 Hi, baby. I think we should go to the left. I'm looking my way. No, we're not. Welcome back to Smoonsville. And today we're covering The Great Beauty. Yeah, Italian film came out The 2010s, I want to say. 2013, I feel like. Yeah, that sounds right. I don't know. It's so good. That might have been nominated for something actually best, best international film. Oh, no. Oh It just, it's one of those that when you need a refilling of your souls kind of been depleted a little bit brings a little of that, you know, heavenly elixir and just fills up your stories a little bit. So new segment to help for those that haven't seen it, but still want to watch us talk about movies. We're gonna try and explain the movie, but we're giving ourselves only 10 seconds so you get a very, very, very, very brief synopsis and then we're gonna dissect it from there. Do you want to go first? Take turns? I don't know. We didn't agree. I would decide on whether or not we're gonna rock, paper, scissors. Okay, fine. Starting now. Okay. It is set in Rome. It is about this journalist called Jep. He's famous for his wonderful journalism and for writing a novel in his 20s and for throwing the best parties. That is too short. Next time we'll start again. Start again? Okay. We'll give you another 10 seconds. That's too short. 15. I have to start again. I can't. You're gonna have to cut this. I don't know if this is gonna work. 20 seconds will do. Yeah, okay. That'll give it good. Okay, and go. Okay, so the movie is set in Rome. It is about this guy, Jep. He's a journalist. He's famous for his wonderful journalism and a book, a novel that he wrote in his 20s and for throwing incredible parties. And he's also famous for knowing a lot of, you know, affluent people in Rome. And so, yeah. There you go. It's a good starting point. Yeah, so that's basically, that's the movie. Yeah. And there's no beginning, middle, or end. It's just a day in the life or a week similar to Totoro. Yeah. It's like a week or a month in the life of Jep. Yeah, it's one of those movies. It's a contemplative thing. It really is for, I think, people that really like and think about art a lot or life. Well, the thing for me is a very hurt soggy, if I can say that. There's a lot of essential images I find in that movie. Just every frame could be a painting. You know, like there's just beautiful shots of whether it's the parties or the landscapes or them walking through these kind of off-limit buildings and these sculptures and all these gardens and everything. It's a great setting. You get a chance to get to know a lot of the characters. And even though you're right, there's not so much a beginning, middle, and end, you get invested, I felt. It's interesting. You get to see how people that have a lot of money live. A lot of people who have connections and are just living in complete and utter decadence, basically. It's a good word for a lot of decadence. It's very interesting because you like Jep. He's not the kind of person, which I'm not saying that if you're affluent, you're automatically a bad person. I don't think so at all. I like him because he's the kind of, despite the fact that he's extremely well-off and well-connected, he's very much human. He's incredibly self-aware and he gets along very easily with different people from all walks of life. It was nice for me. I think he's a great depiction of someone who is like that in an affluent setting because I think you find people like that in different settings. Maybe they are someone from a poor background and someone from a much richer background. There isn't anything there that's inaccessible to a certain class. It's accessible to everybody, the conversations that are had. It's just about a person who is just much more self-aware. I would say probably even more empathetic, to be honest, and just much more self-reflective. Non-judgmental. I really like that about him. He's also incredibly confident. He's extremely secure in himself and doesn't care about being judged by the skin-deep affluent friends of his. He has a guy who manages a strip club and then befriends the daughter of that guy and then goes on to take her out to these lavish events. You get people judging him for it. Yeah, you get people judging him and her. What is she wearing? But he honestly doesn't care. I really like that about him. He has that friend of the strip club manager. They've been friends for a very long time. He's the kind of, I think, aging artist type that you would aspire to. He just sees, are you a decent person? And he interviews this one artist, this performance artist, that he just finds very pretentious and kind of too up in her head and too full of masks and BS and just wants to confuse people and confuse yourself. She doesn't really know how to explain what she's trying to do, what she's about. But for him, he's like, even though he considers himself a writer, he struggles with other artistic types that are more about just being confusing and weird and novel and different just for the sake of it. And he's like, yeah, but do something honest to yourself. He has his one friend who keeps trying to write something like a theater screenplay. And he's always like, for the theater, and he's always like, yeah, but write something just, I don't know, that you went through. And yeah, and I like that. Like you said, you'll have friends of people that own strip clubs because they just see more real than a lot of actually the artistic people that he runs into. I did like that interview a lot when