The Great Gatsby sucks

[Hammock Parties]

.

The trailers for this made it seem like the greatest thing EVER.

Now topping out at 42%

http://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/the_great_gatsby_2012/

Baz Luhrmann's "The Great Gatsby" is a tale told idiotically, full of noise and furor, signifying next to nothing.

The production is not insipid, let's give it that. An exercise in absurdist excess, this fourth screen adaptation of F. Scott Fitzgerald's novel, with Leonardo DiCaprio in the title role, means to dramatize the excesses of the Jazz Age, with hints of Weimar decadence thrown in for bad measure.

But that's a banality by this late date, and it's as far as Mr. Luhrmann goes in making sense of the book. The film's only governing principle is maximalism—everything has been made as big as possible, apart from conversational interludes, when big feelings are displayed, like bullet points, by actors striking static poses.

What's intractably wrong with the film is that there's no reality to heighten; it's a spectacle in search of a soul. For all of its glittery fragmentation, "Moulin Rouge!" came around to moments of genuine passion. None of these new trappings means a thing because the people who populate them are stylish sticks, unsinged by the spark of life.

That's almost surely not the fault of the actors, for the director turns them into lifelike props. Mr. DiCaprio, who's no more comfortable with the phrase "old sport" than Robert Redford was in the previous version, is elaborately sincere when he isn't frowning like Jack Nicholson; being charming like, well, Leonardo DiCaprio, or being mysterious, except that people who are genuinely mysterious don't look mysterious. Carey Mulligan's Daisy is either languorous or amorous, not a lot in between. Mr. Maguire's Nick is cheerlessly impressionable. Joel Edgerton's Tom is charmlessly brutish. Elizabeth Debicki's Jordan Baker is a flouncing cipher. And Mr. Luhrmann uses Amitabh Bachchan, a legendary star in his native India, to make the Jewish gangster Meyer Wolfshiem a leering pillowbiterin.

Given the lifelessness of the enterprise, there's little point in belaboring its failure to convey the novel's themes, let alone the emotional and social resonance of what has come to be considered a masterpiece of world literature. Although the hero created himself out of the whole cloth of romantic yearning, we see almost nothing of that self-creation, only the conflicted result. Although the Nick of the novel arrives at a new and tragic understanding of the American Dream, the Nick on screen can't be more than an earnest observer, since any vestige of the story's tragic sense has been replaced by melodramatic sadness.

This dreadful film even derogates the artistry of Fitzgerald, who wrote "The Great Gatsby" while living on Long Island and in Europe. In a deviation from the book that amounts to a calumny against literary history, Nick, the author's surrogate, is discovered in a psychiatric hospital where, as an aging alcoholic, he struggles to comprehend the vanished figure at the center of the long-ago story, and finally completes his treatment by writing the novel. It's literature as therapy, and Gatsby as Rosebud.

[007]

Originally Posted by DoucheMcCloud

It's theoretically impossible for you to hate that movie as much as me, and I've never even seen it.

Originally Posted by DoucheMcCloud

So J. Edgar is a bad film but you haven't seen it?

So you hated Titanic but you haven't seen it?

[ChiefAshhole20]

Don't sleep on Blood Diamond... The Aviator wasn't bad either.

[Sorter]

Originally Posted by ChiefAshhole20

Don't sleep on Blood Diamond... The Aviator wasn't bad either.

The accent ruined it for me.

[ThaVirus]

Originally Posted by Setsuna

The last movie Leonardo was in that was terrible was Titanic.

Originally Posted by KC native

Ugh I ****ing hated Titanic.

Kill yourselves.

[Rausch]

Originally Posted by ThaVirus

Kill yourselves.

We'll all be waiting to kill you.

Taste this bad demands a lynching...

[blaise]

Originally Posted by 'Hamas' Jenkins

You may laugh but Fight Club and American Psycho were both excellent adaptations. Palahniuk said he preferred the film's ending to the book's.

I read the story, didn't see the film, but I understand Brokeback Mountain was a good adaptation.

Same thing with The Unbearable Lightness of Being. I only read the book, but I know the film got good ratings.


You see Jane Austen type adaptations done with some success. Although I don't know that many were in the last 20 years.

[DaveNull]

Fantastic Mr. Fox was pretty great.

['Hamas' Jenkins]

Originally Posted by blaise

I read the story, didn't see the film, but I understand Brokeback Mountain was a good adaptation.

Same thing with The Unbearable Lightness of Being. I only read the book, but I know the film got good ratings.


You see Jane Austen type adaptations done with some success. Although I don't know that many were in the last 20 years.

I've had a copy of ULoB for over a decade and have never cracked it. Thanks for reminding me of my need to .

['Hamas' Jenkins]

Originally Posted by Ponderception

The accent ruined it for me.

Everyone should speak with a Sout' Afreekan accent.

[BWillie]

I didn't know Dicaprio made bad movies

[MahiMike]

Originally Posted by Wonton Prejudice

Apparently there's a shit ton of rap in the soundtrack, too. Which makes me retch.

wth? Really? How much rap did they have in the roaring 20's? Stoopid.

Rap is bad any time. But especially out of context.

[blaise]

DiCaprio seems like he'd be perfect for the role. He looks like what you'd imagine Gatsby would look like, and he has the charisma to pull it off. I just don't know that you can put the novel on screen effectively. I'm not even sure why you need to. The book is short. You could probably read half of it in the time it took to watch the film.

[Frazod]

Originally Posted by MahiMike

wth? Really? How much rap did they have in the roaring 20's? Stoopid.

Rap is bad any time. But especially out of context.

This. I love period films, but this one sounds irreparably damaged from the start. Whoever thought it was a good idea to put of bunch of rap shit in the soundtrack should be fed feet first through a wood chipper.

[Nzoner]

Originally Posted by DoucheMcCloud

Eh, he was a freaking kid at the time but if you're going back that far into his career, he was phenomenal in Gilbert Grape and especially This Boy's Life.

Absolutely great movies

[Nzoner]

My 19 year old niece really liked Gatsby,that alone makes me think I won't be seeing it.

Also,add another for liking The Beach,not by far a favorite but I still liked it.