The Great Gatsby

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

not that you can probably tell over the luhrmann, but tobey maguire looks like he's stinking the joint up as nick.

― horseshoe, Wednesday, May 23, 2012 9:54 AM (11 months ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

turns out, you can totally tell, even though luhrmann's luhrmanning all over the place.

literature vs film

― A deeper shade of lol (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Wednesday, May 15, 2013 5:04 PM (53 seconds ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

yes, and i like that Robert Towne quote you posted upthread, but if you're going to take on this thankless adaptation, don't have tobey fucking maguire actually SAY, "the eyes of God" like you're SparkNotes or some fucking thing. there have to be ways to do this better.

obvs the only way to do it is to read every word of the novel and have it be 8 hours long, like Gatz

It's just as bad as that EXTREME CLOSE UP LOOK OUT THIS IS IMPORTANT closeup of Robert Redford in the '74 film as he says "Her voice is full of MONEY."

Baz would score that line to Pink Floyd's "Money" though.

ugh don't remind me

when they used the VO to give a heavy-handed interpretation of daisy's line about the shirts

ty horeshoe, I feel even better about not seeing this

I'm sure I'll watch it out of curiosity when it's on tv or something but there's no way I'm going to the theater to see it, I'd rather put spoons in my eyes

that was bad

if you're going to do a lit classic, you either do it with pungent typecasting like Lean in Great Ezpectations -- but then Dickens is so different, begging to be PERFORMED -- or shake things up like Campion w/ Portrait of a Lady.

if neither of those will work, do an original or a pulp adap, so no one will be grading you.

i did think that the actor who played tom was a good physical match to how i imagined tom in the novel, at least much more than bruce dern in that respect

yes, i agree, elmo. the 1974 movie is crappy as far as i can remember? i am not sure i've ever seen the whole thing tbh.

it's one of the worst films ever made

i don't have such a bad recollection of the '74 film but it's been since highschool

strange that '74 Gatsby's director, Jack Clayton, did the brilliant film of "The Turn of the Screw," The Innocents.

haha thats an awesome post horseshoe

are there any non-gatsby fitzgerald films? 'bernice bobs her hair' might make a good short film.

the guy who played tom is joel edgerton, he has a great old timey mug on him. he looked like a buff conan o'brien in Warrior

xpost there's a movie version of Keep the Aspidistras Flying and I can't for the life of me remember what it was called, it was Richard e Grant & helena Bonham carter, it was p good!

don't forget the shitty shitty shitty benjy button

can't imagine this gatsby being worse than that

People who've seen Gatsby for work are complaining that the characters all look too sweaty. So that's a fail, because preppies don't sweat - they perspire.

about the only thing the Clayton version got right: even in an expensive Upper East Side hotel you can still sweat like horses.