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I will be seeing it tonight. I'm reserving judgement until after I watch it. I love Leo DiCaprio, so for him alone I'd watch it. I'm not thrilled however to hear it's 2.5 hours long. I should have done my homework on that.
I just saw it after waiting several months for it to come out.
I was sorely disappointed.
The movie is so boring in alot of places. It could have been done in 1.5 hours instead of 2.5, and would have been better. The Gatsby parties were fabulous, but other than that, no special scenery at all. Could be a stageplay with no problem. You don't even get excited by seeing Leo make love to Daisy, ever. The music was ok, didn't bother me at all, but the boring story did.
The boring story. I only read the book once years and years ago and didn't understand why it was a Great American Novel. So I'll probably wait for cable just to watch Dicaprio.
I'm glad to see positive reviews.
I really enjoyed it! I wasn't crazy about the modern music either. I found it too distracting. Visually I thought it was beautiful. The acting was amazing, IMO. The real stand-out for me was Joel Edgerton, who plays Tom Buchanan. I had never heard of him before, but his performance blew me away. I give it 3.5 out of 4 stars.
I was quite excited about it until I saw the preview. I love Carey Mulligan and Di Caprio but the music will really put me off. What the hell was wrong with fabulous Jazz music?
The rap music did throw me off just a bit. I was not expecting it (didn't expect it in Django either, but even less so for this movie). It didn't ruin the movie for me. I thought the film was okay. The visuals were stimulating.
The funny thing about 1920s jazz, especially hot jazz, is that many people probably felt the same way about it then that many people feel about hip hop today.
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Jazz was different because it broke the rules -- musical and social. It featured improvisation over traditional structure, performer over composer, and black American experience over conventional white sensibilities. Undercurrents of racism bore strongly upon the opposition to jazz, which was seen as barbaric and immoral. Before jazz emerged, many music educators -- worried that jazz would destroy young people's interest in classical music -- tried to convince the public that European classical music was the only "good music."
If the rap music is to evoke the sense of decadence and modernism associated with the Jazz age why not simply transfer the whole film to a modern bling-bling setting?
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Originally Posted by Mooseketeer
Art Deco setting and costumes with rap ? I think not.
Well, it looks like the director succeeded in breaking the rules (or at least your rules). You still reserve the right not to like it, however.
The music really didn't throw me off that much. Though, I do feel like the scene of Nick and Tom in the hotel room with Myrtle and the rest of the bunch felt a bit too contemporary club-like.
The music really didn't throw me off that much. Though, I do feel like the scene of Nick and Tom in the hotel room with Myrtle and the rest of the bunch felt a bit too contemporary club-like.
It didn't throw me off that much. It was more like, "Oh, I wasn't expecting that." But the first rap song they played was "No Church in the Wild," which is kind of fitting for the movie (and novel) if you really think about it.
I imagine if a Gatbsy film had been made shortly after the novel's release (which seems common in today's era) replete with hot jazz and black faces playing it, it would have been perceived as "vulgar," "crass," etc.
I know some people don't really appreciate the use of hip hop in the movie because they see an incongruency. "Why not just make a modern movie if you're going to use modern music? This is a classic!" But why not use it? Some may see it as a cheap tactic to draw in a younger audience, but what's wrong with that? It's just a movie. If you want complete fidelity to the novel, then just re-read the book, and then you can imagine everything in your head to your precise liking. If anything, the movie made me come out of the theater wanting to read the book again.
It's also interesting that people don't want this "classic" ruined by hip hop music when the novel itself was hardly a commercial success for Fitzgerald (who went to his grave considering himself an utter failure).
“We wanted a blend, a weave,” explains Monsted. “Baz and I call it the ‘sliding doors’ between music that is very true to the period of the movie’s setting in 1922 and the music of today. When F. Scott Fitzgerald evoked the popular music of his period, he was criticized because jazz was ephemeral, of the moment. We revere that music now because 80 years have passed. We regard it as a serious art form unto itself. For Fitzgerald, it was ‘the racy, adventurous feel of that music’ in that time.”
I think that this movie was made for young people, and was supposed to appeal to folks that are living and growing up in the current time period. After all, when Fitzgerald wrote the story, he was young! It was the 1920′s! The Great Gatsby novel was not a “period piece.” He wrote this as a commentary about himself those he spent time with, in the period he was living in. This is what Baz was trying to get across. He was trying to create an adaptation of the film that really drew in the young crowd, made them immersed, and really feel like they were at Gatsby’s parties, and truly feel how over the top and beyond-ridiculous they were. If you played a ton of jazz music, would a 17, 18, or 20 year old (like me) really feel like they could be there? No!
I liked the film. I hadn't read the novel, nor had I looked up the plot online, so I just went with what was in the trailer, and I was totally wrong. The movie was more sad. I thought it was going to be some type of time-traveling thriller (that may sound super dumb, but I thought that because of the line about not being able to go back to the past, and Gatsby looking totally confidant and saying that you could, and the thriller being the flash of Gatsby on the boat in the storm, and the narrator talking about how his family had died at sea) - instead the movie was wild excess and you could see the fall coming. I wouldn't go buy the film, and I probably wouldn't rent it, but when it's on TV in the future, I'd probably watch it again. I love DiCaprio.
As for the music, I thought it was funny. There were quite a few bits where I laughed out loud, but I was one of the only ones laughing. Perhaps it was an age thing, since it seemed like an older crowd that evening (it was a Sunday).
I don't know why people keep referring to the soundtrack as "hip hop" and "rap". As they say in the article, it's a fusion...a hybrid. Personally, I liked the music..and I'm no kid. LOL
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