The Great Gatsby

Directed by Baz Luhrmann (2013)

Starring: Leonardo DiCaprio, Carey Mulligan, Tobey Maguire, Joel Edgerton

I’ve always liked Baz Luhrmann and always felt pretty “Meh” towards Leo DiCaprio.  Well, for the latter, I had a massive crush on him during the Titanic craze, but who didn’t?  As for Luhrmann, Moulin Rouge! remains one of my favorite go-to movies if I’m feeling sad.  I listen to its soundtrack when I go for a run and I’m still completely in awe of the costumes and performances.  So, prep me for a Luhrmann-writ-and-directed adaptation of the Great American Novel?  I’m sold.  Tell me DiCaprio is playing Jay Gatsby, tragic hero extraordinaire?  I’m giving the skeptic side-eye.

It turns out I was surprised and disappointed in the results in equal measure, and they canceled each other out to a pretty enjoyable summer movie.  Baz Luhrmann has created a beautiful, manic vision of 1920s New York, filled with artificial landscapes and mansions.  The artificiality feels off-putting, but as one of my theater-going companions pointed out, it reflects the artifice that Gatsby creates in order to lure Daisy to West Egg.

In contrast, the casting wound up pretty perfect.  DiCaprio embodies the charm and drive necessary to play Jay Gatsby, as well as the hollow determination in recreating the past.  However, I’d consider Tobey Maguire’s Nick Carraway the real lynchpin for the film.  Luhrmann adds another frame to the story – after the events of the novel, Carraway has experienced a mental breakdown and has checked himself into a mental hospital.  His therapist recommends that he tells this story in order to move forward.  It’s not a bad device, considering the rhetoric of the novel and the hollow results of Gatsby’s death.  As Nick, Maguire is innocent to New York and its society, simply trying to make his way in the world.  His innocence is what makes him a good match for Gatsby – he doesn’t want anything monetary from him, just that he can be a part of his small universe.  Where Gatsby has hope in his green light, Carraway has idealism in Gatsby-the-man.  What the adaptation skips over are Carraway’s own flaws, even his disastrous relationship with Jordan Baker (Elizabeth Debicki).  Instead, he hangs out in the background, stuck with observing the glamorous tragedy in front of him.

The adaptation moves at about the same pace as the novel.  The first half is devoted to the spectacle of the city and of Gatsby’s West Egg parties.  Discussions are given over to Gatsby’s origins and the Buchanan’s broken marriage.  Nick Carraway is thrown into it, at once landed in society and drifting along, having things happen to him instead of doing anything on his own.

There’s the awkward scene where Gatsby invades Nick’s house to fill it with flowers and cakes after he constructs an afternoon tea with Daisy.  Nick leaves the house during a downpour to allow the couple’s reunion, but when he returns it’s like his presence doesn’t matter.  He could have stayed in the house and still Gatsby and Daisy would be lost in their own world.  He’s the Toulouse-Lautrec character from Moulin Rouge!, except he’s the only one capable of telling the story.

The Great Gatsby has a lot in common with Luhrmann’s jukebox musical.  In many ways, it feels like the actual third film of the Red Curtain Trilogy, replacing Strictly Ballroom.  Gatsby is located somewhere between Moulin Rouge! and Romeo + Juliet, as it’s an adaptation of classic literature that has become updated to modern taste, but with the scope of a fantasy world from Moulin Rouge!  

So: Is it the most perfect adaptation of the novel?  No, of course not.  Is it in a Luhrmann-frenzied style?  Yeah, totally.  But it’s summer movie season, when manic editing and awesome soundtracks trump sensible movie-making art.

The Painted Veil

Directed by John Curran (2006)

Starring: Edward Norton, Naomi Watts, Toby Jones, Liev Schreiber, Anthony Wong Chau Sang

The Painted Veil is a very pretty movie, which probably isn’t the most articulate way to begin this review, but it sure is hard to deny.  From costumes (Ruth Myers) to cinematography (Stuart Dryburgh) to score (Alexandre Desplat), it’s pretty astounding.   The romantic drama based on the novel by W. Somerset Maugham follows the marriage of Walter and Kitty Fane (Norton and Watts), who begin problematically.  Walter, a bacteriologist in China, proposes to Kitty after only two meetings.  She accepts, only after hearing her mother lament about her spinsterhood, and their marriage proceeds awkwardly to Shanghai.  Two years later, Kitty has an affair with Charles Townshend (Schreiber), an important British official stationed in China.  Walter uncovers the affair and as revenge takes Kitty into the middle of a cholera epidemic in the country, saying she must go or he will divorce her.

