Baz Luhrmann certainly does know how to throw a party. And it is for this reason that the question on every critic’s lips leading up to the release of Luhrmann’s The Great Gatsby was whether the film would be all pomp, and no circumstance; all style, and no substance. The answer to that question is, well, mixed. Luhrmann’s Gatsby is the stuff that legends are made of. And by legends I mean absolute fairytales, like Cinderella or Snow White.

Luhrmann imagines a candy-colored dream of New York City that never actually existed. His interpretation is smooth and rhythmic and fluid, and there is a definite poetry about it. But it is the bombastic poetry of Luhrmann, not Fitzgerald – a heightened, kaleidoscopic reality in which the early model cars are super-charged, the music doesn’t match the era, and the costumes might as well be out of this year’s Fall collection.

The real question is not whether Luhrmann is playing fast and loose with the Roaring 20s here (He is). It is whether – as a moviegoer – that happens to be your primary concern. If it is, you’ll more than likely spend the majority of The Great Gatsby rolling your eyes.

Luhrmann takes tremendous liberties throughout, this despite remaining true to most of Fitzgerald’s original story. Along those lines, anyone who has seen Jack Clayton’s 1974 Gatsby will find it difficult to watch Luhrman’s version without comparing the two – most notably, Luhrmann’s decision to cast Carrey Mulligan as the well-to-do Daisy Buchanan. Mulligan, who is usually magnificent, seems wildly out of place here. Her weak attempts at elitism fall flat, especially in deference to the spot-on casting of Mia Farrow in Clayton’s original. To that end, Sam Waterston actually represents a much more believable Nick Carraway, and Bruce Dern, a more indignant Tom Buchanan. Leonardo DiCaprio, on the other hand, holds his own here. He is as good as Robert Redford ever was at portraying Jay Gatsby, if not infinitely more fractured beneath the surface.

In terms of sheer spectacle, Luhrmann’s Gatsby is absolutely remarkable. Your eye is constantly drawn to something – if not several somethings – bouncing back and forth across the frame. This movie makes you long for summer lawn parties and rue the empty pang of early autumn. It’s a bright and shimmering epic, which may very well be the reason it does not hold up well throughout the long-term. For, as Daisy Buchanan very astutely points out during the early going of Mr. Luhrmann’s film, “All the bright, precious things fade fast, and they don’t ever come back.”

Daisy Buchanan never actually said that during Fitzgerald’s original novel, of course.

The real Daisy Buchanan wouldn’t ever have said that, Old Sport.

(The Great Gatsby opens nationwide today.)

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If 1969 was the height of counterculture revolution in this country, then 1963 was the year when matters began shifting into high gear. This was the year when The Beatles released their first album and Bob Dylan released his second; when Medgar Evers was assassinated in Mississippi and all hell was breaking loose in Birmingham; when the situation in Vietnam was escalating and Buddhist monks took to setting themselves on fire; when Martin Luther King was taken to jail for “parading without a permit” and 250,000 African-Americans carried out their March on Washington. It was the year when JFK was taken out in Dealey Plaza – an assassination Malcolm X subsequently referred to as “chickens coming home to roost”. Simply put, 1963 was the year when every sociopolitical issue in this country was turned completely upside down. A full half-century down the line, the 1963 exhibition of black and white photographs at Howard Greenberg Gallery captures a great deal of that emotion, serving as a necessary reminder of just how far this country has come over the past 50 years, and just how very far it still has to go.

(1963 debuts today at Howard Greenberg Gallery and continues through July 6th. Free, 41 East 57th Street, Suite 1406)

Five More For The Offing: 

• Punk: Chaos to Couture @ The Metropolitan Museum of Art (Free with suggested donation, through 7/7, Gallery 773, 82nd Street at 5th Avenue)
• New Art Dealers Alliance (NADA) Show @ Pier 36/Basketball City (Free, 5/10-5/12, 299 South Street)
• Entre Deux Mondes by Phillipe Charles Jacquet @ Axelle Fine Arts Galerie (Free, through 5/26, 472 West Broadway)
• Piero della Francesca in America @ The Frick Collection ($18 general admission, through 5/19, 1 East 70th Street)
• Outside Inside Sensibility by Stewart Uoo and Jana Euler ($20 general admission, 5/10-8/11, 945 Madison Avenue at 75th Street)

It’s an age-old premise, the notion that all’s the world’s a stage and all the men and women merely players. But it’s earned increased relevance given the transparent zeitgeist we live in, driven – in large part – by an unprecedented insistence upon instant gratification. In many ways, evolution has had its way with us, transforming life, love and the pursuit of happiness into a petty, fleeting game of one-ups-man-ship.

