The Great Gatsby

regardless of whether it's an accident tho i like that

haha i mean i guess we are at odds about spectacle, because i could not really deal with pirhana 3D: myrtle's mutilated breast fly @ u face

why weren't the eyes of t.j. eckleburg wearing 3D glasses, missed opportunity imho

we are dooooly appointed old spoats

"I love spectacles"

http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-2C_xkImTZPE/TeMpAkOs7gI/AAAAAAAAACo/Hu5_WIXQrPA/s320/doctor_t__j__eckleburg_by_sukimd2.jpg

The New Statesman's critic actually ended his review with a joke about why Eckleburg should be wearing 3D glasses.

Erm, "I love spectacles"

http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-2C_xkImTZPE/TeMpAkOs7gI/AAAAAAAAACo/Hu5_WIXQrPA/s320/doctor_t__j__eckleburg_by_sukimd2.jpg

why weren't the eyes of t.j. eckleburg wearing 3D glasses, missed opportunity imho

Arf. They made the Eckleburg billboard look reminiscent of the novel's most famous cover instead:

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/thumb/b/b0/Gatsby_1925_jacket.gif/200px-Gatsby_1925_jacket.gif

the eyes of eckleburg were partly inspired by that cover -- fitz wrote to his publisher telling him not to change the cover because he'd 'written it into the book.'

taking a moment today to be thankful 17-year-old me never went through w that tattoo

hemingway:

A day or two after the trip Scott brought his book over. It had a garish dust jacket and I remember being embarrassed by the violence, bad taste and slippery look of it. It looked the book jacket for a book of bad science fiction. Scott told me not to be put off by it, that it had to do with a billboard along a highway in Long Island that was important in the story. He said he had liked the jacket and now he didn’t like it.

why weren't the eyes of t.j. eckleburg wearing 3D glasses, missed opportunity imho

― a ridiculous clusterfuck of totally uncool jokers (elmo argonaut), Monday, May 20, 2013 2:14 PM (2 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

looooooooooooooool otm

dayo you are crazy but i love you

i will admit to kind of liking dicaprio's performance, too, but WHATEVER

i take your point about insisting on a faithful adaptation but movies shouldn't be poo

also if you are going to invite comparison to one of the best books ever i am not going to feel bad for you when your movie is dumb

dicaprio sounds like good casting, since hes not running away from his looks for once

dayo you are crazy but i love you

― horseshoe, Monday, May 20, 2013 4:40 PM (1 hour ago) Bookmark

:D

i feel like i should probably explain myself a lil' more, i think my view of these things is p heavily influenced by hutcheon's a theory of adaptation, which views adapted works and their source materials not in a top-down hierarchal fashion - adaptations all deriving from a source, w/ usually the source presented as the 'best' and the ones which by all others are judged, are ranked; (though there are obv many examples where an adaptation becomes the defining example, see the shining film v. the shining book); rather, adaptation as always being a lateral move from the source. i'm probably being too glib when i say that u should always view adaptations w/o any reference at all to the source, obviously that's gonna be pretty hard to accomplish if you or your audience are familiar with both. but i'd like to see more than just "hah the [exalted, critically impervious work] is sacrosanct, definitive, anything else is automatically lesser, the most that an adaptation can hope to be is to be on par...."

you're basically otm I reckon & I've said similar things many times before but yeah you were way overstating it before

i think this movie is p good adaptation even its not necessarily 'about' the same things the novel is i think the middle third or so does a pretty excellent job of capturing what its like to be caught up in the novel, to live in its surfaces and succumb to its charms

a slow giving in and turning away

i think it's possible for film adaptations to exist in their own right, side by side without degradation of integrity, ie Kubrick's Shining vs King's Shining.

but it requires strength of an authorial vision, imo. if even the director is treating it as an adaptation, & even somewhat 'nursing' the original text, that shows & weakens the adaptation.

imo. idk. maybe that's bullshit, it sounded ok in my head

i havent seen baz's gatsby but i havent found anything yet that is really compelling me.

saying "comparing novels to books is never a good proposition" is a bit like saying that historical films should never be viewed in relation to the events on which they're based, and I reckon sometimes they should. It's worthwhile, sometimes. A film is a film and a book is a book, though, for sure.

all that said i would've like this a lot more if it had been directed by karl lagerfeld and carolyn murphy had replaced carrie mulligan and she had no dialogue and it had been 40 minutes long

lol "comparing novels to books" ffs

lol

lamp i would watch that

it also gets into sort of the differences b/w mediums, film and text are just so different from each other, opposed in many respects. prob the most untranslatable or immoveable experience of the text is the interiority of the characters, u can try to get at it w/ voiceovers (and i think baz framed the movie the way he did just to be able to get voiceovers in), u can change the plot (used in the sense of the ordering of the diff elements of the underlying story) to make the storytelling experience more effective, more 'adapted' to the experience of film... but really, the ingestion of text and film occurs at such different rates, and in such different ways, and the possibilities w/ each are so different...

