The Great Gatsby (2012) Trailer: or You Complain, I'll Defend
I am sorry, but I cannot endure Baz’s films, they give me eye-cancer
Well anyway, I haven’t mentioned this yet but I actually find Luhrmann’s films to be more difficult to dismiss than initially perceived. I can’t stick my neck out and say he’s great or anything like that but when I actually watch what he’s doing, I don’t necessarily see anything wrong with it. In a weird sense he’s pretty honest about his technicolor glitz and glam. So whatev.
—PolarisDiB
He’s a gay Michael Bay.
Not that there’s anything wrong with that.
Puh-lease. Luhrmann may not be all that but he at least understands story structure and actual style. The ultimate issue with Bay is not that he wonks out the ’splosion-fest like a coke addicted 12 year old, but that his movies are just about as coherent as the jabbering you would expect from one. Luhrmann may be mad antic, but his movies are still coherent.
At least to me.
—PolarisDiB
It looks like someone finally caught on to the misspelling:
The misspelling of Ziegfeld is cause for celebration, because it is emblematic of almost everything
Luhrmann brings to the screen.
It’s always THIS close to being right, but is inevitably wrong because the presentation of spectacle
supplants the pursuit of authenticity.
It’s a special kind of laziness, akin to Hollywood stars not bothering to learn the correct pronunciation
of foreign filmmakers’ names or works, but getting up there on stage
at the Oscars anyway and reading the list of nominees.
Lurhmann strikes me as the type who eats whipped can straight from the can, if you know what I mean.
And if you have the attention span of a gnat, his pictures are ideally edited for you.
It makes perfect sense that Jay-Z and Kanye (each an ideal poster boy for Hip Hop Man-Child Syndrome)
are on the soundtrack. What’s the Jazz Age without auto tune?
Or more to the point, this is a movie for people who can’t spell. Or read.
So of COURSE there is a…what’s the word I’m looking for…“modern” soundtrack.
It’s a CG sign, which makes it interesting (well, to me thinking through the workflow), or at least explains the ease to which that typo could have occurred. I was working with a CG artist the other day spelled it ‘cenama.’ Many of the CG artists out there are making it in India, or China, or elsewhere. It’s actually sort of surprising issues like this happen as rarely as they do — one time I was making a CG shield with a nation’s flag and mixed up the positions of the quad-colors, and it was only caught a couple hours before we were going to send the final product out (sooooo, it took the next couple hours to fix, export, and insert over the previous comp’ed scene). The more professional and big budget the house, the more likely someone’s going to catch.
What I mean by interesting though is the idea that, you know, sometimes marquee’s in real life are misspelled, but now that we live in an age of CG, it would be unwise to purposefully design such imperfectness into a movie because it would reflect on the movie itself and not an attempt at verisimilitude.
That said I seriously doubt this was intentional, and if it were it would not be for verisimilitude but to make it more ‘fantasy’ or avoid IP or something. Anyway I wonder how many eyes this went through before it took the million-eyed Internet audience to catch it.
Since it’s CG, it’ll likely be fixed before the movie shows in theatres. Isn’t too hard to replace.
—PolarisDiB
Lemonglow, Trailers use music not in the films all of the time. Luhrmann did not cut this trailer. And based on what I’ve read he is very concerned at doing the 20s right. I’d be shocked if there is modern music in the actual film.
And the issue of the sign is such nitpicking. Of course they should (and will) change it for the final film. But interpreting this as some sort of Luhrmannian affront to truth, art, and the 1920s seems like a bit of an overreaction.
Well here’s the thing.
First of all, Baz Luhrmann has already shown a deep affinity for anachronism especially in the music he chooses for his movies. So whereas The Arcade Fire was not a part of Where the Wild Things Are, Spike Jonze still filled his adaptation with Karen O… to mix references.
