Ed Note: I have still not seen Get On Up. I hear Chadwick Boseman did a great job.
Sorry for the delay between posts – the last two weeks have been particularly hectic. After almost seven years, I left my job for a promising new gig at Yale as a representative of the University’s Equal Opportunity Office, where I’ll help further their mission to develop and maintain a diverse workforce and investigate claims of harassment/discrimination. I’ve had about four weeks to wrap up everything related to my job while preparing for a whole new adventure. It’s been pretty amazing and frightening. In other news, I’ve met my fundraising goal for the Wildlife Conservation Society’s Run for the Wild 5k at the Bronx Zoo (in support of their 96 Elephants initiative). Much thanks to all the friends and family who donated (particularly my brother, who put me over the top)! There’s still time to register and support!
I’ve read some interesting comics (Afterlife with Archie, the Crew, the Dark Horse Catalyst book), but haven’t had the time to write anything about them. So, in the meantime, here’s a brief rant about an annoying film trailer.
Man of Steel. Directed by Zack Snyder, from a script by David Goyer.* I’m not one of those people who thinks they own Superman. He’s an idea created by Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster and stolen by DC Comics. I don’t have any right to him, and neither do any of the many fans of the comic books, movies and live action/animated series featuring the character. It’s hard not to feel like he belongs to us. Superman’s an iconic character that’s been portrayed in thousands of stories by dozens of creators, so it’s understandable that we all have specific ideas about the character that sometimes make adaptations difficult.
Superman is an American/global symbol of justice; a populist strongman; a defender of the establishment; the ultimate immigrant who is a symbol of assimilation and/or cultural pluralism. He’s a science fiction hero and a mystery man. His brand of heroism encompasses the firefighter and law enforcement models of heroism. Some people like him best when he inspires others to do good, while others enjoy the more cosmic dream logic filled stories that emphasize his near-infinite power. It’s hard to do a Superman movie that pleases everyone, especially in an environment in which most superhero movies fit a predictable origin/existential crisis/reboot cycle. We want a movie that blends the accessibility of Superman For All Seasons with the imagination of All-Star Superman and the iconic quality of Birthright. We ask ourselves why a film can’t capture the magic of the original while forgetting that it was a charming but imperfect film.
I was looking forward to seeing Zack Snyder and David Goyer’s vision of Superman. Snyder’s Watchmen was not a good movie, but I enjoyed the elements that complicated my appreciation of the recent run of Marvel Studios movies. His heartfelt, sometimes clumsy effort to convey the politics and stakes of the original reminded me of what I was missing from movies like Captain America or the Avengers. The biggest problems with Watchmen was Snyder’s almost obsessive fealty to the original book by Dave Gibbons and Alan Moore and the horrifyingly bad performances from all involved (many of whom have been quite good in other things). In contrast, Man of Steel was an original project with performances from really good actors (Amy Adams, Michael Shannon, Diane Lane), a promising actor as Superman (Henry Cavill), and actors who are delightfully hammy in the right roles (Kevin Costner and Russell Crowe). It also had this trailer:
I knew it wouldn’t be great, but hoped that it would be good. I was wrong.
Baz Luhrmann’s films are often disparaged as celebrations of empty excess, but I’ve always thought he was a genius at using spectacle to inspire empathy for characters living in unfamiliar worlds.
His films are loud, unsubtle and tasteless. They take place in garish, beautifully designed worlds that bear no resemblance to reality and feature theatrical performances and almost comically unsubtle directing.
Luhrmann’s films are the kind of films that I imagine someone might have made during the Middle Ages. They also do a better job of capturing the emotional truth of the source material than most adaptations. Luhrmann’s adaptation of the Great Gatsby is not good – a number of the techniques that felt innovative in earlier movies felt like hoary cliches and he was far too reliant on digital special effects – but he still did a better job of giving the audience insight into the fears, beliefs and desires of the characters than previous adaptations.
Some of this success can be attributed to the performances. Leonardo DiCaprio’s Gatsby is a perfect blend of Jack Kennedy and Frank Abagnale and Carey Mulligan turns Daisy Buchanan from an elegant cipher into a tragic reminder of the limited choices faced by upper class women in the Jazz Age.
