Some thoughts about The Great Gatsby

Ideally, I guess, I'm the target audience for The Great Gatsby.  I know it was required reading in school, & that was no exception for me, but for some reason, I know for a fact that I didn't read it.  To be honest, that time is all a ~little~ blurry to me.  I'd like to say "it was all the drugs", but that would be a lie and that is something I would never do on the internet.  The point is, I was going into this movie with only the vaguest of notions of what it was about & what was going to happen in it, which is exactly whoever the asshole who put together those trailers wanted people to have before it came out.

I made a comment about this movie having way more special effects in it than you would expect from some narrative about rich people in the 1920's, but I was only half kidding.  What you need to know is this movie is BEAUTIFUL and that it wasn't an accident.  It's pretty apparent that if there was some kind of message somewhere in this movie about the price of extravagance & excess being too steep of someone's soul to pay, the creators wanted it to be an extreme afterthought 3 days after viewing this.  I mean, I saw Iron Man 3 in 3D last weekend and was more impressed with the way that was done HERE than in that movie.

Since the story is considered a bit of a classic, then I guess I can't really blame the material for the headache I developed while watching this (actually, truth be told, maybe it was all the Heinekens I was throwing back with 3D glasses on #badcombo).  I just suppose as Nick being the eyes in which we see all these events happening, I would find myself having a little more connection;  more relativity to his character, but by the end of the movie, I find myself not giving one damn about the motherfucker.  I have no idea if his role is played much differently in the book & other interpretations, but here, he's not much more than an extreme voyeur (a role that, as I type this, IS given some semblance to in a scene early in the film).

And while this may be the craziest statement in the world coming from me, but the use and inclusion of Hip-Hop music in the narrative seemed just so wrong to me on so many levels that, in describing it here, I'm forced to use a term that I hate when used by other people:  "it took me out of it".  And yet, it did.  By playing Jay-Z instead of jazz music in certain areas, I assume that the film makers were attempting to superimpose this as the black music that transcended race lines at the time because they assume that younger viewers couldn't properly fathom it without a modern day parallel, but that's just some shitty & outright wrong way of thinking, so I guess I won't assume that's why.

Speaking of music:  the film is 142 minutes and I think I should dare somebody to find one minute that doesn't have some kind of music playing in it.   I sincerely hope you enjoy this song because you're treated to an instrumental reprise of it about a million times throughout (and I say this as someone who preaches at The Church Of Lana).  #overkill  Maybe I'm just being too negative about the music due to the movie forcing my ears to once again experience  B's cover of one of Amy's classic, which is the worst torture imposed on mankind since another ill-conceived cover , but I kinda gotta go with my gut (cough, I mean my hearing) on this one.

I do have to say as an insecure male in his mid-30's, I am kinda feeling a little joy in Leonardo Dicaprio getting a few wrinkles around the face mask.  I mean, don't get it twisted, I enjoy homey as an actor and this is as a fine as a performance that someone as talented as himself could give, but when he's standing next to Tobey Maguire (which is most of the movie);who, like Leo, is a grown child actor who was given their career because he had facial features that would make him look like a kid for the rest of his life; it gives him just a little more ammo to play someone convincingly that has seen more than a little mileage in his lifetime.

All in all, not a bad movie, but not a GREAT one (Ha!  Me make Great puns!  Me so funny!).  So watch illegally online at your own risk of disappointment for what you paid for. The only REALLY important thing I took away from the movie is yeah, Elizabeth Debicki #cangetit