haha, i feel like i'm the only one excited for it. ensemble musicals are almost always fun, as long as they don't take themselves too seriously. but i'd be lying if i said it wasn't simply because i love watching Tom Cruise act when he's having fun acting (Tropic Thunder for example).

Any actor is great to watch when they're just having fun. That's one reason I like watching Tarantino's films so much. The actors always look like they're having a great time.

This looks awful.

No idea. It's just another superhero film with too much CGI.

What do you mean it has too much CGI? They wouldn't have been able to make it without CGI.

that looks fucking terrible. and no church in the wild? seriously?

why is CGI inherently problematic? transformers: CGI with nothing going on beneath it. the avengers: CGI with worthwhile character dynamics beneath it. lately it seems like "it has CGI" has become a cop out way to criticize a movie.

anyways, what i liked most about the avengers was how whedon handled group dynamics and balanced the superstar auras of 6 or 7 big-name actors. it made for a lot of funny and interesting relationships and interactions between the six heroes and nick fury. stark and banner's conversations were hilarious. it also poked a ton of fun at itself and the genre which is inherently kind of silly, so it got to take itself seriously--the conflict and the characters evolving--but still acknowledge the unavoidable cheesiness. most of its one-liners were actually funny and had that double effect of simultaneously satisfying genre tropes and laughing at them. like in the nolan batmans, whenever there's a one-liner like "i gotta get me one of those," i cringe. but they felt natural and fluid with the tone in the avengers.

This looks amazing. How often do you get something that looks this composed in the multiplex? Better to reimagine Gatsby as a balls-out, hip-hop-tinged, Bioshockian odyssey than to stupidly attempt translating the book's elegance to the screen.

maybe it'll work, but i don't know why you think translating its elegance to a screen would be stupid, or why a bioshockian odyssey is automatically better. i'm pretty surprised you think it looks that great. it looks hip and glamorous but not much else.

I just don't see how translating the book's elegance to the screen is possible. The elegance of the book is the elegance of Nick Carraway's consciousness. It has to do with the rhythms and associations of thought, the sort of thing you can't really translate into cinema without making an avant-garde movie; and since Gatsby isn't an avant-garde book, you'd be being untrue to the book in a different way. Ultimately, it's impossible to really be "true" to a book like Gatsby through cinema because something is always going to be lost in translation. To make a productive adaptation, you have to depart from it in major ways, and it looks like Luhhrman has chosen some creative routes of departure.

To me it looks like Luhrrman has taken one of the few stories that many young people in this country understand in a halfway intelligent way (because their schools have forced them to), reduced it to its bare frame and themes, and then exploded it into a spectacle that draws apt comparison between jazz age decadence and hip-hop age decadence in a way that will get young moviegoers thinking. The over-the-top lifestyle that the book critiques is a perfect fit for Luhrrman's over-the-top cinematic style. My hope is that Luhrrman picks up on this connection and isn't just making the movie emptily glamorous and hip. If he misses that obvious irony it would be an idiocy of truly unbelievable proportions.

Also it just looks cool.

leaning towards drew a bit, but it's been awhile since I read the book so I'm kinda just grazing the surface here and favoring the general idea for a different interpretation. There isn't much you're gonna get out of having a Joe Wright or Robert Redford adaptation trying to obtain "better" fidelity of the novel. I'd rather a different artistic voice re-imagine it, only using the barest essentials of the original source material so it's not so bookish. Could you imagine if Apocalypse Now was strictly faithful to Heart of Darkness? Fuck that shit.

That being said, I haven't liked anything Baz Luhrmann has done.

i like Romeo + Juliet (which dreww's description could fit as well)... but Moulin Rouge gives me a headache. not that it is bad, its just kind of COLORS! MOVEMENT! SINGING! DIZZINESS! AHH!

anyway, i liked that trailer. but ive never read the book.

It's not.



This is where we disagree. In my opinion The Avengers was not that much different from Transformers. This time it was basically Iron Man being a badass and his retarded sidekicks constantly getting in the way. What is the point of Captain America in this film? I feel like he and Iron Man were the Hannity and Colmes of superheroes, that is Captain America was there simply to make Iron Man look better.

CGI is also a way for people to make a mediocre film without putting much effort into anything else. Was The Avengers awful? No. Does it merit all of this hype and praise? Absolutely not. The films saving grace is an excellent performance by Robert Downey Jr. Everything else is your typical run-of-the-mill superhero flick, separated by giant cheesy CGI battles. I guess I don't get it.

A list off the top of my head

Prometheus
The Dark Knight Rises
The Master
Lawless (Hillcoat)
Cosmopolis
Django Unchained
Gangster Squad
The Place Beyond The Pines
The Great Gatsby
Skyfall
Being Flynn
The Hobbit

Prometheus is out next Friday.