Secondly, yeah, Baz Luhrmann is not responsible for the cut of the trailer but I genuinely do not know how many eyes went over that shot before it ended up there, it sort of feels like me like the director’s job with CG shots are to ‘okay’ them. So basically Luhrmann didn’t catch a typo. Not the end of the world, mistakes happen, even Kubrick the perfectionist has his gaffes list, but still, it’s sort of funny to point out. I don’t think anyone is calling it an affront to truth, they’re just rolling their eyes.
—PolarisDiB
But a typo made by someone deemed a hack is going to get a lot more attention then a typo made by someone respected. I guess that’s just to be expected.
Yes, Luhrmann has anachronistic music in another film (films?) of his, but that’s the whole idea around Moulin Rouge. Gatsby is an entirely different animal. I think the people who cut the trailer were trying to recall Moulin Rouge, but I do not expect the film to be in this manner. Or I’ll look like a dumbass in six months and I give each of you permission to throw three tomatoes at me.
You are correct, people are going to see that mistake as representative of Luhrmann’s, well, ‘illiteracy’ as opposed to it just being a mistake, and not like one where Luhrmann is in the 3D program modelling a CG sign and puts in the typo himself.
After all, if a politician’s cabinet makes a mistake, it’s reflective of his or her attempt to destroy the very foundations of our nation, not, you know, a human making an mistake. Thus the lives of public peoples.
—PolarisDiB
Oh how much more one little typo can mean!
@Polaris — “I don’t think anyone is calling it an affront to truth, they’re just rolling their eyes.”
I’ve been rolling my eyes since DiCaprio was announced as Gatsby. FWIW, I’m not as down on Luhrmann as a lot of others are. I liked MOULIN ROUGE! a great deal. I liked the wild visual excess, which was brought off with a skill and intelligence that others like Rob Marshall and Zack Snyder can only try to imitate, and was impressed by the way Luhrmann was able to breathe real life and emotion into the familiar storyline. I managed to see his LA BOHEME on Broadway, too, and found it similarly impressive. I saw bits of AUSTRALIA on cable and was not moved to see more.
But this GATSBY, well. I might go. I might not. DiCaprio, man. Was Matt Damon not available, or interested?
Well I mean, when the movie first came out it sounded like a joke.
“Hey dude, did you hear they are adapting The Great Gatsby in 3D starring LEONARDO DICAPRIO and directed by BAZ LUHRMANN?”
“Pfft, I think that would actually be a crazy movie if it was actually happening! Hahaha, imagine what it’d be like!”
“You don’t, because I’m not joking.”
“Oh…”
But as I said, I tend to find once actually watching Luhrmann’s movies that they are not so easily dismissed. Other people can get all up on that train but I like what he does.
—PolarisDiB
@Polaris – Speaking of impressions of movies that aren’t out yet, what do you, an admitted Aranofsky fan, think of the Noah project? Russell Crowe getting on a giant boat with all those animals? I feel like this is a train wreck about to happen, and it’s really difficult to take your eyes off a train wreck, so I’ll undoubtedly be seeing it when it comes to my town.
Haven’t heard of it, let me research. Gut reaction on your statement here, not a fan of Crowe but he can manage Noah, gonna look beautiful, and is probably very much not going to be like Sunday school renditions of that story.
—DiB
IMDB lists it as being scheduled for 2014, so this movie may not actually happen anyway (or if it does happen, I wouldn’t be surprised if it gets truncated a la The Fountain). Jennifer Connelly is attached, which makes me happy.
From the studio press release:
“NOAH is a close adaptation of the Biblical story of Noah’s Ark. In a world ravaged by human sin, Noah is given a divine mission: to build an Ark to save creation from the coming flood. The screenplay was written by Aronofsky and Ari Handel and revised by Academy Award®-nominated screenwriter John Logan (GLADIATOR, HUGO).”
I started writing this big long entire thing that, well, went off in the wrong direction and could cause a problematic tangent in this thread, but the short of it is that I read the Noah’s Ark story in the Bible and if the adaptation is so ‘close’, it would take like, fifteen minutes because relatively little actually happens (most of the page space is devoted to listing the dimensions of the boat and animals on board, and most of the Biblical stories out there don’t take more than a handful of pages).