I mean, it’s all so goddamn easy, right? You meet someone, you fall in love, you get married, have a couple of children, and then you systematically begin dumping on each other until the mutual respect has given way to mass defiance. This is what it means to hurt the ones you love the most. This is also the incidental essence of Sarah Polley’s semi-fascinating documentary, Stories We Tell.

Stories chronicles Polley’s exhaustive investigation into her deceased mother’s past, revealing – among other things – the secret identity of Sarah’s biological father. The drama unfolds in real time (interspersed with Super-8 footage of hand-picked actors reenacting past events), as translated by close family members and friends, each of whom were either privy to or effected by the sequence of events leading up to Sarah’s birth.

Sarah’s mother, Diane, was a small-time Canadian actress – a textbook extrovert who felt the need to dominate every conversation, if for no better reason than to keep the focus from turning to her. And the beauty of Stories We Tell is that it feeds moviegoers the truth about Diane in tiny bite-sized morsels (i.e., backstory, commentary, revelation … backstory, commentary, revelation, etc.). There’s a sense of intimacy here, not unlike the voyeuristic feeling one gets from uncovering a long-lost reel of home videos. The only problem being that – much like the majority of home videos – the allure of this one wears off long before the show is actually over.

The final half-hour of Stories is really little more than Sarah’s immediate cluster waxing eloquent about the film itself. And yet, despite that, there’s still an incredibly rich narrative here, told by everyday people, many of whom demonstrate a certain knack for being on-camera. In the final analysis, Stories We Tell proves a testament to the notion that both life and love are fleeting, at best, and too few us ever really take the time to examine either one until it’s already too late.

(Stories We Tell opens in New York City this coming Friday, with plans for a rollout in most major markets on May 17th.) 

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Here’s the thing about Chilean director Nicolas Lopez’s new movie, Aftershock – it commits to an integral twist about 35 minutes into the film, and – from that point forward – it does not back down from even the most extreme demonstrations of violence, gore, or violation.

Eli Roth, who co-wrote the screenplay, is actually the best thing about the movie (at least in terms of casting). And yet, he’s sandwiched between a lot of second-rate acting –  commandeered to some extent by constant, misplaced stabs at wholly adulterated content or humor.

But the real problem here is a major schism tearing straight down the middle of this thing. On the one hand, Aftershock feels like it wants to be a horror film. On the other, it feels like it wants to be a buddy picture. On the one hand, it feels like it wants to be a slasher film. On the other, it feels like it wants to be a natural disaster epic. On the one hand, it feels like it wants to be Chilean. On the other, it feels like it wants to be American. Meanwhile, all that middle ground limits the movie’s overall ability to cater to any particular demographic.

The bottom line: if you’re a fan of gratuitous violence, you’ll be bored out of your skull for the first 35 minutes of this film; if you’re a fan of well-crafted narrative, you’ll find yourself extremely irritated for the remaining 55. In the end, one cancels out the other, and what you’re left with is a schizophrenic screenplay that’s gravitating to an extremely limited audience. Assuming you’re a member of that niche, you’re in for one hell of a gruesome thrill ride. Assuming you’re not, you’d be much better served going to see The Great Gatsby this coming weekend.

(Aftershock arrives in limited release and via Video OnDemand this coming Friday.)

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“Is there a difference between cinema and movies? Yeah. If I were on Team America, I’d say, ‘Fuck, yeah.’ The simplest way I can describe it is that a movie is something you see, and cinema is something that’s made. It has nothing to do with the capture medium, it doesn’t have anything to do with where the screen is – whether it’s in your bedroom or on your iPad – it doesn’t even really have to be a movie. It can be a commercial, it can be something on YouTube. Cinema is a specificity of vision. It’s an approach in which everything matters. It’s the polar opposite of generic or arbitrary. And the result is as unique as a signature or a fingerprint. It isn’t made by a committee, and it isn’t made by a company, and it isn’t made by the audience. It means that if this filmmaker didn’t do it, it either wouldn’t exist at all, or it wouldn’t exist in anything like this form. So that means you can take a perfectly solid, successful, acclaimed movie, and it may not qualify as cinema. It also means you can take a piece of cinema, and it may not qualify as a movie. And it may actually be an unwatchable piece of shit. But, as long as you have filmmakers out there who have that specific point of view, then cinema’s never going to disappear completely, because it’s not about money. It’s about good ideas
followed up by a well-developed aesthetic.”