he's interviewing the artist. There are a lot of artists who realize the confusing who who hold on to confusing people because they know that if people don't understand something, they'll perceive it as really profound must be a profound work of art here. And you have a lot of people who okay, all I have to do is to dress a certain way. And that portrays me as a an artist automatically, or as someone who's deep thinking or who's mysterious, etc. I love that Jeff is the kind of person who sees right through that because everybody else in this in Rome is so mesmerized by this artist. Everybody who's there to see her crazy show is completely in awe of it. And, and he's just like, okay, what are you actually doing? You know, and he's she just spewing these things like, okay, well, I live on vibrations. What is a vibration? And she can't even explain it. And in the end, she confesses to the fact that she doesn't even know what she's talking about. And that's where he's coming from, you know, he's the kind of person who doesn't just take things at face value. And he digs deeper. And he understands that people have these masks that they put on. And he's also very much self aware of the fact that he also has his own, he does it to his own flaws. And he does certain things. And when he befriends the stripper, I remember he's talking to him to her about how, you know, at a funeral is they're preparing for a funeral and he's like a funeral is a is a is a show, like it's a production. And you do ABC, you do all of these things. And, and at the funeral, he does these he performs these things that he was describing to her and she witnesses it. Yeah, he can be honest about his flaws, about the fact that he's not a perfect human being and about the fact that he's sometimes dishonest, because these are all parts of us as human beings, you play to certain things at different points in time. But the people I find that are most insecure, they don't want to point to their flaws. They're not very, they don't talk very easily about their flaws. The scene I definitely remember the most from the first time watching it. And it's still one of my favorites is the one one time where they're having the drinking, it's late on his balcony, his friends over. And the one woman is, you know, kind of criticizing trying to, I think maybe Jep's self confidence annoys her because of her insecurity. So she wants to be like, Oh, you've only written one book and it was hardly even a book. And what are you acting like you're so cool and so sure of yourself and so okay with like, you have all the easy to have all the responses to everything and all the the wisecracks, you know, and then he basically explains you like, Well, first of all, you know, we're getting older, we realize that life is how it is. And there's kind of no need to really pretend more than that. We all know that we've had major screw ups, we all know that we're very fallible and we screw up all the time. And that's okay, that actually makes life more enjoyable. And, you know, and he's like, Well, look at you, he's like, I know the stuff I did, I did isn't really anybody's stuff you did, but you seem to want to portray this very successful, very, like exceptional version of yourself. And then he just kind of goes down the list of ways that she really isn't super perfect. In fact, she kind of gets a lot of extra help, she doesn't mention or a lot of her connections help her with all these successes that she kind of likes to show is just she just did it on her own, you know, which again is like, Well, be honest, be realistic, no one ever does anything on their own, you get help in so many ways from so many people and so many things, you know, with his case, like we talk about true realities, because, you know, we realize we don't have all the information and there's no point in trying to compete anymore, try to be the smartest person in the room, because really, this companionship at the end of the day is what we need, especially at this point in our lives. This is the important thing. That's that's what I was trying, you know, there are a lot of people who who want to hold on to a certain image of themselves, you know, they have this idealized view of what a the kind of person they aspire to be has to be into the kinds of things that they like. For example, some people will be like, Oh, we hate YouTube, you know, look down on YouTube. There are people who look down on YouTube and think that, you know, watching it makes them people who watch it are dumb, right? And so I'll just do podcasts. That's all I'll do. And I'll read the New Yorker that is all I'll I do because I am smarter. And if you watch YouTube, then you're a dumb person, right? So these people will hold on to this ideal sense of themselves, right? And may even be watching YouTube secretly, right? But like you, the person who's openly loves YouTube, which I do, I love YouTube. The person who openly loves loves YouTube that that person will chastise you for this thing that they're probably doing in private because YouTube is life. There's so many things to learn from there. Like you want to have fun? Go to YouTube. If you want to learn actual deep things, go to YouTube, everything, education, everything is there, right? You know, you judge yourself harshly. If you are maybe kind of like taking the wrong course where you perceive to be the wrong course. And so if you see someone else watching YouTube, then you, because it's something that you do and you don't want to be doing, it's