By the tittle of the post you can maaaaaybe figure out that I absolutely loved...
L.O.V.E.D!
Gatsby.
I was thinking of adding the "spoilers included" under-text but really there are none and also, if there were...the book has been out for over 50 years so...
Back to the Gats.
I'm a sucker for anything Baz Lurhman. Except Australia. Throw me some Leo Dicaprio into the picture and I will be there. 3D and all.
First things first.
This weekend (and the one before and the one before that) was particularly mellow. Rainy season and Heinz's crazy work schedule have limited our weekend adventures...ok..."adventures". I also teach two yoga classes, one on saturday and one on sunday that leaves us little time to plan activities that involve driving for a long time.
So on sunday we woke up, went to church, yoga and then lunch.
Heinz bought the tickets for the movie. It was at 4:00 pm. We try to avoid the crowds so this time seemed well, less likely to be crowded. We were He was wrong.
He has these special seats that he picks because he is a man of routine. These seats give him comfort, it took him a while to find just the right seats and then he found them and has never let them go.
That was until yesterday when apparently everyone decided to go to the movies. I got some sweet popcorn to get my movie-mode on and I know my crunchy chewing and our neighbor's continuous coughing probably ruined the best-seats experience for my hubby.
Other than that the movie was breathtaking.
It's hard risky to turn a classic book into a movie. You have high expectations from everyone.
I don't know where I stand on expectations, really. It's hard enough when you disappoint yourself to even consider how bad it feels when disappointing others, right?
When it comes to expectations I think we are used to judging something by the final product. Not only when it comes to book adaptions but also lets say presidential terms, starting a new business and even planting...we judge these periods/processes by the final outcome. Did we get the sales, voters, crops that we estimated? did we?
I guess expectations can drive us forward but also, when do they set us up for failure?
I imagine Baz not caring much about this issues. This movie wasn't even released during Oscar season! I asked Heinz if he thought Baz didn't care about the Oscars and he said everyone does.
Well Heinz...maybe Baz and I don't care about the Oscars like everyone else does. Although I do. I really want to walk the red carpet some day but what I would really really really looooooooove is for Heinz to win something at the Oscars one day.
About this Great Gatsby movie, I think the main issues here are adaptation and expectations.
Tricky, tricky.
I can't bring myself to say this is a good or a bad movie. It's impossible for me to judge someone else's creative work in terms of good or bad I can only say whether I liked it or not.
I think the adaptation is very honest, there is one narrative resource used in the movie that is not in the book: having the writer (Tobey Maguire) tell the story from a psychiatric facility.
As for my expectations...yes, Baz is an aesthetic genius. His music-image relationship is hardly found in the work of any other movie director.
As for your expectations...here is a totally unrelated (thus unexpected) picture of me during my aerial yoga class today :)
