Word: guido
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Attractive notions, all. So why don't they coalesce into a fully satisfying film? In part, because they expose the show's structure as a variety program, an episodic fashion show. Each of the women in Guido's life comes on, talks about her life, performs a song, then fades into the crowd. Some of these solo spots are pretty wow-y: Cruz's writhing sensuality in "A Call from the Vatican," the surprising sass and vocal authority that Judi Dench brings to "Folies Bergere" and a nicely gaudy turn by the pop star Fergie as a zaftig whore...
Javier Bardem, the Spanish hunk who won an Oscar as the killer in No Country for Old Men, was originally to play Guido. When he dropped out, the role went to Day-Lewis, an actor nearly the opposite of Bardem. He's coiled, wary, and has a spirit that's not even slightly Mediterranean. In 8-1/2, Mastroianni was such a natural charmer - so, we have to say, Italian - that he made indolence attractive; in that film, a perpetual sexual adolescence was not a flaw but a goal (especially because women kept throwing themselves at him, and what woman...
...movie would be made, in a way, by the man the movie is about. The premise contained its own absurdity - nobody makes a movie without a script, a theme, a setting - but 8-1/2 was a work of great bustle and brio, built around the exhausted, passive Guido (Marcello Mastroianni). Finally, at the point of suicide, Guido has an epiphany: he will put his problems, his job, his life, all his women, into the circus of a movie, with himself as the ringmaster. (See a pictorial celebration of Federico Fellini and his movies...
Only Cotillard, as Guido's long-suffering wife Luisa, is in command of her character whether she's singing, speaking or just staring darts at her philandering mate. Pain rarely seemed so proud, or hurt so regal, as in Cotillard's rendition of the melancholic rhapsody "My Husband Makes Movies." There, a lovely scene when the ex-actress Luisa, while watching screen tests Guido has made for his new project, sees him lavishing exactly the same attention on a new girl that he did on her when she was just starting in pictures; the kind words and gestures she thought...
...your occupation, I probably got a full time job for you." And while many say that Jersey Shore is a horror show, for one cast member named Nicole "Snooki" Polizzi, it may be the beginning of a fairytale. As she says in the first episode, "I wanna marry a guido. My ultimate dream is to move to Jersey, find a nice, juiced, tan guy and live my life...