The Great Gatsby film review

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Promotional Image for The Great Gatsby © 2013 Warner Bros. Ent. All Rights Reserved

I may have mentioned before that I’m not a huge fan of The Great Gatsby and am surprised that, when there is so much fantastic American literature in the world, it is still hailed by some as The Great American Novel. It just left me feeling empty. I won’t rehash my reasons for this, Kathryn Schulz covers it very nicely in her article Why I Despise The Great Gatsby for anyone who is interested.

Last night was the box office opening for The Great Gatsby film in the UK. I went to see it in 3D at 7:45pm, pretty much peak cinema going time, in a usually busy cinema, but the screening was half empty. This suggested to me that this great American novel doesn’t translate so well for a UK audience, though it may just have been that people had better things to do.

Though Luhrmann stayed true to the text and made use of a lot of direct quotation in the film, I found that I liked it better than the book. Luhrmann had managed to invest the characters in the film with a small amount of emotional depth which was, for me, totally lacking in the book and at times injected a little humour. Visually, as you might expect from the director of Romeo and Juliet and Moulin Rouge, it was stunning though the 3D effects occasionally left me feeling a little seasick, especially when lines from the text floated on the screen like snowflakes (maybe this was deliberate, we are all boats beating on against the current after all…). Watch it for the costumes if nothing else, they may be morally bankrupt, but I would love to attend a Gatsby party in a flapper dress.

The problem for me was, that despite the actors and director doing a fine job with the story that they’d been given, the slick production and a catchy soundtrack, the story was still the same. I couldn’t care about any of the characters, and felt a little repelled by Leonardo di Caprio’s obsessive Gatsby and his controlling fixations. The film was well made but I felt, as I did when I read the book, totally underwhelmed. I just couldn’t care enough. I was amazed that the woman next to me was snivelling and sniffing so loudly that she drowned out the credits, turning to her date and proclaiming, “It’s just so sad!” I wanted to ask her whether we’d just watched the same film.

Lit geeks will probably want to watch the film anyway, but I’d be interested to hear what anyone who has seen it thought of the narrative frame which sees Nick Carraway (played by Toby Maguire) writing The Great Gatsby while recovering in a sanatorium, a kind of Fitzgerald character.

Have you seen it? What did you think?

Various Pets Alive & Dead by Marina Lewyka

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If you’re looking for a gentle, amusing read with a bit of contemporary relevance and by an author worth name checking, look no further than Various Pets Alive and Dead by Marina Lewyka, she of A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian fame*.

Various Pets Alive and Dead tells the story of the Free family, who used to live in a Socialist commune, as memories drift to the surface and secrets are revealed. It won’t change your life, but it might make you smile wryly. It may also leave you with the question: does everyone who ever had a younger sibling and a pet hamster at the same time have a story about what said younger sibling did to the hamster?

 

*sounds like the kind of title I’ve seen in some academic profiles recently…

Jane Austen Stamp

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I’ve probably mentioned that I’m not the biggest Jane Austen fan in the world but this stamp really brightened my day when it arrived on a letter in work:

Jane Austen Anniversary Stamp

Sense and Sensibility Stamp

Isn’t it sweet? This is why I should post more letters. Then I might receive more of the same!

Gender Bending Covers

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Game of Thrones cover re-branded as commercial women’s fiction

I was really interested to see the backlash against mainstream publishers who package fiction by women as commercial, women’s interest fiction in saccharine pink covers while promoting fiction on similar subjects by men as literary fiction, even though the writing is of the same quality covering similar themes.

Maureen Johnson lead the charge, asking her twitter followers to create covers for books by famous male author which flipped the author’s gender and thus rendered the writing “commercial” rather than “literary” in the eyes of many publishers. You can see some of the best results here.