Moving on from that point, I would like to see a lot of the post-ark Noah stories told. The drunken and lascivious Old Testament scary women-are-property Noah stories. I think Aronofsky could handle that shit well.
—PolarisDiB
Yeah, I agree about the Biblical narrative stuff. It’s too sparse to comprise an entire film. But if Aranofsky includes some of Noah’s post-ark adventures, it could be interesting.
Drew, most of the press I have seen in the states and across the pond would suggest that the hip hop music for the trailer, or something equally embarrassing, will be part of the soundtrack.
Lurhmann was playing Jay-Z on the set during rehearsal and while shooting, according to two actors,
which is kind of tragic in many ways, but it does hint that he had such stuff in mind for a soundtrack.
That trailer is made up of CGI scenes shot for the movie, unless I’m mistaken.
So responsibility falls on the director’s shoulders.
Considering the budget and resources available to the filmmakers,
I’m not sure what kind of pretzel we must create in order to excuse the error.
But I agree with some others here: the spelling mistake is a minor thing.
Especially compared to the numerous errors in aesthetic judgment.
I like what Stuart Heritage says in the Guardian:
“So maybe we were wrong to doubt Luhrmann’s choice.
Maybe The Great Gatsby will be the film that convinces us of 3D’s worth as a medium.
Spielberg couldn’t do it. Scorsese couldn’t do it.
But they never had a scene about Leonardo DiCaprio hurling a pink shirt around on a mezzanine, did they?”
On the negativity regarding the music:
As a regular classical music concertgoer, I have thought I’m one relatively young but conservative listener yet I’m baffled that people actually got worked up because a director chose a piece of rap music for a 20s period film, why shouldn’t he? So many on Imdb cried out “why not a jazz piece?” and I thought “wow, that’s so fitting and so smart, why didn’t he do just that ;)”
Of course Jay-Z is not some artist whose record I would buy but i feel there is something tiring about a 1000th record of Beethoven’s Fifth too and yes, another all-Chopin program of my beloved pianist.
I’ll not criticize the picture until I can see it. If it is just passably entertaining, it will be better than the Robert Redford-Mia Farrow snooze fest that was the original film.
THE GREAT GATSBY has been filmed now five times…including once for TV.
It’s not possible to capture this character (it certainly has not been yet)…there’s been the seemingly ideally cast but somehow dull (Warner Baxter), the absurdly cast and VERY dull (Alan Ladd), the completely unmysterious and nearly invisible (Robert Redford) and then Toby Stephens on TV…didn’t see.
Will the Lurhmann/DiCaprio version work? Unlikely…this is such an unfilmable state of mind type book that so far has translated to the screen with many THUDS! Remains to be seen…I AM curious to see why 3D was thought necessary.
the characters will always be reduced when embodied in familiar to us human forms, they simply transcend too much to be thus captured….
nicky greenberg came closer than all screen efforts in her extraordinary lovingly wrought graphic novel casting Gatsby as a seahorse and Daisy as a dandelion creature:):)
yeah…what Meg said
The trailer makes The Great Gatsby look like Moulin Rouge on Broadway. Virtually the same camera shots, just replace Nicole Kidman and Ewan McGregor with Leo and Carey Mulligan.
But as I said, I tend to find once actually watching Luhrmann’s movies that they are not so easily dismissed. Other people can get all up on that train but I like what he does.
Actually, they are relatively easily dismissed. Luhrmann likes pyrotechnics. His best movie remains Strictly Ballroom, everything after that has been nothing more than a fireworks show.
I always find something other than the pyrotechnics to impress me, and frankly in terms of pyrotechnics Moulin Rouge is very, VERY impressive visually. I don’t think any other movie looks quite like it before or since.
—PolarisDiB
^ That still makes me think of Fantasia.
I am not a fan of Luhrmann. A lot of the shots in the trailer remind me of CGI/3D sequences out of Hugo. The set pieces look busy as usual, but there is an artificial quality that pulls me away.
Meg ͏
Leo looks coarse