven years ago, for something you didn’t like anyway, is a symptom of how fraught these times have become.

Captain, he who walks in fire will burn his feet.

The Golden Voyage of Sinbad (1973) (SPOILERS) Ray Harryhausen returns to the kind of unadulterated fantasy material that made Jason and the Argonauts such a success – swords & stop motion, if you like. In between, there were a couple of less successful efforts, HG Wells adaptation First Men in the Moon and The Valley of the Gwangi (which I considered the best thing ever as a kid: dinosaur walks into a cowboy movie). Harryhausen’s special-effects supremacy – in a for-hire capacity – had also been consummately eclipsed by Raquel Welch’s fur bikini in One Million Years B.C . The Golden Voyage of Sinbad follows the expected Dynamation template – blank-slate hero, memorable creatures, McGuffin quest – but in its considerable favour, it also boasts a villainous performance by nobody-at-the-time, on-the-cusp-of-greatness Tom Baker.

Listen to the goddamn qualified scientists!

Don’t Look Up (2021) (SPOILERS) It’s testament to Don’t Look Up ’s “quality” that critics who would normally lap up this kind of liberal-causes messaging couldn’t find it within themselves to grant it a free pass. Adam McKay has attempted to refashion himself as a satirist since jettisoning former collaborator Will Ferrell, but as a Hollywood player and an inevitably socio-politically partisan one, he simply falls in line with the most obvious, fatuous propagandising.

Archimedes would split himself with envy.

Sinbad and the Eye of the Tiger (1977) (SPOILERS) Generally, this seems to be the Ray Harryhausen Sinbad outing that gets the short straw in the appreciation stakes. Which is rather unfair. True, Sinbad and the Eye of the Tiger lacks Tom Baker and his rich brown voice personifying evil incarnate – although Margaret Whiting more than holds her own in the wickedness stakes – and the structure follows the Harryhausen template perhaps over scrupulously (Beverly Cross previously collaborated with the stop-motion auteur on Jason and the Argonauts , and would again subsequently with Clash of the Titans ). But the storytelling is swift and sprightly, and the animation itself scores, achieving a degree of interaction frequently more proficient than its more lavishly praised peer group.

You just threw a donut in the hot zone!

Den of Thieves (2018) (SPOILERS) I'd heard this was a shameless Heat rip-off, and the presence of Gerard Butler seemed to confirm it would be passable-at-best B-heist hokum, so maybe it was just middling expectations, even having heard how enthused certain pockets of the Internet were, but Den of Thieves is a surprisingly very satisfying entry in the genre. I can't even fault it for attempting to Keyser Soze the whole shebang at the last moment – add a head in a box and you have three 1995 classics in one movie – even if that particular conceit doesn’t quite come together.

You have a very angry family, sir.

Eternals (2021) (SPOILERS) It would be overstating the case to suggest Eternals is a pleasant surprise, but given the adverse harbingers surrounding it, it’s a much more serviceable – if bloated – and thematically intriguing picture than I’d expected. The signature motifs of director and honestly-not-billionaire’s-progeny Chloé Zhao are present, mostly amounting to attempts at Malick-lite gauzy natural light and naturalism at odds with the rigidly unnatural material. There’s woke to spare too, since this is something of a Kevin Feige Phase Four flagship, one that rather floundered, showcasing his designs for a nu-MCU. Nevertheless, Eternals manages to maintain interest despite some very variable performances, effects, and the usual retreat into standard tropes, come the final big showdown.

Now In Full Color, with a Happier Ending

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