Movie Review: The Great Gatsby

Finally the book we all had to read in high school is getting it's fourth movie adaptation as English teacher's wait with bated breath to see if this will be the version they show in their classroom for years to come or if they stick with the 1974 version starring Robert Redford and Mia Farrow.  While it's a much more loyal portrayal of the source material than Baz Luhrmann's edgy Romeo + Juliet that took place in modern time, Luhrmann does get rid of some of the substance of the novel to add some style and bring this world to life for a modern audience while keeping the Roaring Twenties backdrop.



The Great Gatsby tells the story of one crazy summer of your average bond salesman, Nick Carraway's life.  After living next door to an eccentric millionaire, Jay Gatsby, who nobody seems to know anything about yet everyone goes to his parties every evening, Nick gets an invite to come over to Gatsby's house.  Carraway and Gatsby begin to develop a friendship revolving around Gatsby wanting to rekindle the romance started 5 years previously with Nick's cousin Daisy, who is currently married to an equally eccentric millionaire, Tom Buchanan. 

While Baz Luhrmann doesn't direct a lot of movies, when he does you know it's going to be beautifully shot and this movie is no exception.  In a lot of ways the camera was almost limitless on where it could go as it moved frequently and everywhere especially during Gatsby's party scenes.  While it was good to look at, what really stood out most about this movie was the cast.  Leonardo DiCaprio stars as Jay Gatsby and as per usual delivers a stupendous performance and proves why he's one of the greatest workers in Hollywood today.  I also can't say enough good things about Tobey Maguire, Carey Mulligan, and Joel Edgerton as all of them brought Nick, Daisy, and Tom Buchanan to life and gave tremendous performances as well. 

Where the movie suffers most is length.  It times out at 2 hours and 20 minutes and while the beginning is a good set-up of everything that's about to occur, it just takes too long to get there.  While the movie was full of visual goodness, some of the long party scenes of people singing and dancing could have been cut down just to focus on the story more. Unfortunately Luhrmann's flaw is he always wants all of his scenes to look bigger and more spectacular, when sometimes he needs to tone things down a bit.   While I appreciate what Luhrmann was trying to do, having Jay-Z and other curent artists do the music for the movie by inserting some actual songs or 20's style performances of his songs, it just took you out of this world.  Luhrmann tried to channel Moulin Rouge's performance of current songs in older times again but it didn't feel genuine to The Great Gatsby at all.

While visually stunning and terrifically acted this version of The Great Gatsby suffers from being a little too much.  The Great Gatsby is a literary classic and this version of the film does as good of a job as possible to convey this to a 21st Century audience, it's still the same source material that most of us didn't want to read in school.  It's one of those movies that I'm definitely glad I saw and would recommend to others interested. I just can't envision myself re-watching when it comes out on Blu-Ray or even 5 years down the road.  However, if there was a version of The Great Gatsby I would have to watch, I would want it to be this one.

3 stars out of 5

Movie Review: Iron Man 3

Obviously, one of the main focuses of Episode 55 of the AB Conversation podcast is Iron Man 3, so if you want to hear Anthony and I discuss this movie check that out.  One of my "New Year Pod Resolutions" is to do more written content for the website, including movie reviews.  I figure the only way I can get better at writing movie reviews and hopefully expanding the brevity of the podcast is by actually writing movie reviews, so let's go.



This summer movie season started off with a bang as Marvel Films knows how to make a blockbuster that sets the bar for all other movies in the summer months, in other words Tyler Perry Present's Peeples has some mighty stiff competition in Iron Man 3. Iron Man 3 continues the story of Tony Stark (Robert Downey Jr.), who is still recovering from the alien attack on New York and has replaced the partying part of his life with his obsession of being Iron Man and creating new sets of armor.  Meanwhile, the villain in this movie, The Mandarin (Ben Kingsley) begins taking over the television airwaves nationwide claiming responsibility for a number of bombing incidents. When The Mandarin's latest bombing attack becomes personal to Tony Stark, the battle between Iron Man and the mysterious villain known as The Mandarin is on.

I regard the first Iron Man movie as one of the best comic book films of all time along with The Dark Knight and The Avengers, but was a little disappointed with Iron Man 2.  With this one changing directors from Jon Favreau (who still appears in the movie as Happy Hogan) to Shane Black, I was excited to see the franchise take on a different direction.  Shane Black has wrote some awesome movies like The Monster Squad, Lethal Weapon, and Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang (which put Robert Downey Jr back on the map and earned him the role as Iron Man).  Due to Black's propensity for action comedies, I was expecting this to be an even more lighthearted than Favreau's which had a good sense of humor to them as well, and I was not mistaken.  This is easily the funniest of the Marvel films as Tony Stark is firing out one liners like photon blasts.  Iron Man 3 may also have some of the best action sequences of any Marvel movie to date, or at least right up there with The Avengers, the sheer destruction that takes place is impressive.

