Albert.Tatlock
Familiar Face
- Messages
- 71
- Location
- Weatherfield, LANCS
Saw it last night. I can now say I've done it. I'm not going to add to what's already been said.
I agree that that is what the director was trying to do, but it is a sloppy and pandering way to do it.
Thought that thing would never end. "Just run over that broad and get me home to bed already."
[video]https://vimeo.com/68451324[/video]
Behind the FX
Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk 2
Oooh, lots of people seemed to really hate it!
I gotta say that I read the book within 2 hours, a few hours before seeing the film. I would now call that book one of my favourite books of all time. It has sparked quite the Fitzgerald love fets in me and I'm slowly working my way through all of his books and short stories. Gatsby to me was absolutely lovely, the imagery, the characters and the storyline blew my mind a little.
When I then went to see the film I was both worried about seeing it "butchered" as well as intrigued to see someone else's interpretation. All in all, I gotta say that I liked the film. Yes, parts were over the top and as a fan of jazz I would have liked to actually hear jazz, but I can appreciate what Luhrmann was trying to do. I would rather focus on the parts I really did enjoy and that was the actors' performances. I thought DiCaprio was a fantastic Gatsby and I'm incredibly excited to see how much he has matured as an actor. The same goes for Mulligan's portrayal as Daisy. She seemed spoiled, self-centred and down right unlikeable. Those qualities within the characters is what made me love the book. It is so rare to read books about people who aren't necessaries good people but none the less they aren't portrayed as villains.
I hope my chatter made sense! Some parts were definitely a miss but overall I enjoyed myself.
I'd agree, and maybe this is just my lack of knowledge about racial relations at that time, but it seemed totally unrealistic that Tom had so many Black/African American servants waiting on his guests. Having been in homes were there are servants in the Northeast, very few of them had Black and African American servants, and certainly there was a preference for having white servants who waited on guests among the most racist of them. (In other words, non-white servants were out of sight.) I think the director missed the interpretation of Tom's line about the superiority/inferiority of people and races- he's not just talking about a modern interpretation of race as in Black/African American, Latino, Asian, White. He's talking about class too- the idea is that people from "good" families (read rich) are of a superior race to those who are from "poor" families. He is so racist and classist that he doesn't even see anyone as human unless they meet his standards of old money- yet alone the less than human other races. He's a bigot towards everyone.
You may be reading too much into Tom's racism. No doubt he was a selfish, racist, sexist, etc b#stard. But the point of him talking about that racist book was how dumb he was. The book was a sensationalist piece of trash on the level of Anne Coulter or Rush Limbaugh. Tom was the kind of dope who took it seriously when he heard about it, two years after everybody else, although he couldn't quite remember what it was about.