The Great Gatsby (2013 film)

It's because no one here wants to discuss the movie itself.

Maybe it's because the soundtrack has more original material.

How many of us have even seen the movie? At this point, I only want to see it for the purpose of finding out just what the hell is in it. If I could, I'd just torrent the thing and go see Star Trek.

edited 20th May '13 7:58:57 PM by Mort08

Yeah, has anyone actually seen this yet?

I've seen it. It's not very good, but I was never bored.

I've made a separate thread for the OST; as they said, beside the movie, it's kind of its own entity.

Also, it's frickin awesome.

edited 21st May '13 12:59:01 PM by TheHandle

Yeah, I saw it. I quite enjoyed it, actually.

I've seen it. I, also, was at no point bored during this. It's hard to be given how much there is to actually look at.

So watch it for the scenery and not much else? The scenery alone carries it well?

Okay so I've just finished reading the book.

The first time I picked it up, after a few pages (Tom's introduction, for starters), I got really disappointed and gave up in disgust.

The film and its amazing soundtrack drove me to finish the damn thing. As I finished it, I felt deeply frstrated and quite furious. This story, I thought, is crap, complete and utter hogwash, a pointless waste of time, and I cannot for the life of me fathom why there is so much hype surrounding it. The characters are flat and unlikeable, and the development feels like Twenty Minutes with Jerks extended over weeks. And I can confidently say that most of it is Nick's fault; that asshole can make the most interesting and glamorous people seem like utter vapid sad clowns, he can make the most tragic situations sound pathetic and disgusting, and, for most of the story, the onl emotion he seems to register is embarassment. He opens his book declaring that people like him because he doesn't judge them, but he does nearly nothing else throughout the story but judge people, and judge them harshly, at that. This is the most painful, disgusting narration I have ever had to swallow.

Fitzgerald can write, in fact he writes damn well; his descriptions are amazingly compelling, stark and compact and raw, and his prose flows with a characteristic rhythm. But what he chooses to tell with it drives me to tears; I am simply amazed that he managed to spin a tale out this Random Events Plot, and that such a "Shaggy Dog" Story of misery, mistakes, false hopes, and utter moral mediocrity ever achieved such a celebrated status. It saddens me, old sport, it really does.

So my question is as follows; how does the film compare to the book? I have trouble imagining Tobey Maguire as the First-Person Smartass Nick, for one. Also, I hear that the crowd at the parties is actually acknowledged as being awesome and amazing, rather than merely being vaguely implied to be so like in the book (at one point Nick drops an Info Dump Long List of names that meant absolutely nothing to me, and every time the guests get some line of dialogue, it is utterly stupid, vapid, and irrational).

I also can't help but notice that there's a lot of stuff implied in the novel that the reader isn't told about; I found myself quite puzzled by how I should feel about the Values Dissonance, because the values were never outright stated.

People accused Gatsby of being a bootlegger like it was a bad thing, then proceded to drink alcohol at nearly every scene without showing a hint of shame, embrassment, or moral reprobation.

I am completely in the dark regarding what is the understood consensus about how one should manage one's marriage and one's lovers, and about extramarital sex.

I am rather confused as to the laws regarding driving, the usage of electricity, the social standing of cinemas, muscial theaters, and hotels, and who rides the train. Or things like what a dollar can buy at that time (young!Gats writes about saving three dollars a week like it's a big deal!).

Or even things like how Gatsby's language is in any way remarkable, strange, or unusual for the era, even compared to everyone else's.

So I find myself quite annoyed at my own inability to tell if there's anything more to this story than a bunch of suckers who suck at life leading sucky lives that intersect in sucky stories with sucky conclusions that sucked. Did I mention how much I thought this story sucked?

So, yeah, does the movie not suck, as a story, is what I'm really asking. The montage and photography are a separate matter; like Fitzgerald's writing, they might make the film worth watching on its own, just for the technical execution. But what I really want to know is if it manages to tell a compelling, sympathetic, energic story, rather than the exercise in bleak despair that was the novel.

I think you may have missed the point Fitzgerald was going for. The point of Gatsby was to show just how hollow and meaningless the Jazz Age was; the people Gatsby was trying to impress were utter vapid sad clowns, the tragedy was pathetic and disgusting, and Nick Carraway is a judgmental asshole no better than the morons he hangs out with. Gatsby devoted his life to a woman who never deserved him, and what does he get for his troubles? A bullet to the brain. Life sucks, unless you're rich enough to buy your way out of trouble, and if not, better to keep your head down and try not to get in the way of the train.

edited 24th May '13 6:42:49 AM by maxwellelvis

People accused Gatsby of being a bootlegger like it was a bad thing, then proceded to drink alcohol at nearly every scene without showing a hint of shame, embrassment, or moral reprobation.

