The Great Gatsby

[MarkGrace]

I know this thing has been bumped back (originally slated for this Christmas, now pushed into late spring/early summer), which is never a good sign, but I have to admit to being intrigued by the trailer. Luhrman seems like a love him/hate him for a lot of people, but I'm definitely a fan.

[YOUTUBE]DtlB6N6RAmo[/YOUTUBE]

[falafel]

I didn't realize it had been pushed back. Bummer. I thought it looked very good. The sets look great too.

[pellegrino]

Better that it be bumped to late spring/early summer than to be dumped in January/February.

[MarkGrace]

New trailer. Sure has that Luhrman visual flair.

[Surfah]

I know this thing has been bumped back (originally slated for this Christmas, now pushed into late spring/early summer), which is never a good sign, but I have to admit to being intrigued by the trailer. Luhrman seems like a love him/hate him for a lot of people, but I'm definitely a fan.

[YOUTUBE]DtlB6N6RAmo[/YOUTUBE]

Hate him.

[PaloAltoCougar]

New trailer. Sure has that Luhrman visual flair.

I'm very wary of this. Luhrmann films seem devoted more to form than substance. Moulin Rouge began to grate on me, and I disliked Australia, a lot. The recent Anna Karenina seemed like a Luhrmann movie as well--gorgeously filmed with sumptuous sets and costuming, but ultimately unmoving (and what horrible choices in the actors--Gatsby at least seems to have been cast better). We'll see it, but I'm not optimistic.

[MarkGrace]

Well, looks like the delay was a sign of bad things to come. The first reviews are ugly. Based on what I've read, I think PAC should stay away.

[Commando]

I bet this is the top gross for the weekend, possibly a 2nd to Ironman... and I bet I see it.

[BigPiney]

the book sucked.

[Surfah]

Well, looks like the delay was a sign of bad things to come. The first reviews are ugly. Based on what I've read, I think PAC should stay away.

Pain and Gain has a better score on Rotten Tomatoes.

[MarkGrace]

Pain and Gain has a better score on Rotten Tomatoes.

It is a 3% better movie.

[MarkGrace]

Edelstein: Why I Sort of Liked The Great Gatsby

The best thing about Baz Luhrmann’s much-anticipated/much-dreaded The Great Gatsby is that, for all its computer-generated whoosh and overbroad acting, it is unmistakably F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby. That is no small deal. The last major adaptation, in which a recessive Robert Redford reunited with a blank Mia Farrow, substituted deadly Brit tastefulness for Fitzgerald’s polished American vulgarity—the polish (like the characters’ opulence) a façade through which we can discern the baseness of the Jazz Age high life. No one can say that the Aussie hot dog Luhrmann lacks the requisite vulgarity. And no one can say that he tries to upstage his source. In the movie’s inane framing device, Nick Carraway is in rehab typing a memoir overseen by an eager shrink. As Fitzgerald’s words emerge from Nick’s typewriter, they sometimes drift across the screen (into our faces, if you see the film in 3-D)—a ding-a-ling gimmick, but a reminder, at least, that there is a greater Gatsby elsewhere. The movie is juvenile but could have been so much worse.

You know from the outset you’re in for an onslaught. The camera hurtles (or what passes for it in CGI) across the water toward Disney’s turreted Magic Castle, which turns out to be the house of the mysterious Jay Gatsby. A short time later, Nick tells us that his cousin, Daisy, and her trust-fund-fatted, polo-playing husband, Tom Buchanan, live directly across the water from Gatsby, at which point the camera CGI-hurtles over to the Buchanans’ place—almost instantly traversing a gap that ought to remain fixed, both literally and metaphorically. It’s hard for a man like Luhrmann, whose idea of cinema is rooted in instant gratification (you want it, you got it!), to grasp, let alone translate, the Gatsbyesque notion of longing to be somewhere you can’t be. He’s the anti–Terrence Malick: He makes miracles cheap. Luhrmann has exhausted us well before our first sight of Gatsby.

As Nick, Tobey Maguire has the same dazed-ingenue affect in both his drunken-past and sober-present incarnations, but Maguire can be sweet without undue sickliness. Back in the heady days of Prohibition, young Nick rents the dilapidated house next to Gatsby’s manse (Shrink: “So he was your neighbor?” Nick: “My neighbor … yeah”) and spies the man himself in the distance, on a dock, looking almost, Nick says, as if he’s trying to reach across the water. Then we see Leonardo DiCaprio with his arm stuck out, reaching … reaching … It’s not Fitzgerald’s subtlest moment and is clunkier onscreen. Can any actor overcome a first shot like that? Talk about a reach.