It seemed like this was going to be about distasteful people and the awful things they do to one another.  I was also apprehensive that the film would take to blaming the wife for everything, and while Kitty is not innocent in her marriage, she’s also a figure under considerable strain. She is immature, sheltered and spoiled in her upbringing, but is expected to marry as her duty to her family.  Walter claims he loves her when all her really knows is that she’s pretty, but carries expectations that she will be the charming, loving housewife.  In that dialogue, their marriage is representative of the Problem that Has No Name that Betty Friedan discussed – what happens when a woman is given no expectations besides marriage, then has the expectation of maintaining the emotional bond?

In the country, Kitty is frustrated by how little she can do.  Watts is often shot standing in the middle of a room, incapable of accomplishing anything without becoming frustrated by her situation.  She goes to their nearest neighbor in the town, the stationed commissioner Waddington (Jones), who lives with his Chinese mistress.  How she reacts to their relationship shows just how little she understands romantic love, turning away rather than admitting that their relationship works.

The backdrop of revolutionary China sets the British ex-pat drama under a dangerous air.  While Walter attempts to prevent cholera from spreading, he alienates the local Chinese who see him as threatening their livelihood and traditions.  He has to work with Colonel Yu (Sang) who is equally as suspicious of Walter’s motives, but reluctantly helps him persuade the locals to follow the scientist’s instructions.  I’m not at all familiar with the source material, but based on the Wikipedia it looks like a lot of the changes they made helped develop the story into a mature, modern interpretation.

Blindspot 2012: Bande a Part

Band of Outsiders

Directed by Jean Luc Godard (1964) Starring: Anna Karina, Sami Frey, Claude Brasseur

There’s a tiny part of me that’s regretting loading my Blindspot queue with a ton of foreign films, since it’s harder to multitask when watching a movie on the second to last day of the month, when I’ve still got homework to get done.

However, one of Jean Luc Godard’s early classics did not skate by me last night.  I managed to give it my whole attention.

There’s something very fun and kinetic about the French New Wave.  It takes a lot of its elements from love of the Hollywood films of the 30s and 40s and they tend to be conscious that what’s happening is a movie.  At the same time, there’s the feeling that a shoe’s about to drop and a character is going to start waxing poetic about an existential crisis.  Bande a Part doesn’t have too many scenes like that, but there is an omnipresent narrator who reveals the character’s thoughts every so often.

After meeting young Odile (Karina) at an English class, Franz (Frey) and Arthur (Brasseur) find out that a lodger at her house is holding a lot of cash in his wardrobe.  They get close to Odile and convince her to help them.  Arthur seduces her while Franz feels lonely in Paris, and Odile keeps switching between helping and resisting.

To be honest, Bande a Part is a pretty uncomfortable story.  Two older, rather emotionless men flit around a young woman and seduce her in order to gain her money.  While certain scenes feel like Odile knows what she’s getting into, there are double the times when it looks like she’s about to get date-raped.  This might be cultural and generational differences, but I’m still drawing the line: It ain’t okay.

Structurally, it feels like a novel ran into a B-movie and left the narration behind, occasionally having moments that are very sensitive about the context this story is appearing.  Those are the moments that remain interesting –  the literal moment of silence, the dance scene, the constant switching between chairs at the table.  These make the French New Wave style feel like the influential movement film history tells us it is, but it’s bogged down by non-characters.  And that’s probably part of the style as well.

As much as I love the kinetic energy of running through the Louvre and dancing in a cafe, I can’t say I didn’t get distracted from the film.  After awhile, I started thinking about Jason Wu’s New Wave-inspired line from Target, which made me wonder: Was the French New Wave a statement of style over substance in art?

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 2

Directed by David Yates (2011) Starring: Daniel Radcliffe, Rupert Grint, Emma Watson

Getting ready for the final Harry Potter movie involved a lot more preparation than any other screening.  I re-read the seventh book the week before.  By Wednesday it seemed as though everyone was talking about Harry Potter.  That night was nostalgia overload– running around my house trying to put together a Luna costume for a friend’s party, hunting around in my attic for my old Hedwig stuffed owl, the first thing I remember saving up to buy.  Briefly, I remembered how different it was to watch the first movie, four weeks after it had been released.  I also remembered that I bought a Wizard Rock album by the Remus Lupins and listened to it in the car all day long.

