The Great Gatsby's Horrific Trailer
Ed Driscoll worries that he's being a curmudgeon compared to Emily's positive take on the new trailer. As for me, I think it is a tinsel-strewn cinematic abortion.
The Luhrmann pop-lit aesthetic had its moment. Romeo+Juliet hit right smack in the middle of the teenage years for a generation of Millennials, and it’s enjoyable and certainly unique (though I’ve never liked that play). Now, coming off a critical failure in his last movie, Luhrmann’s trying to recapture that old mid-Nineties DiCaprio magic. Gatsby has always been difficult to film – there have been six adaptations, and while I have not seen them all, none of them have been heralded as "good". But I’m willing to bet none of them are this obviously horrible.
I’ve never seen a trailer in which you can tell so many people are so clearly miscast within ten second increments. Carey Mulligan may be a decent actress, but her clumsy attempt at a Southern accent speaks to ruination of one of the true feminine characters in the entirety of American literature. Luhrmann’s rumored fave for the role, Blake Lively, couldn’t be worse, and that’s saying something. There is not a single actor in the thing who looks comfortable in the role, and the glitz and glam shrieks of this being an Occupy Wall Street take on American capitalism, which Gatsby never was. The CGI New York looks more like Tron. I can’t tell if I prefer the terribleness of Tobey Maguire’s non-acting to that bearded fellow’s overacting. And DiCaprio, poor DiCaprio, simmers with the confused emotion of a man who has just tasted plain yogurt when he thought it was vanilla. Here, toss some shirts.
Katherine Miller writes: “I really do think there's something to the cultural divide. As showcased in the trailer and the general aesthetic of the film, which of course is Luhrmann's usual aesthetic, it's like the gaudiest American thing possible. Which is showcased in parts of that book, but that's not what the actual story is about. It's like what a foreigner would note about an American.” She’s right. Perhaps this is the problem with getting an exaggerated music video director from Australia, once the toast of Hollywood hip (that scene with Radiohead!) but now fresh off a Nicole Kidman disaster and closing in on fifty, to handle a story that’s full of American apotheoses.
I’m not even a Fitzgerald fan, but Gatsby is as quintessentially American as you get: the architectural structure of a story, within which the reader is left to his or her own devices to take ideas. Instead Luhrmann is asking for your money to vomit sparkly things in your face and call it art.
I am sure when you first read it, you thought: "This Gatsby thing is pretty great, but what it really needs is dubstep and 3D." Am I right?
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May '11
Re: The Great Gatsby's Horrific Trailer
"As for me, I think it is a tinsel-strewn cinematic abortion."
Don't be so passive. Tell me what you really think.
Great line, Ben. I would pat myself on the back all night for that.
May '10
Re: The Great Gatsby's Horrific Trailer
If it is true to the book, it is suitable as a Lifetime Movie of the Week all about the platonic romantic yearnings of a wistful wannabe. I always found Gatsby to be a crashing bore. Phonies do that to me.
Apr '11
Re: The Great Gatsby's Horrific Trailer
As I said earlier - looks like crap, sounds like crap.
The international (for films and TV shows are made everywhere, generally to flee those unions and their high costs - unions which the Hollywood elite then support politically) cosmopolitan film industry workers are the definition of dissolute. They seldom can tell good from bad or god awful. All they can do is tell us plebs how stupid and backwards we are.
Maybe we should be grateful that the film wasn't given to Lars von Trier.
Aug '11
Re: The Great Gatsby's Horrific Trailer
For all its jazz-age glitz, Gatsby is really an interior novel. It's not about the fantastic parties; it's Gatsby standing alone on the pier. I'm just not sure how you can do a Moulin Rouge job on a novel like Gatsby.
Time and again I'm presented with evidence that non-Americans just don't get America. I suspect this is largely because the sort of media that gets exported overseas is the sort of stuff that translates easily -- high-action, low-dialogue, sexed-up nonsense. But you'd think Luhrmann woujld know better.
Jan '12
Re: The Great Gatsby's Horrific Trailer
"Carey Mulligan may be a decent actress, but her clumsy attempt at a Southern accent speaks to ruination of one of the true feminine characters in the entirety of American literature."
It also speaks to ruination of the concept of the versatile American actress. That or Luhrmann really likes the idea of an actress with a gratingly botched Southern accent, one or the other.
Aug '10
Re: The Great Gatsby's Horrific Trailer
This looks magnificent! To see Gatsby with the rough edged gangster lurking there somewhere, instead of the gauze filtered octogenarian film that featured Redford, is a joy.
The trailer captures the Gilded Age. I cannot wait for the film. It's not about Gatsby standing on the pier, it's about Gatsby having a library full of books he's never read -- except one. He had cut the pages of the Autobiography of Ben Franklin.
A Gatsby that doesn't acknowledge his gangster past isn't a representation of the novel, it's a representation of a bad 11th grade teacher presenting the novel. Who cares what color the light is? I care how Gatsby represents and depicts the American Dream.
Feb '12
Re: The Great Gatsby's Horrific Trailer
Moulin Rouge meets The Great Gatsby.. Gasp! Lurhamnn does not get subtlety he's far too heavy handed with loading cliche on cliche.
His trailer for Australia gave that away.. It's a wonder Kidman didn't tell him he was remaking certain scenes from Far and Away when she was with Tom.. and that flopped too.
The Great Gaspby.. and in 3D just so you get the Gasp!
He should never have moved on to the big production numbers but no one would be game to say.. so he just keeps doing them. Like Cameron.. 'I'm the king of the world' and he really believes it too. Gasp!
John Ford understood what films were about.. Story.
