I have seen the Green Light//The Great Gatsby

So like probalby most of us (fashion bloggers) I went to watch the Great Gatsby last week. I must say that I had not expected tooo much since also Luhrmann’s Romeo and Juliet and Moulin Rouge simply were not my kind of movies. What I had really liked before I watched the film, on the other hand, were the soundtrack of the movie, as well as Fitzgerald’s novel.

So what do think of the movie… In my opinion and for my likes it’s not a terribly bad movie, but overall also not really great, either. I liked DiCaprio as Gatsby and Maguire as Carraway A LOT. I liked the party scenes and how contemporary (“zeitgeisty” – as I read elsewhere) music was used. Unlike some critics I believe that this kind of deviations from the original settings make a movie only more interesting. I liked some of the pictures that we saw. I liked the clothes, well done Prada, MiuMiu, Brooks Brothers and Tiffany. It was nice to see approximately two seconds of Gemma Ward. Oh, and I really liked the performance of “Jordan Baker”. The additional storyline around Nick Carraway was quite well done, too.

But I totally agree with those who call Mulligan a miscast, I’m sorry. I hated Luhrmann’s – ehum – kind of obvious use of symbols, seriously any stupid idiot got the green light thing after about half of the movie. More subtile symbolism simply is rather my thing. And generally speaking I did not like that everything was so overstated and artificial (apart from the party scenes, as I said-this, of course, makes me wonder whether all this exaggeration was kind of necessary to make the party scenes work.. But as I said, it’s simply not my thing…). After a while I therefore also got quite bored by this overstated, babbling (I don’t know if this is the right expression) way of speaking. I’m not sure about the very excessive use of quotes from the book. On the on hand, that made the movie more interesting, of course, on the other hand it felt kind of awkward and at times, and only more unreal.  Some of the pictures were also too much for me, especially the first scene with Daisy, all the curtains flying through the room, and then her hand with the jewellery, just like an advertisement for Tiffany.

So after all, the negative part is a little longer than the positive one. But I still love the soundtrack. Especially Florence and the Machine, Jack White and Gotye. Not too bad also The XX and Kanye West/JayZ. I bought it a few days before I saw the film, and I’ve been listening to it nonstop. And I still need to finish the book!

[I’m very sorry, I don’t have any English language spelling software on my laptop at the moment…]