For This Year’s Academy Award: My Money’s On Paolo Sorrentino’s ‘La Grande Bellezza’ (The Great Beauty), and I haven’t even had the chance to see it yet.
Editor’s update: READ MY 10/24/13 REVIEW OF LA GRANDE BELLEZZA
I wasn’t in Italy when it was in the theaters, it isn’t out on DVD there until October (but I have pre-ordered it from ibs.it ), and if there’s a way to download it illegally online I don’t want to know about it because, to quote Jerry Seinfeld, “But I don’t wanna be a pirate!”
Nominated for a Palme D’Or at Cannes, reviews have been glowing.
Critic Jay Weissberg said:
Rome in all its splendor and superficiality, artifice and significance, becomes an enormous banquet too rich to digest in one sitting in Paolo Sorrentino’s densely packed, often astonishing “The Great Beauty.” A tribute to, and castigation of, the city whose magnificence has famously entrapped its residents in existential crises, the pic follows a stalled author gradually awakening from the slumber of intellectual paralysis. Very much Sorrentino’s modern take on the themes of Fellini’s “La dolce vita,” emphasizing the emptiness of society amusements, “Great Beauty” will surprise, perplex and bewitch highbrow audiences yearning for big cinematic feasts.
Read all of Jay Weissberg’s review in Variety
The film has already been honored; Toni Servillo won a special Nastro D’Argento and Carlo Verdone and Sabrina Ferilli won supporting actor and actress Nastro D’Argento awards.
Good news America! La Grande Bellezza will open as The Great Beauty in New York City on Nov. 15, in Los Angeles on Nov. 22 and then to other American cities Nov. 29.
I Love Italian Everything 