Enduring legends are not only immune to exaggeration, they actually draw increased power from the wide variance of every subsequent retelling. In that tradition, F. Scott’s Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby continues to evolve nearly a full century down the line. What’s more, the novel’s central character (Jay Gatsby) remains the gold standard for every international man of mystery who has sprung up in his wake – Bruce Wayne, Charles Foster Kane, and even Donald Draper chief among them.

Gatsby? What Gatsby?

It’s a question for the ages, to be sure. For literary purists, the only real Gatsby is the one who was originally introduced via F. Scott Fitzgerald’s 1925 novel. For film geeks, on the other hand, there are a plethora of choices. There’s the silent-era Gatsby, the post-World-War-II Gatsby, the Jazz-age Gatsby, the made-for-TV Gatsby, and – as of this coming Friday – there’ll even be a kaleidoscopic Gatsby … a veritable feast for the eyes that looks and feels a lot more like Baz Luhrmann’s own personal Wizard of Oz.

And yet, the classic Gatsby – at least in terms of modern cinema – was, is, and probably always will be the 1974 Jack Clayton version, based on a screenplay adaptation by Francis Ford Coppola. This is the version that captures every subtle nuance from The Eyes to The Ashlands. It’s the version that includes location shoots in and around Morningside Heights, The Plaza Hotel and Trinity Church. It’s the version in which Sam Waterston appears to be a wide-eyed prep-school nerd and Mia Farrow showcases a voice that’s rife with money; in which Bruce Dern bounces back and forth between bull-headed bigot and brute; in which (Karen Black’s) Myrtle Wilson staggers drunk and desperate as a dime-store trollop. It’s the only movie version that manages to capture Gatsby without over- or under-doing the whole thing. And therein lies its undying charm.

At its core, Jack Clayton’s Gatsby succeeds because it emphasizes all the major literary themes – wealth, power, privilege, class, love, sex, god, intrigue, suspense, betrayal, violence, death, tragedy, comedy, mystery and drama. It’s the classic tale of a poor boy from the other side of the tracks, shot through with the unrivaled angst of every man who has ever had something he loved stolen away from him.

There are, of course, some dated sequences here – moments during which the pace and/or acting seems far too labored or severe. But on balance, Redford, Farrow, Waterston, Dern and Clayton combine to offer a cinematic Gatsby for the annals – the only film version that actually does justice to Fitzgerald’s original source material, despite the increased popularity Gatsby has experienced over the years, thanks – in large part – to the extreme variance of every subsequent retelling.

(Jack Clayton’s The Great Gatsby is currently streaming via Netflix.)

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“I recently got into one of those weird, terrible fights writers can find themselves in with a friend who has for a long time been writing novels he can’t get published. For 25 years I’ve been trying to help him. He can’t rise to the occasion. He can’t write a novel because he doesn’t have the passion to write a novel. He’s writing a novel to make the money, get the film rights, become famous, whatever – all the wrong reasons. When he asked me to read the latest one, I told him, ‘Look, if this novel is super-passionate, and it really is about shit you’re going through, and pain, and it means the fucking world to you, by all means send it to me.’ He said, ‘Yeah, it’s totally all those things,’ and he sent it to me, and it was absolutely like all the others. I flipped out. I went ballistic on him. I said, ‘You never took this seriously! From the time you were 23, it was always some kind of sterile ­exercise, like an imitation of a novel. And you never talk passionately about writers. I never hear you talk about books you’re reading. You just saw that a young writer in the 80s could make some cash from a literary novel. It was moneymaking to you.’ And my friend was shocked, or pretended to be. ‘You know, it’s really amazing to hear you say that, Bret, because looking at your career and reading your books, I never thought you actually took it seriously. I saw your books as trendy knockoffs. I saw you as kind of a hack. I never thought you were really serious.’ I mean, he’s not representative of the kind of person anyone should take seriously in literary matters, but when my friend said that, I’ll admit it gave me pause. I thought, What does it mean to be a ‘serious’ novelist? Regardless of how my books have turned out, or how some people might have read them, I clearly don’t think I write trendy knockoffs. My books have all been very deeply felt. You don’t spend eight years of your life working on a trendy knockoff. In that sense I’ve been serious. But I don’t do lots of things that other serious ­writers do. I don’t write book reviews. I don’t sit on panels about the state of the novel. I don’t go to writer conferences. I don’t teach writing seminars. I don’t hang out at Yaddo or MacDowell. I’m not concerned with my reputation as a writer or where I stand relative to other writers. I’m not competitive or professionally ambitious. I don’t think about my work and my career in an overarching or systematic way. I don’t think about myself, as I think most writers do, as progressing toward some ideal of greatness. There’s no grand plan. All I know is that I write the books I want to write. All that
other stuff is meaningless to me.”

