The Great Gatsby

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

Zacharek didn't hate this.

lol novel as "casualty" ... the book is there and always will be. Portnoy's Complaint was made into a lousy movie, you know.

glad we'll be spared the 'catcher in the rye' movie for another three decades at least.

neveldine/taylor already working on that one sry

actually a book probably survives a REALLY shitty movie even better than a meh one, because no one remembers the shitty movie in ten years. Wasn't there a Seize the Day movie with Robin Williams or something?

unsearchable on youtube because of that dead poets society scene

http://www.mediacircus.net/jakobtheliar1.jpg

hey for what it's worth the reviewers on amazon seem to like it

http://www.amazon.com/Seize-the-Day/product-reviews/B000QGVV5G/ref=dp_top_cm_cr_acr_txt_cm_cr_acr_txt?ie=UTF8&showViewpoints=1

although one of them apparently wasn't sure which movie s/he watched:

2 of 5 people found the following review helpful
4.0 out of 5 stars MY REVIEW FOR THIS MOVIE, November 12, 2000
By Masayo Hayakawa (Chiba Japan) - See all my reviews
This review is from: Seize the Day [ VHS ] (VHS Tape)
"DEAD POET SOCIETY" I like this movie, because I was moved by it. Perhaps, this movie tells us that you don't have to obey your parents and try to be honest to yourself and live anything you like!! In this film, all children obey their parents. The school the children go to is very strict. One day a teacher named Mr.Keating came to school. Mr Keating is a free-thinker. Because of his appearence,children's thinking is changing day by day. In this film, my favorite charactor is Mr Keating,because he always smiling and I like his way of thinking. The most impressive scene for me is when Mr.Keating leaves the school and students stand up on their desks and say, "Oh, Chaptain my chaptain" I couldn't control myself and moved into tears.
At last, I think this film is worth seeing very much , please rent this film and watch it!!

https://i.chzbgr.com/maxW500/5336775168/h3B3014D2/

http://jezebel.com/a-great-gatsby-book-report-by-a-kid-who-only-saw-the-mo-499342823

The Robin Williams Seize the Day (made for PBS) is one of his best performances, Hurting.

“It’s just a dream at this point,” Baz Luhrmann tells the Hollywood Reporter‘s Merle Ginsberg and Gary Baum, but what he’s really like to do is re-team with Leonardo DiCaprio, after Romeo + Juliet and The Great Gatsby, on Hamlet.

http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/baz-luhrmann-i-want-leonardo-518858

i had never known about that seize the day movie but i am curious now. that is one of my favorite books.