The Great Gatsby movie

Unreal carried to a completely over-the-top degree becomes phony, heavy-handed, and distracting to the story. I have that same problem with a lot of contemporary movies that go too far in terms of the visual look and the amount of visual effects going on. Going back 10 years, I had the same problem with Sin City, a movie that had far lower aspirations and a far lower budget ($40M). That movie broke even, but I think it's fair to say it was not a hit, and I think the reviews were mixed at best.

 

Or "Dick Tracy"?

 

I'm no fan of Dick Tracy, but thought Sin City was the cat's meow. I guess I just like what Mark doesn't! Movies that dare to push it that far. (In the case of Sin City, I thought they really captured the look of Miller's books really really well).

 

The fact the story still takes place in the 1920s doesn't count as a reason?

 

And yet you routinely praise CGI crap-fests such as The Avengers and Iron Man 3.

 

But plenty of movies use theoretically anachronistic music. As long as we're not supposed to accept the music as being played in the era, I'm fine with it.

In other words, Jay-Z played as score in "Gatsby"? Fine. Jay-Z coming from a radio in "Gatsby"? Dopey...

 

How do you tell when a scene has been ADR'd?

 

Me too. I wonder how many people were annoyed by hearing Carl Orff or Wagner in "Excalibur", just because both composed centuries after the time of King Arthur.

 

That's one way of looking at it, albeit a reductive, literal-minded way of looking it at.

All of the Jazz Age historical trappings of the book are incidental to its central theme of the conflict between idealism and reality, in my opinion.

 

How about Strauss in "2001"? Mankind didn't even exist yet!

 

Good synopsis. I also think ADR has a "canned" sound to it at times. There's a feeling of being on location that natural dialogue gives that might not be there for ADR.

When done right, you shouldn't notice ADR. It's like a score for a movie or editing: if these call attention to themselves, they're not doing their job...

 

Let's put some of the complaints about Gatsby in perspective. The Hollywood studio system has put a whole bunch of money into serious movie for grownups, with excellent actors (all but a couple over 30) and impeccable literary pedigree, and the result has reached an enthusiastic mass audience. Whether the movie spoke to you or not, isn't that good news? Doesn't it bode well?

I say bring on the inevitable Justin Lin's For Whom the Bell Tolls, or whatever.

 

That's me! Thank you.

Have years of experience. Listen carefully. Note whether the line sounds like it's in the actual acoustic space being filmed.
John Purcell's excellent book Dialogue Editing: The Invisible Art goes into it in some detail. ADR is a necessary part of filmmaking, but I felt there was a ton of ADR in Gatsby that seemed kind of unnecessary, given that so much of it was shot indoors.

 

They don't. They just don't like rap or hip-hop. That's what they're upset about.

 

I've always been more concerned telling whether a scene is on-location or actually on a set. The best outdoor set I've seen (recently) was in "The Big Sleep" from 1946 with Humphrey Bogart. You could tell it was a set, but it didn't look "fake" like most other sets.

Of course, you can always tell a set (especially in the old films) from a real location by the lighting/shadows, the echoes, etc. The Perry Mason TV show has tons of these problems. Hitchcock is among the worst offenders in movies - all of his outdoor sets look exactly like sets.

 

What's funny is the amount of "cheats" that still go on. For example, "poor man's process," where they put a car inside a studio and simulate car headlights and rock the car back and forth to simulate a real car going down a road. I just watched this season's opening episode of True Blood, and there's a couple of long conversations in car interiors shot this way, and I laughed my head off. It was just silly-stupid.

Gatsby did some similar stuff with the grotesque amount of green screen composites throughout the movie -- never worse than when the cars were driving over the bridge. Man, that looked real fake and plasticky to me. I felt like it just called attention to itself much too much. You have two cars trying to outrace each other, in traffic, going over 75 miles an hour, in 1922... and you have to have the camera constantly spinning, craning, and weaving all around the cars at the same time?

I get the attracting for an action movie like Fast and Furious, but Gatsby didn't need this to be more dramatic or to tell the story better. It just seemed like hopeless overkill to me.

 

It depends on who's directing, but I feel in general nowadays, those in car scenes look almost 100% real. Way better than the old days of just having a projector screen behind them.

 

I guess we see things differently. I thought they looked unbelievably non-organic and synthesized, as did a lot of the "hyper-zoom" effects where they'd zoom across the bay and into Gatsby's house. I had no problem with most of the interiors and normal scenes -- those looked real enough. Anytime the camera had to move large distances, it was clear to me that there was a whole lotta green screen going on. I don't mind this when there's absolutely no other way to do it, but beyond a certain point, it just looks like showing off to me.

 

I haven't seen Gatsby yet, so I'll take your word on those car chases. I'm strictly talking about in-car scenes with dialogue. Not chase scenes or anything like that.

 

In a few films of the past, I used to notice lighting faults. IE: A indoor daylight scene, where the sunlight was supposed to be streaming in through a window in one direction. Yet the actors were creating shadows on walls and other objects as if the sun was coming from the opposite direction.

 

There's actually a lot of conversation on set about source lighting, trying to dramatically justify where the shadows are coming from. I have heard said many times that one of the primary jobs a cinematographer does is to place shadows -- it's not just about how people are illuminated per se.

I thought a lot of the lighting in Gatsby was very spectacular and interesting, but like a lot of it, I think it was somewhat over the top. Not awful by any means. And there were moments in the film that were very beautiful.

 

You wanna see bad green screen? Watch "Saving Lincoln". It places the green screened actors in front of backdrops fashioned from old 1800s photos - and does so really, really poorly.

Granted, I suspect it had a budget of about $28, but it still looks terrible. It felt like some community access cable show...

 

There's a lot of low-budget movies that have really bad effects. IMDB says Saving Lincoln only had a budget of $700K, so you kind of have to forgive them at some point. Though I have to say, they're doing great stuff today on TV-show budgets and schedules.

The trick is finding a way to use VFX to enhance the story, rather than making it an excuse for the story. At some point, the VFX just get completely out of control and become wretched excess. I think Gatsby veered towards that quite a few times.

My favorite kind of movie is one where you're almost completely unaware that there's effects in it at all, but they slip them in invisibly to help fix very real problems (like airplanes overhead, missing buildings, the wrong weather, etc.). Some of that stuff is pretty stunning. For example, the recent Liberace film where they digitally stitched Michael Douglas' head onto another actor playing the piano in some shots was pretty much flawless.

 

And I would if it wasn't for the fact the movie uses the green screen as a stupid gimmick. They crow about how it's cool they're shooting in front of old 1800s photos, and it might be interesting if it worked, but it doesn't. It's a visual technique that hurts the movie.

Not that it'd be good anyway - it's really amateurish across the board. It even has some "name"-ish actors like Bruce Davison and Penelope Ann Miller, but they're all awful...