I went to see Gatsby yesterday. The movie is getting brutalized by critics. I have never read the book, I thought the movie wasn’t too bad. Well Daisy was bad, but the rest of it was a passable soap opera.
Are people too hung up, I mean a book is a book and a movie is a movie. They aren’t supposed to be the same thing. Lots of times a film maker will excise huge portions of the book, focus on a narrow element, change the meaning, but that doesn’t automatically make it a bad movie.
I think if you take the expectations out of it, the movie isn’t half bad. Any takers??
I don’t think that’s it, because I read the book about a month before seeing the movie, and I loved it. But I’ve stopped judging movies on their fidelity to their source material; rather, I’m interested in why changes were made, and whether those changes are good or bad. I thought a lot of the changes in The Great Gatsby were good: Daisy becomes simultaneously more sympathetic and more contemptible, for example.
I’ve never read the book, and went into the movie having no idea what the story was, and I loved it too. The music, the costumes, the Art Deco Art Direction/Set Decoration (I hope an Oscar nomination is forthcoming), the stylization, the acting, it all worked for me. The story surprised me, and I like being surprised at movies. It was nothing like what I expected, though I can’t articulate what I expected other than that Daisy was a poor girl elevated into high society and that the Tobey Maguire character would be a poor boy in love with Daisy but who had to compete with the rich Gatsby. Luckily the story wasn’t as predictable as my uneducated ass figured. I came away thinking Daisy was pathetic and feeling very sorry for Gatsby, but thinking they were all crazy.
I don’t know if this factors into my love and acceptance of the movie as a whole, but Moulin Rouge is one of my all-time favorite films.
Well, I haven’t seen the movie, but when I reread the book earlier this year I decided it was very melodramatic, which isn’t too far from ‘bad soap opera’
It’s not a “bad soap opera” - it is a glitzy myth; there’s a difference.
Gatsby is Icarus, who basically falls in love with the dream of being a bird, fakes his way into being bird-ish, then flies too close to the sun and falls - while the birds in the sky keep flying, indifferent to his fate.
Now substitute “flying” with being rich, “birds” with rich folks and voila. Daisy is the rich girl/bird that inspired him to fake his way to “success” - and who is indifferent to his fate and gets back to her flying/rich life afterwards.
Link this myth to the American Dream - and make that Dream look glitzy, hollow and fake compared to the real fliers/rich people, add jazz and beaded dresses and simmer…
I loved the book in high school and also when I re-read it afterward, and I thought the movie was good.
My measure of a movie is whether I was bored. I was never bored while watching it, even at 2.5 hours.
I don’t think Leonardo DiCaprio has been appealing since Titanic, and I don’t think he’s anything special as an actor, but that didn’t ruin it for me.
At one point I leaned over to my bf and whispered, “Daisy needs to get a Master’s degree!” although since it was the 20s a Bachelor’s would have sufficed.
I don’t understand this interpretation, and I’ve seen it a lot. Daisy isn’t indifferent to Gatsby. She has an affair with him and almost goes with him, but decides that she’d rather stay with Tom (hence the soap opera aspects). At least, she does in the book.
WordMan’s interpretation rings very true to me. I thought especially of the scene after the confrontation and the car accident, where Gatsby is worried about Daisy and spends the whole night watching over her, or so he thinks; he even believes that he has set up a signal with Daisy in case Tom gets “rough” with her. Nick Carraway tiptoes up to the house to check things out:
Daisy lent no more thought to Gatsby in that moment Tom did to his mistress lying ripped open in the middle of the road. “They were careless people, Tom and Daisy – they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness, or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made.” The end of the novel showed them flying on just as they were at the beginning, indifferent to whatever they had left in their wake.
Yep - Koxinga - the “cold chicken and ale” scene is the critical one. When all is said and done, Daisy was having a rich-kid adventure, and when things got serious, it was scary, but thank gosh she can wake up and act like it didn’t happen. But what a great story to tell your friends about at the country house
TGG is 31% among top critics at Rotten Tomatoes. That is not good.* Most of the positive stuff about the movie concerns sets, production value, visuals, etc. Not much about the acting or the story.
If the story doesn’t work for you and you aren’t impressed by the scenery, you’re not going to be happy.
It failed to live up to the hype. Not going to get nominated for major Oscars. I suspect this is why it was pushed back.
Tyler Perry’s Peeples, by comparison, is 40% among top critics.
