The Great Beauty
by Odin odin@aflx.com — Read all 3,869 poems by Odin odin@aflx.com
As Best Foreign Film awards go, last night’s Academy Award acknowledgment will go unnoticed by the masses. Yes, best gown, most outrageous comment, and a selfie that clogged the internet will get most of the attention…sadly. Some of us are gifted with different appreciations. (Download the film on Amazon for $3.99)
Monday, March 3, 2014
The Great Beauty
by Odin Roark
How short lived
This laughter made for releasing
Buried in the tragedian
Locked in the universal clown costume
We
You and me
We might watch Fellini’s balloons part
But the message of La Dolce Vita
Has faded into paparazzi history
Or perhaps
Never was
But
Taking up the Master’s baton
Paolo Sorrentino runs like a gazelle
His Great Beauty
Revisiting the question
A man lent to us
Provides a moment
Where one’s man for the ages
For our lifetime
A sufferer for both woman and man
Torn between the paternal instinct
And imagined freedom…
Becomes alone
Yet all-embracing
Such a price
We might say
Italy’s microcosmic decline
Man’s countenance on trial
His worth awaiting
A Christie's auction
Everything with its levy
Yet
What price the good life?
The good life seldom realized?
The kind lived
Then rebuked in
The Great Beauty?
Oh to seek
The unanswerable
Not the self-cocooning
Of “I know”
And the peace of inner-nothingness
Sublime’s secret
Like Sorrentino’s protagonist
We all live in bubbles
The question is about choice
Your bubble
Or
Mine?
the subtle and the intellectually penetrating and the truly artisitc
are usually smothered;
i've been fortunate enough to get my hands on a copy of The Great Beauty and it is, unlike so many others, genuinely worthwhile
take the best care, Friend
john
Since my college days I have been drawn to foreign films for their fascinating subject matter, characters, and lack of need for a huge box office following. I was never distracted by subtitles. In fact, I found them better in some cases then listening to badly pronounced acting in English. Which brings me to one of my pet peeves: Why is it that most of Hollywood's classical Roman movies are manned by English actors? Hollywood is an American town, isn't it? Can't they find some Italian like Sylvester Stallone to play Spartacus instead of a Russian like Kirk Douglas? I can only conclude that it's something to do with Shakespearean theater that most of the English actors have practiced, or remotely, the fact that the British Isles were once a Roman colony, giving them Roman ancestry.
Ron
budd