The Great Gatsby

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'?

Fitz's got a bunch of stories more suitable. You want pink champagne and lost love? He could've adapted "The Bridal Party."

but the end was complete garbage

― Lamp, Monday, May 20, 2013 1:00 PM (5 hours ago) Bookmark

haha i know i said i didn't mind but this is probably closer to how i feel about the end of the movie 24 hours later, it def felt like baz didnt know how to end the film. but i really lol'd when SPOILER tobey puts the final pages of his manuscript into his tasteful attache w/ the brass triangle clip, and has a moment of hesitation - can't quite close this book just yet, then he takes out his finely weighted & balanced pen, and writes 'THE GREAT' over the typed 'GATSBY'

of all my unfinished high school movie projects i definitely most wish "rags martin-jones and the pr-nce of w-les" had been finished, if only to make all those girls' parents feel a little better about how much prom dresses cost

lawd xp

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

― 乒乓, Monday, May 20, 2013 11:56 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

it's the word "never" I'm flagging up, I basically agree w/u

which is why I said "sometimes" it's useful

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

― Lamp, Monday, May 20, 2013 6:56 PM (5 minutes ago) Bookmark

aint seen it

he takes old-time footage from back then and turns it into 3D, theres a lot of planes that fly overhead and then all of a sudden ur zooming in from 10000 feet to ground level in 3 seconds like in that old trailer they'd show in front of IMAX science films at the franklin institute, it's really inexplicable

― 乒乓, Monday, May 20, 2013 1:01 PM (5 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

he literally asks WEGA or w/e studio effects house to recreate NYC for him, and long island, so he can have shots of just zooming along the water through mist

― 乒乓, Monday, May 20, 2013 1:02 PM (5 hours ago) Bookmark

i really cant get over how wild + inappropriate yet appropriate baz's camera is in this film, it's really quite inexplicable. supper's ready, all the doors to the sunroom open at once, white cloth billows sunlight leaps in. the camera moves through the door, you're zooming across the sound now, to new york! through mist, to wall street! who is the audience suppose to be? what kind of wild god is she. is this how third person omniscient should be told on the screen. the book was first person! what is going on.

probably because the last few movies i've seen have all been very 'stately, plump buck mulligan came from the stairhead' in their camerawork that i felt so disoriented and wracked by all this

after australia and moulin rouge i'd have to be tricked by a trail of ice cold beers into entering a theater showing a new baz luhrmann film

lol

last 2 posts are ✓

uh, xp

baz luhrmann's ulysses

h4a otm. I didnt mind Moulin Rouge but Australia idk wtf that even was

i know this isn't what luhrmann's australia is but i would def watch an enormous batshit terrifying all-stops-pulled movie about the colonization of australia

i really cant get over how wild + inappropriate yet appropriate baz's camera is in this film, it's really quite inexplicable.

haha i was arguing with a friend that everything i could see him doing was perfectly explicable, the way the camera moves, the use of 3D, the arrangement of the actors in space, its all kinda on-the-nose at all times. although i did like how they were constantly recording themselves on film during the various amazing party montages, its 2013

yeah for sure, the party was pure busby berkeley, also made me feel really anxious because at real parties someone invariably knocks the punch bowl into the pool

at real parties now someone invariably passes a bowl

i think that happens too

there's room for zefirelli, branagh, and baaaaz, not just for shakespeare, but for eveeeeerrrrrryyyyythhiiiiiiiiiiinnnnnnngggggg~~~~~~!!!!!