The Great Gatsby

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.

btw i am seeing gatsby tonight and i am psyched. i went to iron man two nights ago with one of my friends who is into comics and i was very jealous of the teenagers dressed in 20s costumes who were at the theater, they seemed to be having a richer experience at the cinema than i was.

teenagers dressed in 20s costumes

Actual IRL 3D!!!!

You know what Hamlet is missing? Lots of songs and jumpy editing.

plus he'll probably try and try and it'll still be less ridiculous than the one where marcellus is a 70-year-old jack lemmon (nb i love this movie)

oh my god this movie

I embarrassed my movie companions by flailing around in disgust and futy

fury

tell me in detail how terrible it was pleeeeeease horseshoe

Was there a long slow tracking shot from overhead with Gatsby in the pool, the camera pulling away to show a perfectly circular swirl of red leaves, as the xx's song on the soundtrack played?

(A good friend made an exact bet that this is how the song would be used and in what context.)

i need a hate-filled horseshoe review of this

^^^

I want to know if the totally minor, non-life-threatening drunken car accident is exaggerated into some kind of hit-n-run vehicular manslaughter. That was my big bet on this movie.

i'm seeing this tonight and i've already decided that i like it.

lol viceroy

I want to know if the totally minor, non-life-threatening drunken car accident is exaggerated into some kind of hit-n-run vehicular manslaughter. That was my big bet on this movie.

based on the costumed attired of everyone lining up out the door of the movie theater i drove by last night, this is like 'episode 1' for the mad men set.

come back horseshoe

needs a few random sprays of tommmygun fire to lend authenticity

http://www.vice.com/read/james-francos-impressions-of-gatsby

Would anyone object to a production of Hamlet in outer space?

haha i really want to read this as franco testing the waters for an upcoming project rather than just a rhetorical question

he's just filmed Faulkner's As I Lay Dying, presumably set on Earth.

xp the best part of that is that the presumed answer is "of course not!"

plz tell me he plays the corpse

i would def watch franco as hamlet in space

http://metro.co.uk/2013/05/15/bret-easton-ellis-baz-luhrmanns-great-gatsby-must-be-a-ghastly-prank-3759717/

The 49-year-old previous suggested that his Twitter feed could be read as his new novel.

Franco as Osric would be facile casting.

haha sorry i never returned to vent my spleen!

1. baz luhrmann has some kind of disorder where everything has to be about romantic love--that is not what this book is about! there's a thinness to his interpretation.<---this is a vast understatement of my true feelings. it hardly seems like it's about America at all.

2. if you're going to open your movie with the iconic first words of the novel in voiceover (which you should), don't edit the iconic words. you are not a better writer than f. scott fitzgerald. i wish i could remember exactly how it was reworded, but it basically changed nick's father's advice to him! the nerve!

3. toby maguire sounds like he's going through puberty. and delivers his lines like his reading comprehension is around the level of a young man going through puberty. nick carraway has to be believably smart. wry even. if i had to pick a single worst thing about this movie, it would be toby froggy maguire.

4. why is this movie in 3D?

5. i can't even really talk about the framing device. the doctor at the sanitarium (!!!) uses the words "find solace" at least three times. i kept imagining fitzgerald violently puking and spinning in his grave all at once.

6. there's a throwaway scene of a three black people listening to "Izzo" and riding in a car as the camera pans over cases of Moet. why, Luhrmann?

7. everything that Fitzgerald accomplishes through indirection, luhrmann's script makes explicit. there's a scene where, i think, Nick comments on the eyes of Dr. T.J. Eckleberg. And then intones, "the eyes of God." ow, baz luhrmann.

i really should have posted in the heat of the moment but i was drunk and sleepy. i forget all the details now. diCaprio is not bad, but the direction totally ruins his performance. while Nick is narrating the famous lines about his smile, the camera lingers on diCaprio's face for, like, an hour. even the best actor would seem frozen in place after a while. it's kind of an impossible role, to be fair. one of the people i saw it with said she didn't even sympathize with movie Gatsby, and that it was hard to care about anyone.

things i liked: the hushed version of "Crazy in Love" on the soundtrack. the dude who played Tom is pretty good and god help me, i think his Hitler mustache is kind of a clever visual cue in a totally obvious "do you see? do you see" Luhrmann kind of way.

i sort of thought amitabh bachchan was great. too bad he was in it for 2.5 seconds.

horseshoe otm all around imho

everything that Fitzgerald accomplishes through indirection, luhrmann's script makes explicit.

literature vs film