I’d never been to a midnight screening before, but from hearsay I was prepared for the lines.  My friend Shannon and I got our round 3D glasses and stood amidst fellow Hogwarts students, Deatheaters, house elves, and already-tired parents.  Sometimes these groups meshed, like the father wearing a handmade Quidditch t-shirt and the slutty high schoolers wandering around with Slytherin green skirts and Bellatrix-styled bustiers.  We sat in the very back, surprisingly stuck between two groups of bros who seemed to have gone along for the hype.

And then, for the actual film.  I tried to describe the experience as much as possible, since I realized this week that part of what made Harry Potter so important was outside of the books and the movies.  All of the cultural zeitgeist effects were evident in how I prepped for the theater, how my friends talked about the movies.  We were the generation who had grown up with Harry Potter, more than any other.  I remember reluctantly picking up the first book when I was ten and quickly becoming addicted.  My interest fell off after the seventh book came out– well, even before that really.  The last movie I saw in theaters was the fifth.  I didn’t even bother to watch the sixth except as an after thought and 7.1 just never happened.  But since this was my childhood, it seemed like I should do it justice and watch it at midnight with my fellow generation-HP friends.

So where was I going with this?  Oh yeah, the film itself.  I’m gonna go ahead and say that the 3D experience was unimpressive.  The movie picks up at Shell Cottage, when Harry makes the important decision to go after the Horcruxes instead of beating Voldemort to the Elder Wand.  It all leads up to the Battle for Hogwarts, where things inevitably come to the end.

This interpretation was fairly strong, although it seemed iffy to break up the movies around Dobby’s death.  The first third or so about breaking into Gringotts was about as weirdly paced as it was in the books when you take into account that in the same day comes the big battle scene.  The film picks up when the Golden Trio are able to interact with some other characters, especially when Neville (Matthew Lewis) walks out of the tunnel in the Hog’s Head.  From then on out it became all of the scenes that had to happen, if adjusted slightly for the cinema.

The best parts were the crowd favorites, of course.  Harry using the Resurrection Stone, Molly shouting “Not my daughter you bitch!” and Neville killing Nagini.  Of course, there were weaker elements that seemed to string these great scenes together.  I will never understand the choice of having McGonagall say “I always wanted to do that spell,” when they’re in the middle of prepping for battle or Voldemort telling the Hogwarts students to come forward and join him.  The scene in the book had a little more impact, since it was Voldemort just taking power, going so far as to destroy the Sorting Hat and outlining his plan for a pure blood Hogwarts.

These are just nitpicks I’ve found in retrospect.  I shouldn’t have read the book again so soon before the movie came out, but it’s also the difference between mediums.  I liked the dreamy quality to Snape’s memories and how wonderfully Alan Rickman acted, but not the fact that they skipped over why Lily stopped associating with Severus.

But well, it’s the end of things.  Shannon kept repeating as we left the theater “Our childhood is over.”  That’s the case, although I wouldn’t think that it was so clear-cut.  With the release of Deathly Hallows Part 2, it is the end of the era of midnight releases and press hype,  but as JK Rowling said: ” Hogwarts will always be there to welcome you home.”

Julie & Julia (the Book)

When I don’t feel like cooking, but enjoy hearing about it, I generally turn on Food Network.  The Travel Channel, if No Reservations is on.  This summer, I decided to read Julie and Julia: The Year of Cooking Dangerously, even though I had seen the movie about ten times already and every time the Julie parts seem less than admirable.

After reading the memoir, well, I have to say it was a case of bad writing and casting.  Julie Powell in the book is just as histrionic as movie-Julie, but she’s also smart and funny and knows she’s being ridiculous half the time.  She gets her husband to help with cooking and doles out bad relationship advice to her friends, then waxes poetic on the gimlet as her alcoholic beverage of choice.  She’s certainly not the meek, goody-two-shoes Julie as played by Amy Adams.  They might have gotten closer if they had chucked in a few “fucks” in the script, but I dunno.  The thing about Amy Adams is that she is such a Disney Princess actress.  She can’t help it after Enchanted.