Joel Edgerton effectively captures the pitiful, callous cruelty of Tom Buchannan. I was pleasantly surprised by Maguire’s performance. This was the first time I’ve liked him since Wonder Boys. He managed to convey Nick Carraway’s passivity without becoming entirely inert (which was a real problem with Sam Waterston’s depiction in Jack Clayton’s 1974 adaptation).
But Luhrmann also deserves some credit for using music, light, costumes, set design and movement to convey emotion.
It’s the way that Gatsby’s perfectly tailored suits look like elegant couture at the first party and like a costume when he meets Daisy for a rendezvous at Nick’s house or how Luhrmann uses music, light and sound to evoke the feeling of going too far at your first party and realizing that what you think is a wild time is actually pretty lame.
In some ways, Luhrmann was a perfect choice as a director to adapt Gatsby. The sketchy, archetypal quality to the characters in Fitzgerald’s novel complement Luhrmann’s ongoing effort to use seemingly superficial things – style, music, movement – to suggest deeper truths in his films. Unfortunately, this message is undermined by all of the directorial tics and indulgent tendencies that he’s developed over the years.
In Luhrmann’s earlier movies, the fanciful sets helped create the sense that the viewer was in a heightened fantasy world, but in Gatsby, his computer generated New York was a distraction that robbed meaning from almost every emotionally honest moment, with the notable exception of the last confrontation between Gatsby and Tom Buchannan. It felt like the actors were performing in a Roaring Twenties video game.
There isn’t much difference between Luhrmann’s approach in Gatsby and in Moulin Rouge or Romeo + Juliet. He’s always embraced artifice and smothered performances with bombast and spectacle. So why does Gatsby feel so unsatisfying? I think the answer lies in the difference between practical effects used in the earlier films and computer generated effects in Gatsby. There was a charm to the ornate handcrafted sets and practical effects that was lacking in Gatsby. It helped root the spectacle in a recognizable world.
Although the computer generated effects in Gatsby were an amazing technical achievement, they were also a bit mundane. Luhrmann’s impossibly perfect fantasy version of New York is the one that exists in the mind’s eye of anyone vaguely familiar with the Jazz Age. It lacks a personal touch, the idiosyncratic flair that we’ve come to associate with Baz Luhrmann movies. I also can’t help but feel like a story that’s essentially a critique of fantasy and deluded love is undermined by an idealized Jazz Age New York.
All of the familiar elements of Baz Luhrmann films are here – the migraine inducing quick cuts, the ornate sets, the inappropriate music choices – but where they once felt provocative and daring in earlier films, in Gatsby they were dull and predictable. Even the more interesting Luhrmann touches were underwhelming. The dance sequences were well orchestrated, but lacked the thrill of Moulin Rouge.
The hip-hop tinged modern soundtrack was a cute idea, but the execution was lacking – every time I heard Jay-Z, I was pulled right out of the narrative.
Is hip-hop in the 21st century the equivalent of jazz in the 1920’s? I think one can argue that it was a visceral and culturally exciting music in the eighties and nineties, but I’m not sure that it plays that role in our culture anymore. Jay-Z is an institution. He’s the status quo. Jay might’ve been a daring choice for a 1998 version of this film, but this is 2013. Jay’s the guy who represents ball players and used to own a piece of the Not-New Jersey Nets. Am I the only one who suspects that a real teenager would scoff at the idea that hip-hop is the cutting edge, hip young music of the future?
It’s a shame that Gatsby doesn’t work, because it’s clear that Luhrmann gets the class conflict at the core of the original novel. He never lets the viewer forget about the ocean of privilege between Nick and Gatsby or between Gatsby and the Buchanans. Luhrmann evokes the racial tension hinted at in the novel by including African American faces at key moments in the narrative. When Tom rambles about the primacy of western civilization, or parties with his mistress in a Manhattan hotel room, or when Gatsby is driving Nick to the city and spinning a desperate web of lies, Luhrmann makes sure that we see a black face (or several) at some point in the scene. He reminds me of the untold side of most narratives set in this era, of the people who were only heard when they were singing or playing music on a stage. The only problem is that Luhrmann shows too much of the joy and none of the pain. There was something a little bit too joyous and celebratory about the tenants at the tenement across the street from Tom’s illicit meeting place or the passengers in the car that passes Nick and Gatsby on the bridge has too many bottles of Moët. The latter scene is directly from the book, where Fitzgerald writes:
“As we crossed Blackwell’s Island, a limousine passed us, driven by a white chauffeur, in which sat three modish Negroes, two bucks and a girl. I laughed aloud as the yolks of their eyeballs rolled toward us in haughty rivalry.