(sorry that was an xpost to myself, had to take a phonecall)

love the book. know it every which way. don't feel any kind of way about baz. have never seen a 3-D feature. i'm off today and it's playing a block away. these champion sweats can hide a bottle of sancerre. yes, no?

historical films should never be viewed in relation to the events on which they're based,

yah man but what is meant by the word history, really

*bongrip*

in this particular case something that is often mentioned, including upthread, is that gatsby is a peculiar book cuz it looks like a 200-page soap opera about pretty rich people that you'll just be able to slap right up there, but so much of the work is being done by prose and strange tricks of structure and careful distancing that unless you are really clever in a way more than one filmmaker has rather spectacularly not been you are going to end up with a 2-hour soap opera about pretty rich people nobody likes. nb i have not seen this. but that's one legitimate reason to compare: if one version is way different and way less interesting and you suspect it has something to do with the media themselves.

haha oh xp

xp I call it HERstory

think about it

vaya con dios viacom dios

w/ a book u take it in at ur own pace, u read, reread, double back, u could be 20 pages from the end and realize that u need to reread a passage on pg. 28 that ends up being crucial to the understanding of a plot point

films are kinda like... that contraption in slaughterhouse five, bound immobile to a fixed dolly, viewing the world through a single opening in a particleboard, the gears neither slow nor speed up but move at their own fixed pace

random access gatsbies

the surrender of watching a film is totally different than the surrender of reading a book, the latter of which isn't maybe even a surrender at all but a complicit creation of a shared interior world

http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-jGnPJiy_LxE/TexQwEfd0mI/AAAAAAAABGA/ahYNqdDmfWo/s1600/Poems+and+Problems+-+Vladimir+Nabokov.jpg

like, idk, i know its a stupid book, but when i first read house of leaves and the narrator mentions that the interior wall-to-wall measurement was 5 inches more than what the exterior wall-to-wall measurement was, man, such a chilling moment! and how would u even transpose that into film

I only watch choose your own adventure movies

in 3d

i sometimes wonder what nabokov would make of the total demystification of chess via supercomputers =(

oh man i haven't read house of leaves but the only reason i keep almost reading it is i think that revelation is SO CREEPY

in this particular case something that is often mentioned, including upthread, is that gatsby is a peculiar book cuz it looks like a 200-page soap opera about pretty rich people that you'll just be able to slap right up there, but so much of the work is being done by prose and strange tricks of structure and careful distancing that unless you are really clever in a way more than one filmmaker has rather spectacularly not been you are going to end up with a 2-hour soap opera about pretty rich people nobody likes. nb i have not seen this. but that's one legitimate reason to compare: if one version is way different and way less interesting and you suspect it has something to do with the media themselves.

haha oh xp

― the white queen and her caustic judgments (difficult listening hour), Monday, May 20, 2013 6:41 PM (6 minutes ago) Bookmark

yeah i think the other reason i like this is that, the ~greatest american novel ever written~ can be reduced to a p facile love story, and that interpretation isn't even wrong! it's def one of the armatures of the novel, and obv FSG only builds it up maybe to chop off bits of scaffolding here and there, make it unstable, but it's undeniably there, and its a totally valid frame for baz to hang his own tapestries from

ok i just sort of beat that metaphor up... maybe even collapsed it

good shit

books also allow for the reader's own interaction, allowing their mind's-eye to carry the story along. the difficulty, and delicacy of adapting a text is replacing the many individual visualizations of a story that in part now becames the reader's *own creation*, with a singular visualization that now tells you another way to see. that's a hard call with a text like Gatsby that has existed in people's minds for decades. Especially since Fitzgerald does do so much with the inner voices of his character.

oh man i haven't read house of leaves but the only reason i keep almost reading it is i think that revelation is SO CREEPY

― the white queen and her caustic judgments (difficult listening hour), Monday, May 20, 2013 6:50 PM (47 seconds ago) Bookmark

there are some really good parts! could have been a much better book via stronger editing, it's sort of classic first-novel-itis, overstuffed, danielewski could/should have spun off at least half the content of the book into separate works. but the first couple of chapters or so are really well done i think

would watch a Baz adaptation of "Bernice Bobs Her Hair."

historical films should never be viewed in relation to the events on which they're based,

sorry to return to this example but i've been meaning to watch marie antoinette and i can't help but think that knowing the intricacies of the french revolution probably wouldn't be too useful in appreeshing the film

oh man i haven't read house of leaves but the only reason i keep almost reading it is i think that revelation is SO CREEPY

i read 'the 50 year sword' on a plane last week and can recommend it p highly, it also takes the 20 mins to finish. its a better use of time than 'house of leaves' i think but has some of the same pleasures

hungry4ass did you like baz lurhman's 'the great gatsby'?