Aug '11
Re: The Great Gatsby's Horrific Trailer
Yes, it's about the American Dream. I see the American part, but the dream looks like a nightmare.
Maybe that's the point?
Jun '10
Re: The Great Gatsby's Horrific Trailer
No film can hope to capture the essence of the novel as well as The Great Gatsby for NES, playable online here.
Play as Nick and throw your hat at enemies including flappers dancing the Charleston and a floating eyeglasses boss, all in glorious 8-bit graphics and sound!
Apr '11
Re: The Great Gatsby's Horrific Trailer
Ugh. I'll just stick with the Nintendo version. At least the music's better.
Apr '11
Re: The Great Gatsby's Horrific Trailer
Doh! Missed it by that much.
Nov '11
Re: The Great Gatsby's Horrific Trailer
But it's so adorable! Like watching your kids play dress up.
May '11
Re: The Great Gatsby's Horrific Trailer
I don't understand the appeal of this story.
A bunch of unsympathetic depressing people cheating on each other and having bad things happen to them.
Re: The Great Gatsby's Horrific Trailer
I'm a fan of Baz Luhrmann -- and yes, that includes Moulin Rouge -- but as pointed out above, he is not one for subtlety. This movie would seem to require subtlety.
And 3D? The worst.
Dec '10
Re: The Great Gatsby's Horrific Trailer
Ben,
Will people use their I Pads and Nooks to read the Great Gatsby or will they watch a cheap streamed version of this awful mindlessly indulgent perversion.
Maybe what happened to Facebook is the greatest blessing in disguise. It isn't the technology that's at fault. It's how we use it. Or in the case of Facebook and this Gatsby ripoff how we abuse the technology.
Marshall McLuan said "The Medium is the Message" 45 years ago. I heard someone say recently "It's not the Medium it is the Message". Maybe we are ready to realize no matter what the medium is or becomes it will always be the message that counts.
Regards,
Jim
Feb '11
Re: The Great Gatsby's Horrific Trailer
"I can’t tell if I prefer the terribleness of Tobey Maguire’s non-acting to that bearded fellow’s overacting." I think the bearded fellow you are referring to is Amitabh Bachchan one of Bollywood's (i.e. India) most revered actors and father-in-law to the world renown beauty Aishwarya Rai. Can't say I'm surprised about the over acting. Hindi cinema is not know for it's subtlety.
Aug '10
Re: The Great Gatsby's Horrific Trailer
"Will they watch a cheap streamed version of this awful mindlessly indulgent perversion?"
So...you've seen the entire film James? Remarkable. Please tell me how awful and mindlessly indulgent this film is...
Especially considering that Gatsby is about mindlessly indulgent people living in a mindlessly indulgent age. Pray tell me how Gatsby got his wealth. Pray tell me of how dull Art Deco and Art Nouveau are from an aesthetic perspective.
Baz Luhrmann's imagery in this trailer is breathtaking. The fact that the TRAILER fails to capture what you view as the essence of Gatsby says nothing of the actual film.
I will say that from the design of the credits to the representations of the Roaring Twenties, this film visually captures everything I could hope for.
Apr '11
Re: The Great Gatsby's Horrific Trailer
The one appeal a new Gatsby film would have had for me is irrelevant now that HBO's Boardwalk Empire has already recreated the mood and aesthetic of that era so well (although, echoing the absurd hip-hop of that trailer, the show inexplicably uses some indie song for its title sequence).
I'm certainly not excited by DeCaprio in the title role. Seems they made the same mistake as they made 30 years ago casting Robert Redford. Jay Gatsby is supposed to have a mysterious edge, not just be a pretty boy. At least they skipped a generation and we didn't have to endure a Brad Pitt version circa 1995.
The whole story may be challenging to translate to the big screen, but the Gatsby character would be pure gold in the right hands. Any ideas on actors for the role?
Two contemporaries that jump to mind are Christian Bale or John Hamm, largely because both Bruce Wayne and Don Draper are versions of the same American archetype. Also, out of nowhere, the guy who played Jefferson in the John Adams series comes to mind.
Historically, Paul Newman or a young Brando could have been interesting Gatsbys.
Jan '11
Re: The Great Gatsby's Horrific Trailer
Remember Ken Owsley's thread about "frauds" a couple weeks ago? That's a theme that runs throughout Gatsby. For all the glamour and mystery, it's a fraud. Gatsby was just a guy from the sticks trying to fit in and be an eastern sophisticate ...
... but the interesting thing is, he was pulling it off.
Sure, it all unraveled in the end, but the genius of the novel (for me) is that it was undone by the most basic human emotions - love, trust, suspicion, jealousy ... in other words, by the forces that every human being has to deal with. Elites aren't any better at living life than the rest of us.
So, was Gatsby just an interloper into a real elite, or is the whole elite class a fraud in itself?
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So it strikes me ironic that Hollywood ... you know, the industry that specializes in manufacturing fantasies and fiction ... finds it so hard to deliver the power of the story. These guys can't tell their own story.
Jul '10
Re: The Great Gatsby's Horrific Trailer
I think you called it. A kind of, what if Frank Miller did Gatsby experience. To portray the story requires finesse, a captivating sense of spectacle and mystery in the first act, some subversive intelligence in the second act, and a balanced, somber view of the ultimate implosion as nemesis does her thing.
These guys are chewing the furniture like the director hasn't fed them in a month. It's like a demented Cliff Notes version.
Perhaps it is ust a placeholder until Tarantino does the Sun Also Rises. Or David Lynch does Huckleberry Finn. And who would ever forget Sam Raimi's the Crucible. Ridley Scott does Catcher in the Rye. Kevin Smith's the Autobiography of Frederick Douglas.
Edited on May 24, 2012 at 8:07am