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.

]]> http://nerdvampire.wordpress.com/2013/05/16/the-great-gatsby/feed/ 0 nerdvampire Gatsby01 Gatsby02 http://nerdvampire.wordpress.com/2013/05/14/movies-watched-57-5132013/ http://nerdvampire.wordpress.com/2013/05/14/movies-watched-57-5132013/#comments Tue, 14 May 2013 21:12:17 +0000 Allison http://nerdvampire.wordpress.com/?p=2176 ]]> First Time:
The Great Gatsby

Badlands

Marvin’s Room

Rewatch:
Django Unchained

Scott Pilgrim

The Man in the Iron Mask

This Week: 6

Total: 133

Starring: Mike Birbiglia, Lauren Ambrose, Carol Kane, James Rebhorn

Based on Birbiglia’s off-broadway show, based on real life, Sleepwalk With Me is about the challenges of becoming a standup comedian, dead-end relationships, and REM Sleep Behavior Disorder.  I moved this up on my Netflix queue based on a recommendation from a friend who really enjoys Birbiglia’s stand up and it’s pretty good.  The narrative is amply available in just about every medium available, which makes it hard to really rate this as a movie.

Basically, I already know the story before I’ve seen the movie.  Just with a friend showing me some of Birbiglia’s stand-up clips on YouTube, I already knew a lot of the punchlines.  Honestly, they work better as stand-up.  That’s not to say that Sleepwalk With Me is bad.  It’s charming and funny, but it’s not the most ideal way of experiencing this story.

The Mummy (1932)

Detachment

Sleepwalk with Me

Dan in Real Life

Footlight Parade

Rewatch:

50/50

Soapdish

Roman Holiday

This Week: 9

Total: 127

Directed by David Lynch (1997)

Starring: Bill Pullman, Patricia Arquette, Balthazar Getty, Robert Blake

I’m playing personal goal catch-up right now with the Netflix Challenge, at least in terms of doing proper reviews for the movies.  We’ll see if I’ll ever catch up or ever follow through with my blogging goals (answer: probably not ever, but I’ll try harder).

Lost Highway is a bucket of weird, which I assume is intentional.  Even after watching most of David Lynch’s feature films and all of Twin Peaks, I still feel like a neophyte to what Lynch is attempting with his art.  I think Lost Highway is more structurally interesting than Blue Velvet, but it does feel like the sister film to Mulholland Drive.  Blue Velvet is more of a straightforward heroic narrative, whereas nothing makes a lot of sense in either Lost Highway or Mulholland Drive.  These films are more about identity and how sexuality dovetails into violence, which okay, is also what Blue Velvet is about.

Saxophonist Fred (Pullman) lives with his wife Renee (Arquette) in a modern house in Los Angeles.  One day, out of nowhere, things begin to get strange for the couple.  Fred hears the message “Dick Laurent is dead” on their house’s intercom and once a day he receives a videotape of what happens in his house.  He meets the Mystery Man (Blake) at a party, which begins a strange play on the Wrong Man theme.  Fred receives a final videotape that shows him killing his wife and he’s sent to jail.  However, he literally becomes the Wrong Man: he turns into Pete Dayton (Getty), a young mechanic who has a large gap of his memory missing.  At his job, he meets gun moll Alice (also played by Arquette), the paramour of Pete’s client Mr. Eddy.

Lost Highway has a skin-crawling eerie quality to it.  It comes from asking the audience to accept that they’re not following the story of two men who are also the same man, but it’s also the weird highway cut scenes and the slightly-off pop songs on the soundtrack.  It’s also the messenger figures who appear to Fred and Pete.  The Mystery Man tells them almost exactly what they should be aware of, but he tells it to them at a time in the narrative that makes it meaningless.  Similarly, Mr. Eddy seems to warn Pete not to get involved with Alice, even before they start their affair.  It doesn’t feel like the events of the movie could be avoided for the heroes, but there are plenty of warnings that make it seem like they could have that chance, if only they lived in a universe that made a little more sense.

