no
Do you realize Francis Ford Coppola wrote the screeplay? Wouldn’t that be a little odd for her to remake a film her father was involved with?
Baz Luhrman is adapting it for his next movie apparently. Can’t say that I care for The Great Gatsby. I’d go as far as saying that I loathed it when I read it. Maybe I’ll revisit it years from now and see it in another light.
hmm all i could think of when i watched the one with robert redford was sofia coppola.
Love the book. I always imagined Redford in the part as well as Mia Farrow as Daisy. But when I finally saw the movie, I thought she was quite poor in it. The whole movie, I recall, was bad. But I’d love to see a good version done. Always loved the flighty party-goers of RULES OF THE GAME in relation to the characters in GATSBY.
No. You can’t make narcissism even more narcisstic.
Great novel and it’s confirmed that Luhrman would re-make The Great Gatsby (probably on screen in 2012), with Leo DiCaprio (Gatsby), Carey Mulligan (Daisy), & Tobey Maguire (Carraway). Can’t wait!
Hell no, I don’t want Luhrmann anywhere near The Great Gatsby… not after Moulin Rouge…
Anyone else think Bunuel or Fellini would have done a good Gatsby?
Yes. Luhrmann is an awful director and awful choice for GG – even though I despise the book. Tobey Maguire is also horrible and unintentionally creepy all the time.
Sofia Coppola excels in movies about the idle rich and I don’t mean that in a bad way, I like everything she’s done.
Please. The novel itself is lame enough, a fucking bogus Rimjob on the Very Rich. I can’t imagine sitting through another goddamn version of this stupid sentimental shite book again.
^ I wouldn’t say it’s “lame” and “shite” (seriously, there are far worse American books) but Fitzgerald has certainly written better stuff.
On the other hand, yeah, let Sofia Coppola do a remake. That’ll ensure that I never have to sit through another film of this bullshit story.
I’d rather see Whit Stillman take his shot at it.
Don’t give Stillman any ideas, please. His absence from moviemaking has been one of the few bright spots of recent years.
^ ^ WORD.
He’s better than both Luhrmann and Coppola though, that’s for sure.
Any kid with ADD and a video camera could make better films than Luhrmann. Strictly Ballroom excepted.
Apparently he might be doing it in 3D…
No, I’m not kidding.
Entourage watchers know that the show flirted with the idea of Vince starring in a Scorsese-helmed remake. Although his character apparently did make the movie, precious little screen-time was devoted to showing the final cut (unlike Billy Walsh’s Medellin, which we saw too much of).
I preferred MOULIN ROUGE to the unspeakable METROPOLITAN, myself, but that’s hardly surprising.
Not me, Roscoe. Moulin Rouge was preferable, though, to the mindlessly hyperkinetic R&J.
well it should never be seen as just the surface story – Gatsby’s careful construct, the idealising of Daisy who is not ideal and quite undeserving of it, his invention for his own need, is only a metaphor for the idealizing of the shallowness of the American dream’s underpinnings (money and pleasure) during the time of great disillusionment after WW1. The sociology of money moral decay cynicism, how money anaesethises (sp?) people to the suffering of others, Gatsy has a loving sentimental heart true, and it ultimately gets dashed against the rocks of life. It’s like I was saying on the other thread re breaking the waves, how the world rolls on regardless of sacrifice, but human beings will never up the pursuit of the dream, it happens every time “boy meets girl” and new hope for perfection and idealism arises. All there is to be said about Fitzgerald’s novel has been said by more erudite souls than I :) and of course you can get impatient with Gatsby especially through the lens of the more jaded evolved “eye” of now, but there is so much more to it than does meet the eye and its themes are timeless.
I wish they would leave it the fuck alone, it can’t be conveyed properly on screen (Like Catcher). But of course, they won’t. Sofia could probably do ok with it, Luhman will just turn it into something completely other than…
“but that’s hardly surprising.”
Hardly surprising you prefer kitsch musicals like Moulin Rouge and Sweeney Todd. Please, don’t fucking utter the “opinions differ” thing.
Not just the surface story I’m seeing, Meg. What really finally chokes me about the whole thing is Fitzgerald’s impression that he is delivering some terribly important notion about AMERICA and THE AMERICAN DREAM in that squalid little story of the Assholishness Of The Very Rich, when all he’s doing is delivering the same tired cliches about the shallowness etc. And the shameless romanticizing of Gatsby’s pursuit of the miserable c*nt Daisy is ridiculous — boats borne ceaselessly into the past my ass.
Whatever. I sat through the Elevator Repair Service’s acclaimed theatre piece based on this novel, which involves a reading of the entire novel (it takes 7 godforsaken hours) hoping that I’d finally see what the big fucking deal is, and it didn’t happen.
Roscoe it was written in the 20’s, it is impossible for us to imagine the world within which and about which he was writing, before the cliche my dear, before the cliche please consider the significance of that ..Fitzgerald’s prescience was extraordinary to depict all he did in Gatsby, actually in the 20’s. .it is hard for the “now” reader to appreciate the nuances and layers of the narrative, rememeber even in the 60’s vice had to be punished to get past the censors so things like the Buchanans being able to blithely swan off unscathed was really daring in a novel in the 20’s …the excess of alcohol is another we would not give a second thought to today, the adulturous affairs as well.. .the context and content of Gatsby is most difficult to grasp in the present. Gatsby is written in a style that advanced the form of the american novel for all who came after and the book is a masterpiece of its time, many prefer others over it in Fitzgerald’s body of work but Gatsby has endured as a shining beacon of literary advancement and social commentary for unique and unquestionably sound reasons.
I don’t think the “context” of the novel is quite as difficult to grasp as all that, Meg. Before the cliche, “my dear” or after the cliche, the book remains sentimental tripe about Carraway’s pathetic hero worship of the non-hero Gatsby and his pathetic pursuit of the unspeakable Daisy Buchanan, all wrapped up in a self-importance and sugary romanticism that have always made me gag. Fitzgerald seems to see some profound statement or other is being made in the slimy story of these vile people and it just collapses in a batch of nonsense about boats and green lights and the past, that folks have spent nearly a century lapping up. The book is a highbrow Harlequin romance.
May have been a terrible shock to those terribly delicately sheltered 1920s readers (I doubt it, frankly) but I’ve never been able to take it with anything but a shrug or a smirk.
So . . . you don’t believe in the green light then, Roscoe?
well you accuse him of delivering the tired old cliches about the demise of the American dream, which at the time of delivery did not exist, he was pre-cliche…so I struggle with that a bit
Carraway’s pathetic hero worship of the non-hero Gatsby and his pathetic pursuit of the unspeakable Daisy Buchanan
well, that’s how people are…this is kind of linked to my thread the other day about dismissing films because I don’t like the characters and behaviours of the characters (my example was A Heart in Winter) causing me to angrily dismiss the whole film and miss its merit. And yes I do think the many nuances of context are largely lost on a modern audience in something like Gatsby. unless one was to take the time to undertake a focused exploration/study of them.
Whoah, so much bitching about Fitzgerald, I guess I am right about Americans liking shitty authors like McCarthy!
Sunny!
anyone else agree.