Exactly. People were being hypocrites like that. Alcohol was indeed illegal then, yet people didn't care unless they were being arrested for it or needed to pin the blame on someone else.

Even when you're rich enough to "buy your way out of trouble", life barely makes it to "sucky pleasantness", in this story. Honestly, I'm finding the sheer bleakness of it all to border on the fantastic and the surreal. I've been raised as an upper-middle class boy, and I can guarantee that, while the rich do not have a greater proportion of them than the poor, there is an appreciable proportion of vibrant, brilliant, wonderful people in this world, you just need to know where to find them. If Gatsby had had the sense to, say, start a charity or fund scientific or educational endeavors or even theater productions, or, really, any social activity at all besides huge anonymous alcoholic parties, he'd have had the chance to meet and befriend people who might at least have been of some use to him.

Even among actors and artists, there are plenty of people with quite a bit of emotional depth and human insight; it is after all quite hard to have your art convey these things when you don't have them in the first place.

To sum it up, understanding Fitzgerald's point is not the same thing as agreeing with it. His fictional New York & Eggs may be a bona fide Crapsack World of the greatest and most expensive and expansive mediocrity, but I frankly doubt the actual thing was nearly as terrible.

Well, to be fair, the only one to make a big deal of the bootlegging was Tom Jerk Jock (how old is that trope, really?). Most people were suspecting much worse.

I do think Gatsby would have been better off telling the truth to everyone. A lame past is healthier and more manageable than a mystery. People can fit all kinds of things into a mystery.

Another thing that bothered me was the suspicion that "he once killed a man". I'm not how many people knew he'd fought at The Great War, but wouldn't those who did suspect that he killed a great deal more than one man? He led a regiment of machine guns, for chrissakes! Or could be that somehow those didm't count?

And as for the song, "Will you still love me when I'm no longer young and beautiful?" I find it amusingly fitting in the case of Daisy, as she literally has nothing else going for her.

...

And not a single old sport here has answered my questions about the film yet.

edited 24th May '13 10:35:55 AM by TheHandle

You're just missing a lot of the themes here. For example, Gatsby wasn't hosting those parties to "meet" anyone. He was using them to eventually attract Daisy.

edited 24th May '13 10:44:46 AM by cutewithoutthe

But Gatsby didn't want those kinds of people, no, he wanted Daisy Buchanan. He didn't want to meet vibrant, brilliant people, he wanted to be seen with people others thought were like that. Everything he did was in an undertaking as foolish as Don Quixote battling windmills. Daisy Buchanan would never feel the way he felt about her, she was too up in her own material wealth, so much that she forgot she had a baby. The Roaring Twenties were not a very good time for basic human decency.

As for funding the arts to get more famous or something? The main artistic movements of that period were Cubism, Surrealism, and Dada; three movements obsessed with society's ugliness and how hollow life seemed in the wake of mechanized warfare. Not the sorts of things the Buchanans or Gatsby would find all that appealing.

The whole point Fitzgerald was making was how shallow and hollow the lives of the rich are. His wife was still in an asylum when he wrote it, he wasn't very inclined to write happy stories in the first place.

Exactly. Gatsby's parties and money were just a big peacock tail; he didn't give two shits about the guests. Albert Einstein and Pablo Picasso could have been there and Gatsby wouldn't even notice or care.

Edit: I think it was also implied that Gatsby started most of those rumors himself, just to attract more people towards him. He pulled a Michael Jackson and started gossip to get more attention, just to increase his chances of getting Daisy to notice him.

edited 24th May '13 10:53:41 AM by maxwellelvis

Here, watch this and then watch the second part of it in that playlist.

I already watched that one, the week it came out. I came out with the expectation that Daisy would kill some random person with Gatsby's car while drunk silly and he'd let himself get arrested in her stead. But he didn't "take the fall" for her actions, he had the fall dumped on him by that asshole Tom.

I also left with the impression that her liaison with Gatsby lasted a lot more than it did in the actual story, where Tom finds out almost right away and it all climaxes in an amazing demonstration of the Idiot Ball by everyone except Tom, who had the Extra Asshole Ball instead.

I don't need happy, but I do require "cathartic" and "satisfying" and Gatsby was an exercise in frustration. I just wanted to jump through the pages of the book and shout "You morons".

Also, I am absolutely not like Daisy in any way, shape or form. If there's a character I can identify with in this story, it's that dumbass Gatsby. I used to be in love with a girl like Daisy, like, seriously in love. I almost ruined my life pursuing her. I feel so sorry for the poor fool.

edited 24th May '13 4:28:10 PM by TheHandle

Why would you read F. Scott Fitzgerald for catharsis? The man was miserable, and he had a reason to be so, his wife went insane and had to be put away. Most great literature in the U.S. in that time was un-cathartic; this is the same period Eugene O'Neil wrote his plays in, and they were much of the same as this.

