Not so great Gatsby
The Great Gatsby may have cost the Australian taxpayer a reported $85m to create an homage to mid-20th century American society, but at least we can take pride that we’ve helped bring the world one of the most well crafted paragraphs in a film review of all time.
“Having watched this fantastically unthinking and heavy-handed adaptation I feel the only way to make it less subtle would be to let Michael Bay direct it. As it is, the task has fallen to Baz Luhrmann, the director of Moulin Rouge! and Australia, a man who can’t see a nuance without calling security for it to be thrown off his set.”
The problem with Baz Luhrmann films is that they all look like Baz Luhrmann films.
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Note to Guardian. Rather than “subtlely” in the subheading, try “subtlety” .
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Meh – Baz has carved a niche for himself. He’s what I’d call a true auteur in the manner of Hitchcock in the sense that he’s created such a recognisable visual style that you can spot it at 100 paces. Amidst the dross of same-same bollocks that gets churned out by Hollywood, that’s something to be proud of. If people don’t like him, that’s their prerogative but he’s done bloody well for himself.
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Honey’s got a point…
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And people are still paying him millions of dollars to make films and giving him hundreds of millions in budget to spend, so he’s doing something right
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Loved Romeo & Juliet. Since then, it’s been lousy acting and heavy-handed post production visuals, both of which are so distracting I’ve not been able to immerse myself in the storyline. Interested to see how Gatsby has turned out.
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Sadly Mumbrella seems to delight in the negative-a pastime which seems to be practised by many people in this country who have never got off their arses and taken a risk.Let alone done anything more creative than critique the work of others.
Pity more people didn’t have the vision,passion and sheer chutzpah of Luhrman.
By the way Lucio
,if you want a storyline stick to Hangover 3.
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Funnily enough, Roo Boy, I was thinking about this very issue this morning as I listened to interviews with actors and stars who were at the premiere in Cannes overnight.
They were absolutely unreserved in their praise. Obsequiously so. Now they may have been sincere, but I suspect it’s more likely that because they are part of the Hollywood system they would never feel free to talk about a film’s flaws.
That’s why the argument that people who’ve never done something/ made something shouldn’t be entitled to have a view is somewhat lazy and flawed.
On the whole, I’d rather read the views of a reviewer who owes nothing more to the audience than to tell it like they see it, than from a member of the club.
Cheers,
Tim – Mumbrella
Baz may well have made a dazzling film. He may well have made a profitable one. He may even have made an impressive one. But he has not made The Great Gatsby. His flamboyant vulgarity is arresting, but it tears the spider web of the source material to pieces. Baz is a huckster, a carnival barker and a skilled craftsman who believes that massive budgets and big-top eye candy can conquer multiplexes and turn them into magnets. His film is causing comment. It is dividing audiences and critics. It is news worthy. It is an event. It may even make money. Its budget is a mystery; anything from $100m to $127m to $180m; marketing costs will inflate it. So? It’s only money! Is there a rich uncle in the closet? Whatever; Baz has arrived. He will go down in cinematic history as the Aussie who killed new millennium Hollywood with the kind of movie that 30s Hollywood used to make. In the eyes of the literary world he has also killed The Great Gatsby. But lost somewhere in the spin is one telling mistake: He should have called his movie by its true name: The Great Baz. Then he wouldn’t have needed to kill anything. Gold-plated vulgarity is hard to ignore.
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The Great Gatsby is a mediocre novel – perhaps the most overrated book in history – I am almost certain Baz’s film will be a far more satisfying experience.
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so what if his films are a mainly a visual spectacle … that’s still art and its still entertainment. That’s what the big screen is for. all those deep thinking spinach films can be watched at home on a DVD.
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@JimP, You don’t talk for the ‘literary world’ although that is beside the point as Baz Luhrman has not hunted down every copy of the Great Gatsby and destroyed them by making this film.
The book has not been, and cannot be, killed by a movie adaptation regardless of how it turned out.
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Tim’s point is that the Australian taxpayer tipped $85 million into the movie. ‘Heavy-handed’ is a term you could also use for other government ‘investments’ over the last five years.
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When a film screens at Cannes, they are not an intentionally polite audience. If they are disgusted with something, think a film is ridiculous, they will definitely show this and say something. Many people have walked out of screenings over the years.
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No worriesI think most of the millions have been made back already chaps.
Mark Kermode who’s opinion I respect . . well he loved it and it is his favourite book apparently, but he was prepared to hate it and was Baz-bashing for weeks before he actually saw it. He also said he would watch it again. Blimey! He felt Baz did actually engage with the book’s theme in an “Intoxicated Trans Siberian Railway” kind of a way.
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The question is if we will see that money returned with interest to the taxpayer, or will it all be swallowed up in the traditional movie number shuffle, where no film ever makes profit and therefore doesn’t have to pay money back. The guy who played Darth Vader (not his voice) in ROTJ is still waiting on residuals as Lucasfilm can show that it never made a profit!
http://www.techdirt.com/articl.....able.shtml
As an Aussie, I want return on that investment. I hope the govt enforces it, instead of just basking in playing ‘movie producer’, which isn’t their job…thank god! $85M could be very helpful to those of us living below the poverty line.
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FYI – BazMark created hundreds of jobs for the initial filming and also for the second re-do of this film(For those that don’t know, the initial shots weren’t the best so they had to do a complete re-take with new sets).
Construction workers (tradies), designers, animators, actors, extras, hospitality caterers, hotels and their employees, car hire companies, make-up artists etc. were all employed in order to produce this film, apart from the obvious stars, which in turn indirectly funded our economy.
I have not yet seen the film, but the fact that films with these big budgets are slowly starting to be produced here (even if it’s just post-production), is something beneficial to our country.
We should be giving them more tax incentives in order to create much needed jobs in the entertainment industry.
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Baz is a creative genius who manages to give such authentic detail to a story and yet deliver it in a most contemporary, refreshing way.
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