DiCaprio is, on balance, a good Gatsby. It helps that most of us like him so much that we root for him to hit the right notes. And if he does, as actors say, “indicate,” what choice do you have in a Baz Luhrmann picture? You signal desperately while trying not to look desperate. DiCaprio has a too-nice tan and looks obscenely healthy, but he’s not playing a wasted, reclusive Gatsby: He’s a man still aglow with youthful dreams, convinced that by adding “old sport” to the end of his sentences he’ll seem to the manner born. (He sounds like someone doing a bad JFK impersonation.) DiCaprio was the most grown-up-seeming of child actors and is now the most boyish of grown-ups. So it’s easy to believe that his Gatsby could attach no importance to the five years that have passed since he last saw his treasured Daisy, back when he was a poor boy. It’s easy to believe he thinks hope—plus his new wealth—can vanquish time.

It’s less easy to believe that Carey Mulligan can embody Daisy. I know: Who could embody American literature’s ultimate prize, its Great White Whale transformed into a beautiful woman who can only be landed after a suitable fortune is amassed? She’s a projection—and at the same time a mistreated, discombobulated woman who shows signs of not wanting to bear the absurd weight of a man’s dreams. I suspect we all have our Daisys in life but could find no consensus if allowed to vote on an actress. A couple of distant possibilities: Peter Bogdanovich recognized a Texas version of Daisy in Jacy in The Last Picture Show—and the poor dreamer launched himself on a Fitzgerald-like road to ruin by leaving his wife for the 21-year-old Cybill Shepherd and installing her in a mansion in Bel Air. Gwyneth Paltrow, despite her current Goopy associations, still radiates a Daisy-like relish for being envied and desired—along with an obvious (even neurotic) attachment to privilege.

Mulligan might turn out to be a better actress than Shepherd and Paltrow put together, but she’s down-to-earth pretty (a tad mousy) rather than unattainably glamorous. She does well in Daisy’s most challenging scene, in which she has to oscillate between the desires of two impossible men, the monomaniacal Gatsby and the overentitled Buchanan. But it’s possible to forget she’s in the movie. She’s upstaged by an Australian actress named Elizabeth Debicki, who, as Jordan Baker, is all sleek insouciance, an archetypal New Yorker flapper cartoon brought to vivid life. You could project on Debicki till the cows come home.

She slinks off with the movie, but she doesn’t have much competition. Apart from DiCaprio and Maguire, the chief actors are Brits or Aussies and hit their American notes, like their r’s, harrrrd. Joel Edgerton’s Tom Buchanan is about on the same level as Billy Zane’s Cal Hockley in Titanic, Leo’s last rich rival for his soul mate’s affection. But shouldn’t the Fitzgerald version have a bit more nuance than the Cameron knockoff? Jason Clarke, who plays the mechanic Wilson as if competing with clowns and elephants for the audience’s attention, will be lucky if no one recognizes him from his riveting turn as the increasingly tortured torturer in Zero Dark Thirty. As the doomed *Myrtle, Isla Fisher suggests Bernadette Peters in dire need of a showstopping Broadway ballad.
You can find fault with virtually every scene in Luhrmann’s The Great Gatsby—and yet in spite of all the wrong notes, Fitzgerald (and the excess he was writing about and living) comes through. The Deco extravagance of the big party scenes is enthralling. Luhrmann throws money at the screen in a way that is positively Gatsby-like, walloping you intentionally and un- with the theme of prodigal waste. I imagined him directing the spectacle while fending off—like Gatsby—phone calls from shady moneymen: “You spent a million dollars on fireworks? You needed how many sets of twins on how many fountains for one shot? Putz!”

http://www.vulture.com/2013/05/movie...re+Blog%252529

[MarkGrace]

Pain and Gain is now RUTS.

Still likely to see it this weekend, though.

[Art Vandelay]

the book sucked.

Ha. I just finished it last night. I never had to read in during HS or college, but thought it must be good, since I've alway known about it, and they are making a movie starring Leo. I was wrong. It was boring, and had a stupid ending. I have no plans to see the movie.

[Jeff Lebowski]

Pain and Gain is now RUTS.

Still likely to see it this weekend, though.

48 hrs did a documentary on the real-life story recently. It was incredible. I might want to see the movie now as it seems they followed the true story quite closely.