The Great Beauty

When I was thinking of, you know, things I could recommend that wouldn't make you bad or [laughs] deformed, I thought Tintin.

Um, a film I'm very, very fond of is an Italian film called La Grande Bellezza by Paolo Sorrentino.

It came out in 2013.

Won the best film foreign, uh, category award for the Academy Awards that year.

And, uh, it's intensely beautiful.

I, I would really recommend that to everyone.

Maybe not year eight, but, uh, La Grande Bellezza is fantastic.

Uh, an author, I mean, my favorite writer, and I used to have her portrait hanging in my office, is Dorothy Parker, who was a, a 20th century American critic, poet, screenwriter.

deep as

this movie or as The Great Beauty, also starring Tony Servillo.

Was that the film he did prior to this?

Yes.

Yes.

Right.

Which we reviewed also, The Great Beauty, another beautiful Sorrentino film.

Oh, gorgeous.

At year's end, the Best Picture Oscar went to 12 Years a Slave.

And the Foreign Language Film Oscar went to The Great Beauty, which was also awarded the same award by BAFTA and the Golden Globes.

More about that later.

And I

Yeah.

Moving on, we have a major movie that did not win awards.

The Great Beauty, La Grande Bellezza by Paolo Sorrentino from Italy in co-production with France.

We'll talk about Sorrentino more in this show when we talk about The Consequences of Love from 2004.

So it's Far La More by Rafaela Carrá, but it's a Bob Sinclair mix.

And it appears in the Great Beauty's birthday song, kind of appearance of all the characters.

I remember, like, I burst out laughing in the cinema.

It was just very, very funny, the whole thing.

because the movie is about the President of the Republic, played by Tony Servillo, and the director is Paolo Sorrentino.

And this is his best work since The Great Beauty, that won the Academy Award for International Film.

What we can expect, Beth? Finally, we can see a good, moral, ethical politician at work.

So this politician, this Presidente della Repubblica, is in his last six months of his term.

If you watch that film, it's so architectural.

Italian films, or La Grande Bellezza, which is a Sorrentino film, which is very architectural.

So sometimes moments in a film will just capture my imagination and I'll hold on to that And I'll sort of bring that in when it's time to do a building.

And the scale and the way that the proportions worked in that actually helped me put spaces together.

Since I moved to LA, Many years ago, Sorrentino, one of the biggest directors in Italy, he's from Naples originally, but he's deeply in love with Rome.

He wrote and directed the movie, La Grande Bellezza, The Great Beauty.

In Rome, there are so many things that, Lately, a lot of specific tours have been offered.

For example, the tour about the life of Anna Magnani.

All the spots where Anna Magnani shot movies or film movies or she lived.

Anna Magnani is the... uh first of all the first uh oscar winner actress italian actress she won the oscar in 1955 with the rosa too and uh so it was a big achievement and she was such a such a diva she says oh i don't care it's fine i think think I deserved it but you know with distance so she was fantastic but she is the face of Mama Roma so a tour about her I think it's interesting as it's interest it would be interesting seeing the corners of Rome that have not been have not been so touristy.

So the parts of Trastevere, parts of the center, not necessarily the line at Vatican City.