I think Jodi Picoult expressed the stupidity of the double standard perfectly in this tweet:

Jodi Picoult Tweet

 

 

 

 

I came across this story after reading a tweet by Marina Fiorato who wrote The Venetian Contract which had a similar cover positioning issue that I commented on when I reviewed the book. The Guardian picked up the story and discusses some other worrying decisions that publishers have made when designing book covers here.

What’s the worst cover design issue that you’ve come across?

Fire at the National Library of Wales

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National Library of Wales copyright Caroline Ramsden

My brother who is currently a student at Aberystwyth University (my old uni) text me earlier today to tell me there was a fire at the National Library of Wales in Aberystwyth. I have a joint honours in English Literature and Welsh, and as a part of my Welsh language studies we visited a lot of important Welsh cultural institutions to talk to the staff about the role of the Welsh language there. The National Library of Wales was one of these, and I remember being terrified at the idea of being there when a fire broke out because of the tour behind the scenes.

The National Library of Wales is a copyright library which means that it holds a copy of every book or newspaper published in the UK. There are miles and miles of shelves behind the scenes and because many of the documents are very rare, they would be damaged by water sprinklers in the event of the fire, so they have air tight steel walls which come down before the room is pumped full of carbon dioxide to prevent the materials stored becoming fire damaged. I think a special alarm sounded to let you know that the steel curtains were coming down and you had a minute to get out. Really scary. At least you’d stand a chance of getting out of a burning building.

You can read more about the fire here

The Republic of Letters Project at Stanford

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Excuse me a moment, I have my geek hat on. In work today I heard about a really cool Digital Humanities project being developed at Stanford University which I thought that you might be interested in. It’s called The Republic of Letters and it is a big data project which allows users to map letters that were sent between European and American intellectuals during the Enlightenment and filter by writer and date to allow academics to draw conclusions from the data, making visual representations of Enlightenment era social networking.

An example of data mapping from the Republic of Letters project at Stanford University, copyright Stanford University.

Their website has some case studies and the tools section has some interesting screenshots, so it’s definitely worth checking out if you’re interested in writers from the Enlightenment period. There’s loads of interesting information on the website. It’s really cool seeing a tool like this being developed and I can’t wait to see how it aids research in the Humanities. It could be like the use of satellite imaging in archeology and that’s thrown up some really interesting things.

Shakespeare’s Birthday Playlist

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Shakespeare's Birthday Playlist Happy 499th birthday, Mr Shakespeare! Following on from my post about my favourite Shakespeare Inspired Songs last year, I thought I would really liven the party up with a Shakespeare inspired playlist from my Spotify account. Let me know if there’s anything great that I’m missing and I’ll make sure I add it (Phantom Siren sent me some great suggestions last year).

 

 

 

 

So we have a mixture of songs about Shakespeare plays, songs inspired by Shakespeare lines and a few sonnets set to music… Now all we need is some Shakespeare style party food and we’ll have a good thing going.

Labyrinth TV Series

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Promo image for Labyrinth TV series 2012

Did anyone else watch the mini-series adaptation of Kate Mosse’s Labyrinth starring Jessica Brown Findlay, Tom Felton and Vanessa Kirby? And if you did, were you really disappointed in it?

I’m not sure who wrote the script, or whether it received a hard edit, but I thought that the character progression sucked to the point where characters in the books were totally transformed. Sajhe is played by a twenty something all the way through, so instead of seeing a boy growing up in love with Alais and doing everything he can to protect her, you get a (slightly gormless) brooding young man who stares at her in a creepily perverted way throughout. Audric wasn’t old or frail enough and was far, far too smug, thus enhancing this weirdness. Likewise, there’s no chance for a relationship/reconciliation to develop between Alais and Guillame or Alice and Will, so Alais looks weak and insipid in the formed and creepy spontaneous face sucking breaks out between the latter.