And then there’s the fact that the script pares her down to the most hysteric moments.  Hell, it’s not even that she gets stressed out over and over again– movie-Julie is crazy.  She talks about Julia Child like she’s her imaginary friend, the saint of Cooking Secretaries, come to adore her for going through this project.  The book-Julie is a lot more straight about it.  While she does feel a unity with Julia over having a shitty job in a government agency and cooking, the Julia Child imagined is more normal.  Like “Did she really write out these instructions for Bitch Rice?”  It’s long after the project is over that Julie realizes the impact Child left on her.  That sense of perspective is so much more real and genuine than the crying jags and pleas for forgiveness that movie-Julie gives.

Plus, Julie Powell is a hilarious nerd.  She has a crush on Jason Straithan, loves Buffy, and her friends have an annual True Romance viewing party.  I respect an ambitious  choice from a fellow geek.

The Count of Monte Cristo

Directed by Kevin Reynolds (2002) Starring: Jim Caviezel, Guy Pearce, Richard Harris, Dagmara Dominczyk

It’s weird to be coming off of this after the Harry Potter Hype from this week.  Edmund Dantes (Caviezel) in his cell in Chateau d’If just resembles Sirius Black too much, and Richard Harris as the Abbe Faria is, well, Dumbledore.  I just kept thinking, “It’s nice that Dumbledore still cares about education while in prison.”

Subtracting these thoughts, The Count of Monte Cristo is a pretty generic adaptation of the Dumas novel.  It suffers some pacing issues up to the grand revenge scheme, but there are some nice sword fighting scenes.  I irritably ignored the costuming inaccuracies in order to enjoy Pearce’s scenery-chewing.

One of the film’s choices that I can’t really put my finger on is that it seems really sanitized.  It’s a story about epic revenge, but it pushes the Christianity angle a little too hard for a little too long to then allow Dantes to get away scot free at the end.  The final scene is the carving on his cell wall: “God Will Give Me Justice.”  But God had no part in it, and Dantes doesn’t get much in terms of comeuppance.  While it’s nice to see a man get everything he had wanted and more, it seems like a weaker plot to then turn around and remember that he has a soul.

But why dig that deep?  Alexandre Dumas wrote adventure stories, sprawling novels and their sequels about honorable and hasty men with swords, thrown into circumstances that were often beyond their control.  I might as well remember this movie as such, where men with swords run around and give elegant speeches on honor.

Jud Suss

In my Jewish/German studies class this semester, part of the syllabus was watching the Nazi propaganda film Jud Suss (1940), which is  really complicated to discuss.  As it was explained in class, it was released in 1940 in order to gear up Nazi-occupied Europe for the Final Solution.  Over 20 million people saw it at the time and it was a hit worldwide, but in retrospect it is disgusting.

It was marketed as a historical melodrama, which was one of the main genres produced by the Nazi film industry.  As much as it’s remembered for propaganda like The Triumph of the Will, Nazi cinema was geared more toward producing Hollywood-style comedies, dramas, and musicals.  Only a small percentage of these products are considered to be anti-Semitic, however Jud Suss is evidence enough that the Final Solution was disseminated  across all media.

Loosely based off the historical figure Joseph Suss Oppenheimer and the 1925 novel, Jud Suss is about how a Jewish money lender becomes the head adviser to the Duke, corrupting him, his duchy, and German women.  While a Jud Suss existed in history, the plot has been twisted far away from fact in order to match up with Nazi ideology.  The opening titles begin with the phrase “Based off of historical documents,” as a way for the Nazis to present this to the public as evidence against Judaism.

All of these facts about the movie puts an important frame of mind for the modern viewer.  It was designed to create violence against Jews in Europe.  The actual plot is more about a historical melodrama, where a villain corrupts a state and a young girl, before being lawfully killed.  There’s a large focus on having the trial be systematic instead of revenge, but the final decree that the film ends on is for forcing the Jews out of their city.

I can’t say it’s not a well made movie though.  Most of the camera work and special effects reminded me of Citizen Kane with their ingenuity.  There are several crane shots that come to mind, just thinking over the technical feats.

It’s important to note that the director Veit Harlan was the only director in the Nazi film production to be charged with war crimes.  It’s also strange to note that Jud Suss wasn’t just a German hit, but a worldwide popular movie.

