Yes, this film was deep. But was it really better than Wayne’s World?

When it comes to art, is it ever OK to compare apples with oranges, or even apples with aardvarks? I don’t know if it is. And yet … I can’t stop doing it.

About a month ago I went to see La Grazia at the cinema with some friends. It’s the new film by the auteur Paolo Sorrentino, about an Italian president consumed with questions of public and private conscience in his final term of office.

La Grazia is an art-house film (contains moody rooftop scenes involving cigarettes, suffering horses, etc) and explores perennial and modern moral quandaries, from infidelity to euthanasia. There were moments of brilliance in La Grazia but I found parts of it tiresome and was glad when it was over.

“Not as good as Wayne’s World,” I muttered into the dark as the credits rolled.

My friends, sitting next to me, shook their heads. The comment was part of a long-running joke between the three of us. These two friends are knowledgeable about cinema and watch hundreds of movies every year but I’m more of a book person. The joke is that, by contrast, I’ve only seen five movies over the course of my lifetime – including Mary Poppins, Wayne’s World and Despicable Me 3 – and that these are my only cinematic reference points.

It’s a joke, of course, but there is a speck of truth to it. Watching Wayne’s World was a seminal cinematic experience for me. (For the uninitiated, Wayne’s World is a 1992 slacker-comedy about a metalhead, Wayne, who hosts a cult talk-show from his parents’ basement in Aurora, Illinois.) I saw it when I was 12 and thought it was hilarious. Some juvenile part of me continues to hold on to this memory as a peak movie experience – even if parts of the film have not aged especially well.

This juvenile part of me was also a subliminal part of me, until I started the in-joke with my movie-buff friends. Since then, the Wayne’s World comparison thing has turned into a sort of self-fulfilling prophecy and a perverse mental reflex.

I’ll be watching, say, Dead Poets Society (to choose another widely watched classic) and the Wayne’s World comparison impulse will steal over my mind and I’ll be powerless to stop it. Sure, Robin Williams is great here as the subversive prep-school teacher, I’ll reflect, but is Alice Cooper in fact better in his Wayne’s World cameo as a shock-rock sage? After all, Alice Cooper cuts a doubly subversive figure, upsetting mainstream social mores with his on-stage persona and challenging the expectations of the metal community backstage.

This is not normal, obviously, and it’s not reasonable, either, for Dead Poets Society or any other film, including La Grazia. Sorrentino set out to make a visually striking study of modern morality in the Italian capital and not a deranged, Aurora-based buddy comedy. His work should be discussed accordingly.

It’s important to note that critics who judged La Grazia on its own terms liked it more than I did. Sorrentino has been hailed by some as a 21st-century Fellini. La Grazia’s star, Toni Servillo, won the best actor award at the 2025 Venice Film Festival for his performance as the inscrutable president paralysed by awesome responsibility. (And, look, Toni was great. But … was Mike Myers better as the vacillating Wayne, torn between the trappings of mainstream success and the awesome responsibility he owes to his authentic doofus persona and original fan base?)

I’ll need to overcome this unhealthy habit of the mind if I want my friends to stay friends with me in the long term. Or maybe I just need to keep this weird activity inside my mind and keep my mouth shut for now. Not too long ago I watched the documentary The Creative Brain, hosted by neuroscientist David Eagleman. It’s about the neural processes involved in creative activity. I learnt that artists and innovators achieve great feats of creativity not from generating purely original ideas but by “bending, breaking and blending” existing concepts and remixing them into unlikely combinations. (The Bohemian Rhapsody scene in Wayne’s World makes the exact same point with a lot more charm and economy and without annoying infographics.)

Still, perhaps making movie comparisons that do not bear comparison – comparing apples with aardvarks – is a classic example of bending, breaking and blending, and we should all be doing it all the time. It’s possible this kind of unlikely analysis is the beginning of all sorts of extraordinary creative breakthroughs. And if not, it’s definitely the end of sensible conversation. Party on.

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