The typecasting didn’t help either. I’m not sure that it’s bad acting per se, but Jessica Findlay Brown pouted her way through the series in a poor repetition of her portrayal of Lady Sibyl in Downton Abbey to the point where she looked a little concussed as though she was waiting for Carson to come in and explain what the heck was going on. Oriane was played by Morgana from BBC’s Merlin, who occasionally plays the part of Irish actress Katie McGrath, but fortunately, she didn’t need to act in this role, just stride around cackling madly (as in Merlin) while trying to maintain a constant accent and simulating bad sex with Alais’ husband.

Oh and the sex was bad. If you’re going to do it, do it properly. Oriane and Guillame looked as though they were doing some weird form of aerobics, lined up in their respective positions ensuring that there was at least two feet of air between their persons at all time. And I’m not a prude by any stretch of the imagination, but I’m not sure what exactly lingering shots of Jessica Findlay Brown’s naked arse added to the telling of the story. It’s a lovely bum, don’t get me wrong, but it just felt a bit creepy, as if I were POV of the newly perverted Sajhe. In fact, the concept of the Grail seemed to be secondary to the weird sex/tangled relationships element of it.

It’s a pity that this hadn’t been made into a bigger budget film, or at least a proper TV series and actors who weren’t playing stock types from other popular series. All in all a real let down for me.

What did you think?

Cloud Atlas- a film review by someone who read the book

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A weekend or so ago, I went to see the film version of David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas. I will put it out there from the beginning that I rather enjoyed it, though could see why many people wouldn’t. For one thing, if you hadn’t read the book I don’t think you stand a hope in hell of following what was going on. If you have read the book, then it’s interesting to see how they’ve adapted the story to screen.

In many ways, the script and casting would have been better suited to a theatre production. I didn’t hate the idea of actors playing several characters (possibly because I spent too much time in drama groups as a teenager) but even I found it a little gimmicky towards the end. It is also very, very long. So long that if you haven’t seen it in the cinema yet, I would recommend waiting until it is released on DVD so that you can watch it but cut it into hour-long chunks at a time. On the whole I would have preferred it as a TV series.

In addition to the length and the rep style casting (which was clever but overdone) my main criticism would be that I think they over did it with the concept of reincarnation and made it the centre of the story in a way that it just wasn’t in the book. Once you’d finished playing what Charlie Brooker called something like Where’s Wally with famous people, you end up feeling like you’re playing spot the birthmark. Unless you haven’t read the book, friends I’ve talked to who hadn’t didn’t notice it.

My thoughts on each individual story and how they were adapted are below:

 

A Pacific Journal of Adam Ewing (Adam Ewing)

By far the driest story in the novel (though important, obviously) I think they did a great job of making this more interesting on the screen. They brushed over the darker elements of racial Darwinism and focussed on the story of an unlikely friendship between a professional white man and an escaped slave who become one another’s salvation. Which was a relief. I thought that Tom Hanks was reasonable here but when I read the book and thought about a film adaptation, I pictured Robert Downey Jr playing Henry Bones. Maybe I’d just watched one of the Sherlock Holmes films.

Letters from Zedelghem (Robert Frobisher)

This was probably my favourite story in the book. I loved Frobisher’s irreverent narrative and shady dealing s and I do think Ben Whishaw was perfectly cast, sadly this story was massively interfered with partly to reduce the film’s running time and budget, partly because… well who knows? The story is moved from Belgium to Edinburgh, Ayres is syphilitic but no longer blind. Nor is he nearly as vile as he was in the novel. The daughter is cut out completely, which makes it look as though Frobisher commits suicide as a result of a rejected pass at Vyvyan Ayres. My mind is still reeling from the horror of it. On the Brightside, you get to see Ben Whishaw naked. Which means I get to type that and net in unsuspecting googlers who aren’t in it for his acting talents.

