The Great Gatsby

The Great Gatsbyⁱ is a whole lot of prime cinematography workⁱⁱ wasted on a mediocre novel.ⁱⁱⁱ

I get it, Jay Gatsby resonates with all you losers out there. That's fine, the "incorruptible dream" or whatever, the "real you" that'll wake up one day to be like Neo in damatrix. "Hope is an important theme", something in the vein of "hopefully God will upload kung-fu fightin' straight into your dumbass on a JIT basis". The sort of pseudo-hope that's a mere pretense, an adolescentine conceit intended to mask self-esteem the self perceives as indefensible - or in the simpler words of an old farmer, "the sort of bullshit that's not even worth turning." But whatever, I'm sure the great Red Green^iv Star in the East will shine its beacony light or something.

Meanwhile back on Earth the contemptible worm of a Mary Sue "hero" is unremarkable in all respects save one : that he manages, if ever so briefly, to make even that miserable heel of a husband appear convincingly pleasant. At no point is the master of the house even remotely in the zone of "people you'd tolerate at the table", except for that short stretch where he humiliates the starstruck humanist. This performance in failure and there only seems eerily representative of the failed generation, that sad collection of accidental births that actually imagine Fitzgerald could pass for a writer.

There's really nothing here, and in particular the failure of the... girls, for women they are not, must be noted. The exquisite decor of the set and the costumes serve approximately in the manner an ellaborate gold monture would serve a rabbit turd : its execrable quality is thus harshly displayed, magnified by the contrast.

The world periodically knows generations that, as far as anyone can remember, never actually happened. This film is a fine effort at capturing such a generation for the baffled amusement of their children, who always intuited that there's something wrong with the hole moving around where his mother or father should have went, but never really quite got to see it. Because you can't actually see a hole, that's the problem, the only way you know it's there is through the absence.

This film does an excellent job of chronicling the absence that the boomers were, in the only way such a thing can be done : by showing the edges of the missing parts. In that much, it is notable.

1. 2013, by Baz Luhrmann with Leonardo DiCaprio and that Freddy that got fingered (not really, but the difference is negligible - same product a decade later). [↩]
2. Also set and costume design. If this film should be seen, it's mostly for Simon Duggan and Catherine Martin/Beverley Dunn/
   Eva Starlite. DiCaprio is doing okay I guess, but otherwise the cast doesn't exist. Actors can't play in a vacuum, that's the first thing any tango instructor tells the woman : you gotta push back, bitch! The man can't dance with the air, let him lead, yes, but let him lead. Acting's no different. [↩]
3. Here's a hint : the generation at the time, not being entirely fucking insane, thought nothing of the soap in question, and its tiresome author died poor and ignored, and correctly understanding his failure as both a writer and a human being for exactly what it was : his routund, resplendent failure, as a writer and as a human being.

   Then a generation of narcisiac lusers got wind of it, and it tickled their fucktarded fancy. This is perfectly fine, but it makes about as much difference as the generation in question collectively does - which is to say zero. [↩]

4. Ain't that clever! [↩]