The Age of Innocence

Directed by Martin Scorsese (1993) Starring: Daniel Day-Lewis, Michelle Pfeiffer, Winona Ryder

To begin with, I complete understand the love that Daniel Day-Lewis gets now.  In The Age of Innocence, he plays Newland Archer who is engaged to May Welland (Ryder) when he meets her cousin, the Countess Ellen Olenska (Pfeiffer).  Because Olenska left her abusive husband, she is an outcast in New York society, but her out-of-step actions intrigue Archer to the point of infatuation.  Ryder seems tailor-made for wearing the costumes in these films, but I remain ambivalent about Pfeiffer’s casting.  She dons a reedy voice for her role as Olenska, but sticks out more from her cast mates by looking, well, too nineties.

Everything about this movie is pretty: pretty costumes, gorgeous set-design, cinematography that uses classic techniques, and best of all, food porn.  Every time there’s a party scene, the camera takes sweet time looking over the food that’s being served, including a long sweep over a table laden with desserts.  More importantly, New York City in the 1870s is beautifully reconstructed, especially for set design and costumes.  It gets high marks in all areas that count the most for costume-flicks.  The cinematography, while it lends great lighting to the food, also works its hands in the most important scenes, such as when Archer watches a boat pass a lighthouse or when he believes that everyone in Society knows about his affair, while a red light flashes on him, then off again.  Actually, all of the colors in the movies turn out fantastic, as if Technicolor has been brought in to make the roses a little more yellow and Olenska’s gown a little more scarlet.

 

I haven’t read the novel by Edith Warton, but with the addition of voice-over, I got the impression that what was being constructed was the novel for the screen, rather than a mere adaptation.  The film feels like an epic on that scale alone, while it becomes punctuated by parties, dinners, and nights at the opera.  The plot develops primarily through letters, which get spoken accounts by the writers, and conversations, which often happen off-screen, since not all of the conversations of-interest happen while Archer’s in the room.  It’s all social intrigue and he-said, she-saw and filial influence running amuck with these rich people, who come to define what the upper class is in Manhattan.

When it came to the denouement, it seemed pretty set in stone.  That’s how these Forbidden Love stories tend to go, although in this case, society had directly prevented Archer and Olenska from running off together, all through the influence of honor and family ties.  I can’t fault May from keeping Archer in New York– she was securing her happiness as much as he would have by traveling– but the epilogue scene in Paris, as an older Archer walks around the city with his adult son (played by Robert Sean Leonard, who just seems made for this sort of role in the early 90s) gave a necessary conclusion to this drama.

 

Visual Films: Kamikaze Girls

Ah!  I went a little bit overboard with this Visual Films post.  But who cares, it’s Kamikaze Girls. Who doesn’t like Kamikaze Girls? Answer: No one.

How to Lose Friends and Alienate People

Robert B. Weide (2008) Starring: Simon Pegg, Kirsten Dunst, Jeff Bridges, Megan Fox, Gillian Anderson

What had been rumored as a “meh” comedy proved it had earned its reputation, although admittedly, I did like Kirsten Dunst quite a bit (and the reference to The Apartment was a nice touch).

Sidney Young (Pegg) is an obnoxious journalist for his humor magazine.  When it catches the eye of media tycoon Clayton Harding (Bridges), Young is offered a job in New York, writing for a major periodical.  There, he tries to ingratiate himself to the next It-Girl Sophie Maes (Fox) while forming a reluctant friendship with fellow writer Alison Olsen (Dunst).

I feel like Pegg was given a role that was a lot like Tim on Spaced, except not nearly as likable.  Admittedly, Sidney has his moments usually when he’s bonding with Alison.  Dunst’s performance surprised me with how good it was, possibly because I had forgotten she was a good actress to begin with.  During the later half, when their settled into their roles as friends, the characters are sympathetic, funny, and interesting, but the weird quips and odd situations from the first half make it a little tiresome to get to that point.  However, when the plot shifts to an adaptation of  The Apartment between Sidney, Alison, and their boss Maddox it becomes a decent plot.

In general, movies and TV shows about the ugly sides of the entertainment industry are really boring.  The first time around, they’re revealing, but they are such a bore to slog through.  The material taken from Toby Young’s memoir are really frustrating, from the obnoxious mannerisms to the fact that celebrities and the cynics that cater to them are boring.  Luckily, the romantic plot tied it together for a satisfying end.