The Great Gatsby

The lacuna in the narrative regarding Gatsby and Daisy’s relations that summer saves Fitzgerald the trouble of writing dialogue for them that would have underlined their shallowness (one of the reasons why Daisy’s line about Gatsby’s beautiful shirts works: it happens just once)

that is kind of the greatness of the book, that it's a tale about Gatsby that has epic qualities but really he's just trying to fit in and seduce the most vapid people

That aspect ... might translate!

:)

that is kind of the greatness of the book, that it's a tale about Gatsby that has epic qualities but really he's just trying to fit in and seduce the most vapid people

― mh, Monday, May 6, 2013 12:35 PM Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

actually just the existence of this remake is sort of making me think about the book a little differently -- it's all about strivers partying with new money people.

For sure, Tom Buchanan is old money but still a midwesterner like the rest of the main cast, but they're attempting to blend into the NY social scene, none of which shows up to Gatsby's funeral.

me speak english

wait how would there be an old Gatsby

I could see Baz Luhrmann changing it so that he lives, this movie seems that goofy.

obi-wan-style ghost gatsby

Has anyone read this?
http://www.amazon.com/Trimalchio-Version-Cambridge-Edition-Fitzgerald/dp/0521890470/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1367859678&sr=8-1&keywords=trimalchio

well, he could be Gatsby's father (Gatz) who shows up to the funeral

the remake should have Gatsby as a multi-millionaire from an herbalife style scheme. He could be a positivity-preaching crossfit junkie. Maybe Carraway is a would be app-designer seeking VC funding or something.

let's not

this framing story enrages me more than any other stupid thing about this movie.

I heard Gatsby's going to be in the next Avengers

Tbh though, i dont care about "faithful" adaptations. The book exists, it's its own thing, and this is something different.

yeesh @ that schulz article. i mean no one's obligated to like anything, but when someone trots out the 'there aren't any likable characters!' line, you know it's time to run for the hills.

Yeah I didn't quite get her bug -- ok, you don't like the book, but what does Edward St. Aubyn have to do with anything? Is caustic satire the only way rich people are supposed to be written about? High moralistic melodrama can make for a great read!

I'm surprised ppl still get away with the "likable characters" criteria.

the characters in Edward St. Aubyn's books are all horrible, including the narrator

agggh I just read about that stupid framing device ...

I liked Strictly Ballroom, I liked Romeo & Juliet, hell I didn't mind Moulin Rouge. Australia was duuuumb and a snooze. But this is a bridge too far. I knew it would be horrendous just from the trailer. But now with this new information...this is like Sandra Lee 'reimagining' Julia Child's Mastering the Art of French Cooking. Baz Luhrman IS the Sandra Lee of movies.

nick carraway is a likable character!

so is gatsby, for that matter

except when Sam Waterston played him

Gatsby is likeable but you end up pitying or loathing him because he's accomplished so much and all he wants to do with it is chase after Daisy

damn, dude, I get your single-mindedness but you have to get over it

Or maybe he just likes green lights?

"Darling, Tom has cornered the market and I need to complete my Christmas lights portfolio."

i find gatsby very likable and sympathetic. one of the saddest things about the david michaelis book about charles schulz was learning how deeply schulz identified with gatsby.

i agree. gatsby's a dreamer more than anything. to call him "materialistic" is to simplify things: his understanding of status, as an outsider, is the fathest thing from "worldly." i always thought the tragedy of gatsby is that he is a determined guy of enormous imaginative capacity who wasted these gifts on such a superficial version of the american dream.

always considered Reagan a Gatsby figure: born in a nothing Midwestern town; a blank, forced to recreate himself.

so all Midwesterners are blanks now huh

the one thing reagan seems to be lacking is the kind of insane, blind, driving passion that motivates gatsby. unless his 'daisy' was the laffer curve.

i don't think that's that far off. reagan's america was a fantasyland where hard work always pays off and the government doesn't need to messily step in and stop the egregious harm that comes from very un-perfect market dynamics, which do not necessarily benefit the public good. like his voters, he might have bought into the dream.

sorry for all those adjectives.

I've made the analogy before. The guy was a nullity -- even to his wife -- who cared only about a blinkered if powerful vision of America.

Charles Foster Kane too.

do you think gatsby was a nullity though? i always assumed a guy like that must have a rich inner life. you don't see it because all of his creative energy is devoted to maintaining the mystique of his self-invented personality.

a good update on the gatsby myth is the movie rushmore. i always assumed that behind gatsby there is a creative little max fischer he has slowly refined out of existence.

It's Nick telling the story, of course, but he doesn't he call him an elegant young roughneck or something?

hm, it's been a while since i've read the book. my impression is that gatsby was -- to nick -- very cool, detached, and elegant. it's only by closely observing him that nick realizes that gatsby has this obsessive, blinding ambition to realize a dream version of his life he made up for himself long ago, and that most people would have long since moved past

but my point is that it takes a certain personality to cling to your dreams that fiercely, and refuse to adapt your expectations in accord with changing circumstances.

http://sallykohn.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/06/reagan.jpg

Red light! Red light!

wtf Amitabh Bachchan is in this?!? as a Jewish gangster?

oh weird, i thought that was a picture of reagan.

xp Baz Luhrmann don't care.

Walter Chaw of Film Freak Central:

The great irony of Baz Luhrmann's unwatchable farrago The Great Gatsby is that it's not so much an interpretation of its titular hero's self-aggrandizing fandangos as a literalization of one. It's all surface, all façade, and not coincidentally, the most successful thing about it is Luhrmann's shooting of Gatsby's legendary parties as infernal bacchanalia. But that bit of useful critique is clearly a fluke, an accident of Luhrmann's one-trick pony kicking over the single element in Fitzgerald's book that is remotely compatible with Luhrmann's style. The marriage of Baz with Fitzgerald, in fact, is a little like asking Michael Bay to adapt The Brothers Karamazov--it's Timur Bekmambetov's A Farewell to Arms. It's showing off in the loudest, most obnoxious way possible, without any kind of critical, nay, useful, rationale for all the bread and circus--an asshole at play with Welles's "best train set a boy could ever want," with the casualty only what's possibly the best American novel ever written. It's an effrontery to taste, the sole consolation being that as Baz Luhrmann's The Great Gatsby is something of a motherless child, there's no one who will love it. No one could.

deployment of welles chestnut p devastating there imo

I dunno, isn't Baz the kinda brechtian ideal for this sort of shit? Doesn't the massive detachment make the point?

well he says the party scenes are good