The Great Beauty (2013)

This is a definitely Fellini-esque film, which means that I am pretty sure that i did not totally get it.  I was both confused and amused by it.
"The Great Beauty" is a character study that presents contemporary Rome through the eyes of Jep Gambardella (played by Toni Servillo).  He is a simultaneously overstimulated and underwhelmed taste-making intellectual who moves from small intimate roof top parties to clubs that throb with music and pulsating dancers. He was a writer who wrote one great work that is now floundering in obscurity and he doesn't really write. Or be gainfully employed.  He spends his time performing as a public figure, a fixture of the city. He wants to remain young and important for as long as he can (he's 65 and ironically looks older), so he uses botox. But he also mocks anyone who makes vague, pseudo-intellectual claims about ethics, art, and staying young. It is a movie of contradictions, and I think the message is that Rome is also full of contradictions.  At once old and flirting with modernity, it is a city that has great beauty, but also some grittiness.