365 Film Challenge - The Great Gatsby

- so i almost didn’t even see this in theaters based on the poor reviews it was seeing. but i’m kind of glad i did. AND NOT BECAUSE THE FILM WAS GREAT. because it was just a hair under ok. there were definitely two distinctly different halves: the first half with quick edits, really bad ADR (or editing, whichever came second…), and shutter speed that was unsettlingly high, but faith in regards to the trailer and readied you for the rest of the movie to be like that. and then the rest totally wasn’t. the second half featured great acting from leo, meh acting from everybody else, and pretty much NOTHING to really hold your attention. the music all fell flat, the VFX started to be EVERY shot (and really bad…) and some piss poor introspection sequences from Maguire’s Nick Carroway with really silly typography. the first half of the film, however, does present some really interesting discussion fodder about the role of celebrity, with Jay Gatsby as an example. i think that’s a really great link between the setting of the film and pop culture now. another thing, however, that i REALLY HATED was Luhrmann just beating and beating the goddamn green light over my head the ENTIRE FREAKING MOVIE. it totally could’ve been featured like twice and that would’ve been enough, everyone would’ve gotten it because everyone’s read the book who’s old enough to comprehend it and it would’ve been a very nice homage to the source material. BUT INSTEAD we get swells of music fading in and out with it every time we see it, it starts the film, it ends the film, Carroway looks at it, Daisy talks about it, Gatsby stares and reaches out for it, YEAH IT’S AN INSANELY BRIGHT GREEN LIGHT AND IT’S A SYMBOL. YEAH. but i digress… i would definitely say not worth paying $10 to see, and kind of OK at capturing the atmosphere of the novel. also: let’s all stop supporting sloppy VFX, yeah?

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