‘Anything can happen now that we’ve slid over this bridge,’ I thought; ‘anything at all…Even Gatsby could happen, without any particular wonder.”
Luhrmann does a nice job with the visuals. Three people of color, two male, one female, all of whom are stylishly dressed and chaffeured by a white man (imagine the scandal!). He misses Nick’s ambivalence about class mobility (which is made more vivid when it intersects with race), the familiar discomfort that established classes have with the consumption patterns of the nouveau riche (or the nouveau middle class). Without the mocking laughter and class conflict, the moment becomes ahistorical and meaningless.
I didn’t think that Luhrmann would capture the nuance or lyricism of Fitzgerald’s novel, but I assumed that he would find a way to use his uniquely bombastic brand of melodrama to evoke the central themes of the book. Luhrmann fulfilled those expectations, but was undermined by his failure to evolve as a filmmaker. The interesting moments were drowned out by the stale ones. But I still have a soft spot for Luhrmann films. The bombast, spectacle and visual candy with a touch of camp. I hope that he finds a way to combine that zaniness with more forward thinking ideas in his future projects.
When I was infected by hip hop for the first time, I mostly paid attention to the mcs. It was all about Rakim and Kane and KRS ONE. I loved a good beat, but it played second fiddle to a dope verse. It wasn’t until I listened to 3 Feet High and Rising and Enter the Wu Tang for the twentieth time (sometimes I miss the technical limits of the cassette era – being forced to listen to a set of tracks in a defined order on a regular basis really helps you become intimately familiar with every element of each song) that I really noticed how producers like Prince Paul and the RZA weren’t just providing a great track for the mc to ride, but shaping the way listeners experienced the album.
I don’t like to review the first issue of a comic series, especially if the story’s not self contained. It feels too much like reviewing the first chapter of a book, the first half hour of a film or the first episode of a serialized tv show. I’m never sure if any problems I have with the story or the execution will be resolved or disappear as the story progresses. Sometimes creators just need space and time to figure things out. I’ve read any number of disappointing comic series with transcendent first issues and amazing series that had a slow start. So why not wait? Because the analogy between comics and other art forms has a limit. The industry and culture of comics are fundamentally different from television, books and film. Movies and books are (mostly) produced and sold as singular objects. We might consume them piecemeal, but the only thing wasted by a ‘wait and see’ approach to the story is time. Although television episodes and comic book issues can be appreciated as discrete works of pop art or as components of a larger story, most people still buy TV shows via a subscription to a network or streaming service. Comics are different. While subscription services, stand alone graphic novels, story collections and free/ad-supported webcomics are growing in prominence, there are still an awful lot of comics produced and sold in the individual issue format at three to five dollars a pop. It’s hard to wait for things to improve if it’s costing you money. Readers can wait until an arc is completed, but the ‘Wednesday Warrior’ culture that has developed around the Direct Market also exerts social pressure on readers to read and discuss comics as individual issues. It’s hard to be patient and wait for a book to get better.
Well. That was certainly a long commercial break, but we’re back. For those who may have forgotten (and who could blame you!), I’m Jamaal. Here’s a quick recap.
I’m a co-founder of the Funnybook Babylon podcast and blog (we had things to say about comic books). I also tumbl about things at Infected Worldmind. About two years ago, I realized that I had things to say about the broader world of pop culture, so I started a separate wordpress blog. In the fall of 2014, I moved from the Bronx to New Haven (Connecticut) and my blog was hacked. All of my efforts to repair the blog were unsuccessful, so I decided to start a new blog in November 2014. What happened next?