The Journal of Manny Face, Installment 2
So this is how I saw Fellini’s “La Dolce Vita” last week at the Kyiv Cinema, off of Lva Tolstogo Square.
I’m an actor, so whatever I say about it should be taken as the words of an expert.
But it’s not just how I saw it, which is simple, I got tickets and went to see it with The Dancing Girl and then we just sat there for 3 hours and watched it, but it’s what I thought of it, how it made me feel, what my impressions were. Know what I mean?
Which is why it’s called a review, because it happened here, in Kyiv, as part of Italian Film Week, fitting the required format of The Checkout, which doesn’t do previews, which never turn out to be true anyway; know what I mean?
Like the cruddy weekly entertainment pulper we’re stuck with, What One glossy magazine, with its cheery elitism, bubbly condescension and flatulent righteousness farted out of every overlong editorial together with the dyspeptic moron observations at the end that are supposed to impress us with their deep worldly wisdom (like, ooooo… these must be the thoughts of a real writer, whom fate has forced to work as this weekly tripe’s publisher instead. Hey, that’s okay. Look on the bright side – you get all those free meals at the most expensive restaurants in town that the vast majority around here can’t afford, so that must make you feel real special – doesn’t it? Oh, and of course you’re also made morally irreproachable by your chivalrous love and respect for Ukrainian women, as, according to your own admission, it is precisely and only into THEIR pudenda you want to stick your poisoned sackcloth foreign cock, to the exclusion of all other pudenda worldwide, not being good enough, and we here at Kyiv Unedited just want to tell you, having gotten word back firsthand on your noble posture: To you, the women of Ukraine are truly grateful. And what the fuck are you going to do about it? Huh…Sweaty…???). We thinks we’re a wee little phony – too much [Ed. Note: In all fairness to our reviewer, Manny Face, he didn’t write this paragraph, which was inserted by Kyiv Unedited’s board of editors, although an intelligent reader, which KU readers invariably are, would be able to discern that, based on the obvious differences in writing styles, making this note all but unnecessary, except for those… others].
So the first thing Manny Face did after the epic classic black-and-white comedy drama from 1960, “La Dolce Vita”, which means The Good Life, was look up any kind of review he could find about Fellini in English here in Ukraine. But all I could dig out was a 2007 restaurant review in the Kyiv Poster by that Stephan about the restaurant called Fellini’s on Horodetskoho Street, next to the Ukraina Cinema.
Now, being chief editor of the Kyiv Poster at the time and thinking himself a writer (yeah, Manny Face knows all about it), Stephan was either too vain and self-involved with his fantasies of fighting Hemingway to mention that the photos he talks about decorating Fellini’s’s walls are probably stills from the great Italian director’s movies (although to arrive at the truth, or some flickering cave shadow of it, the reader would do well to check out this Fellini’s themselves – if they can afford it), OR to mention that the restaurant itself was named after the great Italian director, and wasn’t just a name they pulled out of someone’s ass here and said, ‘Hey, that would be a great name for a ritzy restaurant on a fashionable street in the prestigious Pechersk district of Kyiv,’ OR he was too stupid to know it.
Let’s face it – he was too stupid. Just look at his Saint Stephan website [Fut. Ed.: saintstephan.com.ua, sabotaged in 2015?] and you’ll see what I mean; know what I mean? Stupid’s written all over it. Me and Jack Step, who helped get me this pretty good job in The Checkout section of Kyiv Unedited, we’d wipe our asses with that poetry, if doing so wasn’t an insult to our asses. Ha, ha, ha, ha, haaaaa…!!! I just love that one – Step came up with it. I owe him some drinks.
Which just leaves Manny Face to write about the movie himself. Fair enough.
To be continued in Installment 2½ of the Journal of Manny Face
Manny Face, March 31, 2013