The ending is incredibly interesting, although it makes the timeline a confused loop.  There’s a scene at the end outside of Fred’s house that reminds me of Meshes of the Afternoon, which is at once very cool, but also emphasizes that we’re in a stranger world in Lost Highway.  I like it a lot, I just also accept that I’m not ever going to understand it.

I would recommend reading “David Lynch Keeps His Head”, the essay on Lost Highway and its production by David Foster Wallace. And on a weird, personal note, this movie was released on my birthday in 1997.

]]> http://nerdvampire.wordpress.com/2013/05/03/netflix-challenge-lost-highway/feed/ 0 nerdvampire LostHighway02 LostHighway01 http://nerdvampire.wordpress.com/2013/04/30/blindspot-five-easy-pieces/ http://nerdvampire.wordpress.com/2013/04/30/blindspot-five-easy-pieces/#comments Tue, 30 Apr 2013 20:06:27 +0000 Allison http://nerdvampire.wordpress.com/?p=2130 ]]>

Directed by Bob Rafelson (1970)

Starring: Jack Nicholson, Karen Black, Susan Anspach

Blue-collar worker Bobby (Nicholson) goes bowling with his friend, gets his girlfriend pregnant, and avoids work by playing on a piano on a moving truck.  The oil-rig worker comes from a family of professional Classical musicians, who are holed up at the family compound in Washington in order to take care of their infirm father.  Bobby takes his girlfriend, Rayette (Black), along and causes trouble that relate to American individualism or aimlessness of masculinity, or something.

I think I’ve gotten burned out on New American cinema and their (typically male) wayward heroes.  Like, I get the feeling here that Bobby leaves behind his prodigious upbringing for a blue collar lifestyle as some way to find a male experience in America.  Bobby seems pretty happy with his life until family forces itself upon him – when Rayette tells him she’s pregnant and when he tracks down his sister at a local recording studio, informing him about how sick their father is.  As soon as these events occur, Bobby becomes aggressive and has no direction in life.

The reason the film seems so male-centric might come from the reliance on Bobby as the only defined character.  Everyone else is one dimensional, either as the pregnant, dim girlfriend, the rowdy best friend, the effeminate older brother, the spinster sister, the distant father…  It seems telling that Bobby’s father can’t even speak to him, due to his stroke, but also because it doesn’t matter in comparison to what Bobby has to tell him.  The closest the film gets to someone as well-developed as him is Catherine Van Ooost (Anspach), the fiancee of Bobby’s brother and a pianist in her own right.  She has a fling with Bobby and tells her life story, but refuses to leave the island with him, because she knows where she’s going in life.

The point, of course, is that Bobby has no idea where he’s going or where he wants to go, and I just don’t find that a compelling story in its context.

Echo Park

Quiet City

Living on Tokyo Time

Rewatch:
In the Mood for Love

Cold Weather

Breakfast at Tiffany’s

Take This Waltz

This Week: 8

Total:118

Valhalla Rising

Man on the Moon

Lost Highway

A Matador’s Mistress

How to Marry a Millionaire

Rewatch:

The Darjeeling Limited

Hot Fuzz

This Week: 7

Total: 110

Adventureland   (Hit the spot in the summer weather happening in North Carolina right now)

A Royal Affair  (Lovely, dramatic and sweeping)

Monsoon Wedding (Fun and light one second, fairly dark the other, but a really interesting picture of an Indian family during a week-long wedding ceremony)

Five Easy Pieces  (Blindspot pick for this month)

No       (Feels a bit like a political thriller for Mad Men fans)

Capote  (Not as good as I expected)

Rewatch:

Metropolitan

This Week: 7

Total:103

I’m honestly chomping at the bit for the next episode of Hannibal.  The first two episodes were easily the most engaging thing I’ve watched this week.

Pull My Daisy

Working Girl

American Graffiti

Border Radio

Rewatch:

The Manchurian Candidate

Dead Poets Society

This Week: 6

Total:96