Day 306: The Great Gatsby (2013)

2949000564366_p0_v1_s600Now this is a great Great Gatsby.

I’m not even a fan of Baz Lurhmann, who directed this 2013 adaptation of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s novel. Lurhmann is a hyper-kinetic director whose style often becomes a distraction.

You see, that’s my biggest pet peeve when it comes to movies.

When the director’s camera becomes another character in the film (for example, when hand-held camera work makes a movie so jerky one gets nauseous attempting to watch it), I immediately lose interest. I walked out of The Hunger Games for that very reason. It was impossible to watch.

In Lurhmann’s case, his fanciful, over-the-top settings, quick cuts, and boisterous music make movies I would never number among my favorites.

Except for this one.

This adaptation of The Great Gatsby offers the best Daisy Buchanan (Carey Mulligan), the best Nick Carraway (Tobey Maguire), the best Gatsby (Leonardo DiCaprio), the best Tom Buchanan (Joel Edgerton), the best Jordan Baker (Elizabeth Debicki), and the best George Wilson (Jason Clarke).

It also offers the best acting, the most compelling cinematography, the best costumes, the best lighting, and the best narration of any of the previous three Gatsby adaptations.

Lurhamnn’s Gatsby is electric. It crackles with a palpable energy that permeates every scene.

In short, it is Continue reading

Day 282: F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby

Beethoven190Good-bye Beethoven.

Hello F. Scott.

This leg of my three-year journey through the works of the world’s greatest composers, authors, filmmakers, musicians, and actors is a three-week assessment of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s great American novel The Great Gatsby.

According to its entry on Wikipedia:

The Great Gatsby is a 1925 novel written by American author F. Scott Fitzgerald that follows a cast of characters living in the fictional town of West Egg on prosperous Long Island in the summer of 1922. The story primarily concerns the young and mysterious millionaire Jay Gatsby and his quixotic passion and obsession for the beautiful debutante Daisy Buchanan. Considered to be Fitzgerald’s magnum opus, The Great Gatsby explores themes of decadence, idealism, resistance to change, social upheaval, and excess, creating a portrait of the Jazz Age or the Roaring Twenties that has been described as a cautionary tale regarding the American Dream.

Fitzgerald, inspired by the parties he had attended while visiting Long Island’s north shore, began planning the novel in 1923 desiring to produce, in his words, “something new—something extraordinary and beautiful and simple and intricately patterned.” Progress was slow with Fitzgerald completing his first draft following a move to the French Riviera in 1924. His editor, Maxwell Perkins, felt the book was too vague and convinced the author to revise over the next winter. Fitzgerald was ambivalent about the book’s title, at various times wishing to re-title the novel Trimalchio in West Egg.

And that’s where my journey begins – with Trimalchio: An Early Version of The Great Gatsby.

Over the course of the next 24 days, I’ll read Trimalchio, The Great Gatsby, Fitzgerald’s novel that became the basis for a bunch of film versions…and then watch all four said movies (a 1925 silent adaptation is a lost film):

1949 – starring Alan Ladd, Betty Field and Shelley Winters
1974 – starring Robert Redford, Mia Farrow and Sam Waterston
2000 – starring Paul Rudd, Mira Sorvino and Toby Stephens
2013 – starring Leonardo DiCaprio, Carey Mulligan and Tobey Maguire

And then compare and contrast them (as my college professors asked me to do on exams).

I’m not sure how I’ll keep the blog, though.

It’s one thing to listen to a CD every day and write about it. It’s another thing to read a book and…what? Do I write how many pages I read? What I’m thinking as I read it?

I’ll figure it out.

I’m a big boy.

Day 180: Celebrity

71KREPYQ2QLCelebrity, Woody’s 29th movie as director, features another massive cast and themes of relationships, love, infidelity, sexuality…wait.

Haven’t I seen this before?

Celebrity features a number of interesting performances, notably the leggy, sexy, and model-esque Charlize Theron playing a leggy and sexy model…British actor Kenneth Branagh doing a very fine impression of Woody Allen throughout the movie – stuttering, gesturing, and trying to get into the pants of every woman he meets – theatre director, author, and actor Andre Gregory (of My Dinner With Andre fame) making a cameo appearance as film director John Papadakis…character actor J.K. Simmons as a souvenir hawker…Leonardo DiCaprio, whom someone on IMDB noted was in this film for exactly 10 minutes and 20 seconds.

My favorite scene is when Robin Simon (Judy Davis) and Tony Gardella (Joe Mantegna) are at a screening of a film. Robin says she’s ought to know more people there. Tony points to Andre Gregory.

Tony Gardella: You see that guy?

Robin Simon: Mmm-hmm.

Tony: That’s Papadakis, the director of the film were gonna see.

Robin: Oh, yes.

Tony: Oh, yeah, he’s very arty, pretentious, one of those assholes who shoots all his films in black and white.

Robin: [laughs]

[Camera picks out a handsome young guy talking on the phone.]

Tony: Tom Dale. *Big* star. He’s in New York filming an adaptation of a sequel of a remake.

[Camera picks out a guy who looks like the late film critic Gene Siskel.]

Tony: Oh, and getting out of the elevator I see there’s a famous critic.

Robin: Him, I recognize.

Tony: Oh, he used to hate every movie. Then, he married a young, big-bosomed woman, and now he loves every movie.

The line about the pretentious asshole who shoots all his films in black and white was an inside joke because Celebrity is shot in black and white, which Continue reading