Three years ago, Jennifer Lawrence announced herself on the scene via what is still the most impressive role of her career (i.e., Winter’s Bone). This past February, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences finally caught up, awarding Lawrence a Best Actress Oscar, albeit for a role in The Silver Linings Playbook at least a dozen other actresses could’ve played.

One can only imagine Michael Shannon is destined for a similar fate. After a remarkable string of roles in films like Revolutionary Road, Take Shelter, and Return, Shannon has still only yielded one major Oscar nom. Keep in mind, this is a guy who can do more with a subtle twitch than most actors can do with a tirade. He has absolutely mastered the subtle art of remaining set and still – a skill that has not only served Shannon well throughout his career, but also represents the key to his brilliant turn as (contract killer) Richard Kuklinski in Ariel Vromen’s The Iceman.

Those familiar with Kuklinski by way of a pair of HBO documentaries know him to be a calculated – very often even charismatic – individual. There are early seeds of Tony Soprano here, including the ongoing lack of remorse, the misguided family values, the inscrutable sense of sarcasm, and the suburban stronghold in North Jersey. Kuklinski represents that rare homicidal beast who actually lives up to all the billing. He killed … for money, perhaps more than 100 times. And he did so with unrivaled skill and efficiency, mastering every aspect of the process to avoid arrest, incarceration, or even suspicion for the better part of three decades.

True to form, The Iceman is a grisly film with very little in the way of comic relief. In certain respects, it’s reminiscent of 2011’s Kill The Irishman (i.e., an independent character study of a lesser-known underworld figure who stood alone against the mob). Only the central plot here is worlds more severe and unforgiving, bypassing any hope of latter sunshine through the rain.

The supporting cast includes Winona Ryder, Ray Liotta, and an almost unrecognizable David Schwimmer. But the real story here is Michael Shannon, who nails every aspect of Kuklinski right down to the awkward lumber. His performance is a spot-on reminder that we are all human beings wrought with contradiction, and even the worst of us come fully capable of compassion. With any luck, The Iceman may even earn Shannon his second Oscar nomination … that is if the Academy doesn’t see fit to nominate him for his role as General Zod instead.

(The Iceman opens in limited release today, with plans for a national rollout to follow.)

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IDEAS CITY bills itself as a “biennial Festival in New York City of conferences and workshops, with an innovative StreetFest centered around the Bowery.” Founded by the New Museum in 2011, the festival stretches over 4 days, including dozens of events and sponsored tie-ins, all of them geared toward the preservation – and proliferation – of the arts.

The theme of this year’s festival is Untapped Capital, with participants focusing on how major cities can utilize untapped resources to improve overall access to – and quality of – art-based initiatives. Among the more notable events:

• An Entire Series of Moderated Discussions (@ the New Museum, ongoing through Saturday afternoon). Covering everything from funding to photography, the New Museum is sponsoring an entire 3-day schedule of roundtable discussions. Please note: Most sessions take place during the morning and afternoon hours.
• Mayoral Panel (Tonight, 7:30-9, @ Cooper Union). Featuring past and present mayors from Miami, FL; Lexington, KY; Nashville, TN, and even a former deputy mayor from Paris. Members of the panel will discuss various strategies they’ve used to promote the arts throughout their regions. Online ticket sales are closed, but $15 tickets will still be made available at the door.
• Mulberry Fest (Saturday, 8-11 pm, Mulberry Street). Saturday night, IDEAS CITY takes over an entire stretch of Mulberry, offering everything from a mini roller rink to a public light installation. Most of the festivities are free, and there are several different bars and restaurants for food and drink along the way.

(IDEAS CITY runs through Saturday night in and around the East Village, with a specific concentration on the Bowery. For a full list of events, click here.)

Five More For The Offing: 

• A Sport For Every Girl by Jefferson R. Burdick @ The Metropolitan Museum of Art (Free with suggested donation, through 7/7, Gallery 773, 82nd Street at 5th Avenue)
• Entre Deux Mondes by Phillipe Charles Jacquette @ Axelle Fine Arts Galerie (Free, through 5/26, 472 West Broadway)
• Mixed Messages by Alan Peckolick @ Atlantic Gallery (Free, through 5/24, 548 West 28th Street, Suite 540)
• And Europe Will Be Stunned by Yael Bartana @ Friedrich Petzel Gallery (Free, through 5/4, 456 West 18th Street)
• Somewhere Now by Canan Tolon @ Von Lintel Gallery (Free, through 5/25, 520 West 23rd Street)

Click through for full-size gallery.

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