Then it must have been a trans-atlantic epidemic because... checks Wikipedia...

...

Huh?

I'm finding that a lot of works that I had somehow strongly associated with post-WWI depression such as The Stranger and Waiting For Godot were actually published at least three years after the end of WWII.

Wittgenstein's bleak Tractatus is still in the time frame I thought it was, thank GodMeaninglessness.

I really thought existentialism was a twenties movement and coexisted with surrealism and dada... My goodness, my memory is failing me! It is the beginning of the end!

Random question - does the dude who plays Tom Buchanan in this film have a "husky tenor" voice?

I pictured him sounding and looking like J Jonah Jameson, myself. Buzz haircut and all. Except,you know, he's neither funny nor likeable nor charismatic. He's a Jerk with a Heart of Jerk the likes of which I've never seen before.

Well, this story is a big deal. How should I set this up?

Rarity gains an inheritance from an uncle, travels to Fancee, reinvents hereself as a fashionista from Mareseille?

Rarity and Twilight go live in Manehattan, where Twi becomes basically Bloomberg, and while Rarity is a compulsive striver who would go as far as reworking her whole being to fit the specifications of the mixed bunch she romanticizes (because rich people are a mixed bunch, believe it or not), and is certainly not above a little fraud and dishonesty, Twilight has grown privileged and high born and is completely jaded to the Conspicuous Leisure and Conspicuous Consumption of her class, preferring to deal in academics, and not just for academics' sake, but out of a genuine drive to be useful.

Twilight doesn't just provide a commentary to Rarity's antics (she gets mixed up in Stendhalesque and Balzaquian messes almost automatically), she also acts as her consciousness and the voice of reason every time she thinks Rarity could not possibly pay the price for learning a lesson on her own without losing irrecoverably.

Conversely, Twilight, while a brilliant administrator and leader, remains somewhat socially awkward, and it's Rarity's keen eye for social convention, protocol, and properness, that saves her from embarassment on more than one occasion.

Hm, that sounds less like TGG-Reconstructed and more like a throwback to Balzac's Comédie Humaine with a faint smell of Don Quixote.

edited 25th May '13 6:39:40 PM by TheHandle

Well, he's described in the book as having a "husky tenor" voice. The 1974 movie kept that little detail. The opera adaptation also has him written as a tenor.

Heh. I just like it when the filmmakers keep track of the little details. Les Miserables had loads of little changes from the musical to make it more book-accurate, and those were nice.

edited 25th May '13 6:33:08 PM by Pannic

You mean the film?

Yeah, the film. Lots of little stuff, like how the final battle goes down when the boys retreat into the cafe and throw down bottles on the attackers, and how Enjolras and Grantaire are executed. And how Valjean runs into Fauchelevent after taking Cosette, etc etc. Little details. Nothing really big, but it's nice to see the filmmakers paid attention to the source material.

Well, I saw it.

You know how I kept saying that if this movie was anything like Moulin Rouge, it would fail?

I take all of that back. It should have been WAY more like Moulin Rouge. Because that movie has plenty of entertaining things in it. This movie was bland as hell.

The acting is, for the most part, not good. There is no chemistry between DiCaprio and Mulligan. She's bad when trying to be flirtatious, and he keeps looking like he's trying not to puke. The only decent performances came from Elizabeth Debicki and (at times, mostly towards the end) Tobey Maguire.

So what about all those dazzling party setpieces with their modern-day music? Those are fun, right? I suppose they would be if they were actually there. The music is almost always pushed into the background, like Luhrmann didn't know what to do with it. There's no creative cinematography in the party scenes. Instead of being huge and crazy, they feel small and even a little bit boring.

Does it work as an adaptation of the book? Of course not. What makes Gatsby a special book is not its story or dialogue, but the way it's written. You just can't translate that to film (and literally shoving the words in your face doesn't count), so we're left with an uninteresting story and stilted dialogue. The symbolism is way overdone; for example, that goddamn green light. It makes this weird whining noise, and Luhrmann inserts it into the film everywhere. Not the light, just that noise. When the story reaches its inevitable Downer Ending, you can't take in the tragedy of it because all you're thinking is "Thank God, it's finally over."

You could probably read the book in around the same amount of time it takes to watch this movie, and that's what I'd advise you to do. This film doesn't work as an adaptation of its source material, nor as a film in general.

edited 27th May '13 8:43:37 PM by Mort08