just that reminder of, it reminds you of this thing that you don't like about yourself. And so you judge it harshly. And I've struggled a lot to find people like Jeff much more, you know, people who don't care about their weaknesses and who are okay to be vulnerable basically about what they maybe can or cannot do and aren't really trying to live according to some kind of yardstick. Yeah, yeah. Just a lot of great interaction, a lot of great characters. I like how in the dinner, the 104 year old, soon to be saint, I guess, she really liked the one book Jeff wrote. So they had dinner at his place. And there was a cardinal there that I think was supposed to become Pope, I think that's what they were saying, but very unpoped like, right? Which is, that's the thing, people are human. And then he was always kind of trying to steal a conversation. You know, he was that classic conversational narcissist that always needed to bring it back to him and talking about just whatever cooking. You know, it was just a very juicy movie. Such a juicy movie. Yeah, maybe I like it because it confirms a lot of things, a lot of my world views. It helps when a movie just speaks to you like that. It just relates so much to it. Things like sometimes people become friends with other people because they are artists, right? And that's it. We are both artists. And so we're going to be friends. But that is not enough just because you share in this one thing or this huge thing, maybe you both sell art and you're very good at it. But that does not mean anything in terms of whether or not you can actually be good companions. In reality, the things that you do, what you do doesn't necessarily, it's not the thing that the kind of, it's not a solid glue to a good companionship for me, as far as I'm concerned, because artists are not, you can have two people who are in the same field, but their personalities are very different. You know, like that guy who eventually leaves and is like Rome does not work for me. He's dating this, well not dating, he's pursuing this woman who is a writer and actress and all these things. And she's awful. She's an awful human being. And then everybody else, all the other artists around him, they love partying and they're extremely superficial, but all of them are in the same field. And he in the end realizes that, okay, I do love art. We can both love art. People can love this one thing, but it doesn't, it's not the thing that's going to bring you together. And so which is why I like Jeff because Jeff doesn't only limit his interactions to other journalists. He interacts with people that are just rich and that's it. They don't even have a job and that's that. Or he interacts with, he has, some of his friends are, you know, the strip club owner and the daughter. That is the mark, I think, of a person who's truly living life. You're not restricting yourself. You really, and you understand yourself more than just your title, you know? You understand that there's more to you than just your title. Because I think a lot of times people are very restricted by their title, understanding that if I want to maintain my status within this community, I cannot be converting with the likes of a stripper, you know? Jeff does not care. I love people like that. Yeah. Because, you know, he's surrounded by, you know, well-off dilettants that don't really have to work for a living. You talk, ask one person, what do you do? He's like, I'm rich. I don't do anything. And the person that his friend is pursuing, she just takes up a different artistic field just whenever it suits her, because she's not actually committed to what it takes to be good at any artistic thing. She does it purely for the status of it. I want to be a writer and then she wants to kind of attract this director, I think, who is going to direct a play. Well, now I want to do that, or now I want to act. It all just kind of depends on who she's attracted to at the time to potentially get closer to them, or just what does it serve in terms of attention and things like that. And there are people like that. But then there are people like Jeff that it's just, are you an interesting person? Can I talk, can I connect with you as human to human? That's all it matters. And he does seem to long for something, a more tangible relationship than the passerbys he's encountered throughout his life. But at the same time, he still enjoys the moments of beauty that he finds in his life, as much as it's so much surrounded by such complete superficiality. He still finds joy in that. And I think that's something that is really hard for people. That's the good life. There's a lot, there's a lot. It's a great movie, beautiful acting, just great. This is definitely a reflection piece. Yeah, 10 out of 10 reflection piece. Yeah, absolutely fantastic movie. Everything, it's hard. I find for movies to pull off dance or club scenes that really seem real and legit. But the way they did it, I'm like, yeah, I believe that all these people are here actually dancing and trying to escape their lives or their week or, you know, there's so many interesting faces and so much you can get from each person that they show dancing. It was just so easy to watch all the way through because there's so many interesting images and people and events and interactions. So yeah, very yummy, very yummy movie. All right. That's it. That's about it. That's it. That's definitely it. 100% it. Definitively it. Definitively. All right. Bye folks. Bye. Did we give it a rating?