H To The Izzo, This Movie Was a Scourge On the Estate of F. Scott Fizgeraldizzo

I've been terrible at keeping this updated, I'm so, so sorry. I blame The Woman.

So. The Great Gatsby. In 3D. (which i actually saw in 2D but fuck you and come fight me if you think 3D in any way improves the narrative structure of a film).

By Baz Lurchman.

Where... where the fuck do I start? The director? The editors? The casting director? The actors? The visual effects? The bizarre decision to make a 3D adaptation of what might possibly be the Great American Novel? Or is it all of the above?

Yes.

I went to see this with Acacia on a date night to prove I can still plan things, and the classless boors who sat in the back row and dropped a 40 oz malt liquor bottle and sent glass skittering everywhere halfway though did not detract from the flim. That was the level of my unenjoyment.

In any other hands, this might have been a good movie. Seriously. Gatsby is an incredibly relevant piece of literature (unfortunately), that details the depressing emptiness to decadence, mindless self-indulgence, alcoholism, materialism, reckless hedonism, manifest destiny capitalism, and so many other -ism's I can't and won't go into describing them all. The disturbing parallels between roaring 20's era Jazz Age financial industry excess and pretty much every boom and bust cycle for the past century are SO GODDAMN PRESCIENT THAT YOU'D THINK THE CLOWNS IN CONGRESS WOULD DO SOMETHING ABOUT IT. BUT THEY DON'T. WHAT A BUNCH OF CLOWNS.

But is any of that evident in this particular movie? Only superficially. Which is the exact wrong way to depict the catastrophic precursor culture to the great depression. But that's entirely the fault of Bahz Lurchmann.

To start off, the first 45 minutes of this movie made me angry. Not because of any plot that happened on the screen, but the absolutely confounding  editing process.

Now, I know WHY they did this to me, but my real question is also why? From the start of the picture (that actually stars Tobey Macguire and not Leonardo di Caprio like the previews would lead you to believe), 3D effects more gratuitous than the final cumshot to an hourlong culioneros skin flick featuring Nekane are rampant.

I need to watch this again, to count the amount of cuts there are during a conversation, or a long silence. My estimate is closer to every three seconds. Its so FUCKING fast, and frenetic, i just know that the movie aims to stay moving in order to keep its audience's attention. Which is insulting on an entirely other level.

In order to more properly justify the expense of releasing the movie in 3D, they camera motion had to be constant. Unending. The set design and backgrounds of a 1923 period piece don't grab your eye on their own, unless you are an aspergian faglord who loves intricate easily missed setpieces (me). Every time the camera slowly pans across an actor as they sit motionless in a chair reciting dialogue, the background moves, too. Which make the 3D effects pop, and allows people to go home and feed themselves after selling their souls and working for a corporate machine in creating this affront to the name of cinema.

It just... sucks. I'm tired of always being shown things and not told anything. We don't need this kind of indulgence if there's no superstructure. I'm all for lavish, beautiful and creative visual effects, but if you can't back it up with something that justifies its expense then you might as well blow your brains out on the wall and leave something much more 3D than anything i've ever seen onscreen.

Plot: surprisingly passable, even though it kind of reinforces the fact that Gatsby is a shitty movie but a great book. It just doesn't have the 1st, 2nd, 3rd act structure that movies need.

And then we come to this. The music.

I am completely and utterly stupid when it comes to music. I love weird shit. I will listen to the entire discography of the Beastie Boys (rip M.C.A. you were one of the best humans), hipster on to Run DMC, jam the fuck out to the Black Keys, get my estrogen on with Adele, Ellie Goulding, Kate Nash, get drunk as shit and listen to 105.1 K-Mozart, and pretty much sit through whatever you have playing. I LIKE music. One of my favorite things to do is search youtube for Taylor Swift music videos and laugh at them, and unironically enjoy N*Sync or Britney concerts.

I'm weird.

But this... this THING, executive produced by Shawn "Jay-Z" Carter is just weird and off-putting and poorly planned. Contemporary and modern musical pieces go back to back, dragging you back and forth between the bleeding THEN and the dead NOW. Boardwalk Empire, a similar era period-piece, stays rooted entirely in the past. All the music is from the 1910-20's, much like Deadwood, which adds to the enjoyment.

Gatsby? Well...

Look, I like Jay-Z. For all the faults that that might entail, you racist. But his music has no place here. The Jazz Age rendition of the Beyonce song later in the movie is entirely fitting, but PLAYING "H To The Izzo" WHILE THE CAMERA PANS OVER A CAR FULL OF PARTYING JAZZ AGE BLACK PEOPLE IS STUPID, PROBABLY RACIALLY INSENSITIVE SOMEHOW, AND JUST... FUCK. I got mad, Acacia got mad, for entirely different reasons that wound up overlapping and allowed us to make out in the car later.

The modern pieces wind up petering out about an hour into the film and it gives itself entirely over to Gershwin and his cadre of similarly sounding influences and generic movie score. Which is great, but it should have been like that from the beginning.

Overall... this is a masturbatory flick spawned from the loins of a shitty director, costume designers, interior decorators and people who are obsessed with Art Deco for the form over the function, the style over the substance.

I'm sorry, white people, but you blew it. there's too much here to ignore, and that you completely overlooked. Class struggle, racial inequalities, the impact of World War on the psyche of the returning veteran, the role of women in 20's society that at the same time (like now) that valued them purely for their sex appeal but at the same time judged them for being TOO goddamn sexy, the deja vu effect of teh Matrix when it changes something... EVERYTHING.

Baz Lurhmann is not the person to have given this to. I don't have a list of names on hand to suggest different directors, but Lurhmann is so obsessed with the superficial, what looks and feels good, i'm amazed that Aussie fuck hasn't checked into a rehab clinic for MDMA abuse.

THINK FOR GOD'S SAKE. Let your brain live. Read the book, read any book, watch Breaking Bad, The Wire, Deadwood, anything. I beg you. Please. there's nothing wrong with fun, but the fun had on this was son wrong it makes me wish i was born a hundred years earlier so i could beg Lenin to take an aspirin every day after dinner so he didn't die of a stroke and lead to the worst outcome of socialism that could possibly be imagined.

Two fuck's out of five, only because I love Art Deco so much and will use this moment to plug the novel "The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay", which is accessible to both die-hard comic fans and normies alike.