I only had a few minor quibbles with Iron Man 3, the first being that it didn't set up any of the upcoming movies in Phase 2 of the Marvel films.  The first Iron Man had that epic moment at the end of the movie where Nick Fury showed up and movie history was set into place and Iron Man 2 had more Nick Fury as well as the debut of the Black Widow.  While this keeps the rich history alive, it does nothing to push Phase 2 into hyperdrive or set up Avengers 2.  The 3D was added in post and therefore doesn't really do much to add to the movie, if I were you I would just hold onto the surcharge amount and see the movie in 2D.  You would think in a big action blockbuster like this, something would stand out of the 3D, but sadly it does not.  While I liked the music for the most part, those that are expecting to hear AC/DC blasting when Iron Man makes an appearance will be sorely disappointed.

Writing a review about this movie is pretty pointless because pretty much everybody that wants to see this movie is going to hit the theaters and see it opening weekend and those that aren't probably aren't all that interested in the first place.  If you are an inbetweener, I highly suggest checking it out as it works great as an action-comedy as well as a superhero flick.  The exchanges between Tony Stark and James Rhodes, harken you back to the dialogue between Riggs and Murtaugh.  While the duo of villains were quality actors in the second Iron Man (Mickey Rourke and Sam Rockwell), I was blown away by how they handled The Mandarin (Ben Kingsley) and Aldrich Killian (Guy Pierce).  Ben Kingsley gives an amazing performance and his performance is reason alone to see this movie. Also a big kudos to Ty Simpkins' character Harley who plays off of Tony Stark so well and provides a ton of laughs and also Paul Bettany who never gets his due as the awesome voice of Jarvis. 

This action packed thrill ride is full of laughs and keeps re-inventing itself throughout.  While the there are still some contract issues to be sorted out and this very much ends the Iron Man trilogy, I would be very disappointed and surprised if this is the last we see of Tony Stark on the big screen.

4.5 Stars out of 5

If you like this movie, I recommend:



Read the comic book, the Extremis storyline in this movie is based on.

To The Wonder Review

I’m going to try to do more written movie reviews for things we don’t cover on the podcasts.  The first of these is the new Terrance Malick movie which was just released on a limited basis throughout the country, “To The Wonder.”  Here is my review of the movie:

Let me just start off by saying, I am not a fan of the Terrence Malick movies that I have seen. I have great respect for him as a filmmaker, he just doesn’t make movies that I enjoy.  His previous work, the Academy Award nominated “Tree of Life” bored me to tears.  Because I wasn’t going to get anything out of the nonexistent storyline, I ended up “watching” it on 10x fast forward on Blu-Ray.  While “Tree of Life” was a beautiful movie it makes a better screensaver or visual effects demo reel than movie.

This movie was not much different and really felt like deleted scenes from “Tree of Life” pieced together with some footage of Ben Affleck and labeled a new movie.  While this was on a much smaller scale than “Tree of Life” which basically told the tale of the beginning of the Earth to death, this covered mostly just the lives of Neil (Ben Affleck) and Marina (Olga Kurylenko) from their meeting in France to their journey to his home in Oklahoma.  What happens from there is your normal series of romantic ups and downs of a couple that probably shouldn’t be together.

To be perfectly blunt that just by describing this movie, I’m practically giving away everything that happens.  For Malick fans this ok, since you are just in it for the experience of the movie and for a deeper meaning rather than pure entertainment value.  It seems like Malick stockpiles as much footage as possible of these actors wandering around aimlessly and tries telling the story in editing.  The astonishing thing about Malick’s movies is there are always actors that he shoots footage of and then they don’t make the final cut of the movie, in this case Rachel Weisz, Michael Sheen, Amanda Peet and Barry Pepper were all in it at one point but gone by the time the movie was released.  To be fair, Javier Bardem, who plays a conflicted priest, and Rachel McAdams, who plays Neil’s ex-flame who briefly comes back into his life, also could have been completely cut from the movie with little being missed other than running time.  While I do respect Malick as a director sometimes I question whether or not he really knows what story he is trying to tell until he gathers all of the footage and decides from there.  For as much as I didn’t like “To The Wonder,” there’s no doubt that Olga Kurylenko carried this film and absolutely loved the material she was performing.

It was ironic that Neil and Marina spent part of the opening of the movie drudging through mud flats in France as this seems to be an analogy for the pacing of “To The Wonder.”  Terrence Malick’s films are the movie equivalent to jazz, to some they are beautiful and compelling, while others just experience an incoherent mess that seems to go on for too long.  This film tends to explain itself through its actions and not its words.  Too much is told through montage sequences with random poetic lines of narration.  While there is one scene where emotions are actually explained through dialogue and not scenes that look like a perfume commercial, this three minutes of movie is not enough.  There tends to be an interesting story in this movie, however Malick would rather show you random shots of interesting things.  While ultimately much more focused than “Tree of Life” and by therefore much more watchable, this classic case of style over substance disappoints.

2 Stars out of 5