"Cinema is how the Italians explained themselves to the world. Television is how the Americans apologised."
I watched it at 40 and thought it was about Rome. I watched it again at 47 and realised it was about me. Jep Gambardella walks through parties he no longer enjoys, writes nothing despite being capable of everything, and surrounds himself with beauty as a defence against the terrifying suspicion that beauty might not be enough.
Sorrentino shoots Rome the way Fellini shot his own imagination — as a place that exists primarily to be remembered. Every frame is a painting that knows it is a painting. The opening sequence alone — the tourist collapsing before the Fontanone, the choir, the cut to the rooftop party — is the finest fifteen minutes of cinema produced this century. I will accept arguments. I will not accept disagreement.
The most underrated television series of this century. I will die on this hill and I will die alone on it, which is fitting because The Knick understands loneliness better than any show since Six Feet Under.
Soderbergh directed every episode himself. The soundtrack is electronic — Cliff Martinez synthesizers over 1900s surgery — and it should not work, except it works so completely that you cannot imagine it any other way. Clive Owen gives the performance of his career as Dr. John Thackery: brilliant, addicted, doomed, and so precisely rendered that you forgive him everything because you understand him entirely.
Two seasons. Twenty episodes. No wasted scene. It was cancelled because nobody watched it. Nobody watched it because it was too good. This is how civilisation declines — not through catastrophe, but through the quiet failure to recognise excellence.
The most beautiful thing Scandinavia has ever produced, and I include the fjords.
Bergman made this as his farewell to cinema, and it contains everything he ever knew about family, memory, cruelty, and the stubborn persistence of joy. The Christmas dinner scene in the first act is so warm, so rich, so full of life that you can smell the candles and taste the aquavit. Then the bishop arrives, and the warmth drains from the screen like blood from a face.
Watch the five-hour television version if you have any respect for yourself. The theatrical cut is fine. The full version is a masterpiece. There is a difference, and it is not subtle.