The First Luisa Rae Mystery (Luisa Rey)

Halle Berry was pretty good here, it’s just a pity that you don’t really get much information about why everyone is being killed. Hugh Grant is smarmy. I’m not sure Tom Hanks in a blonde wig is a love at first sight thing. By far the worst thing about this story was that they had Agent Smith from The Matrix playing another bad guy. Actually he cropped up as Agent Smith from The Matrix in some of the other stories as well. Must’ve been a glitch in the matrix…

The Ghastly Ordeal of Timothy Cavendish (Timothy Cavendish)

Another great story in the book, this was well adapted in the film and made me laugh almost as much as reading the book did. Though when I laughed at Tom Hanks’ Irish accent, it wasn’t in a good way. I was a little confused about why they tried to make this story look like a reincarnation link between Luisa Rey and Somni-451, since the Luisa Rey story is set in 1975 and Timothy Cavendish is present day and 65, so the dates don’t work. This is made clearer in the book by Cavendish wanting to edit allusions to reincarnation out, but I guess that doesn’t work with the “message” of the film. Oh, and you get to see Ben Whishaw in drag. Sorry, need those google hits.

An Orison of Somni-451 (Somni)

Again, well adapted and this story was visually stunning. I think they blew their production budget here which explains why they had to save on Hugh Grant’s make up in every other story. The book is far nastier than this extract in the film. A lot has been cut eg. Somni’s time as a student’s Science project and the horrible moment with the little fabricant doll. I thought one of the eeriest bits of the book was when Somni explained to the archivist that everything she had told him had been a story and that she wasn’t the first ascended fabricant- they cut that for the film but I thought they made up for it quite well.

Sloosha’s Crossin an’Ev’thin’ After (Zachary)

To be fair to Tom Hanks and Halle Berry, I think they acted this as well as they could have done with this. You lost a bit of dialogue from the dialect, but otherwise this was well acted and the setting was beautiful. My main issue was that in the book Zachary is a teenage boy when you see his father and brother killed/taken at Sloosha’s crossing and it explains his fear of Old Georgie without making him look like a coward who sat back and watched a child die. Tom Hanks’ Zachary was harder to like because you don’t see the death of his father, the disappearance of his brother, the loss of his baby when he’s still very young. So to make Zachary and Meronym the same age… meh. I wasn’t a big fan but it was well enough done for what it was.

 

 

My Top 5 Fictional Badgers #teambadger

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Image by BadgerHero, used under the terms of Wikimedia Commons License

Badgers remind me of my childhood. Mysterious woodland animals who usually played a noble role in fiction, defending the weak, standing up for what was right… They remind me of more innocent days in my naive youth. A time when I believed that a democratically elected government had to listen to the views of the people, or, if they insisted upon taking a paternalistic approach, the mainstream of scientific opinion… you know, silly things like that…

Given the UK government’s current foray into badger fiction* (fiction in the sense that they are flying in the face of the facts/a ten-year independent scientific study into badgers and Bovine TB) I thought I would share my top five badgers in actual fiction.

 

1. The Badger Lords of the Redwall Series  by Brian Jacques

I was obsessed with the Redwall Series by the late, great Brian Jacques when I was small. I’ve always had a fondness for rodents. The Redwall books are a little like what Lord of the Rings might be if you take out the magic and replace hobbits, dwarves and orcs with mice, squirrels and wildcats.  My favourite characters always the badgers and the mice. Though the badgers are noble characters, they suffer from bloodwrath which turns their eyes red, the sign of a great warrior who will not hold back or even be able to restrain themselves in the heat of battle.

2. Badger in The Animals of Farthing Wood by Colin Dann

If you’re of a similar age to me, you’ll probably remember The Animals of Farthing Wood as a television series in which a diverse group of woodland animals  who are threatened by man’s interference in their wood, form a motley crew and journey to the safety of a woodland reserve. It doesn’t look as though this will go ahead, due to the smaller animals natural fear of the carnivores eating them, until Badger suggests they take an oath of mutual protection. It’s a very nice story about understanding other people’s limitations and supporting them (Badger carries Mole on his back because he can only walk very slowly). Someone should also read it to the Environment Secretary because it makes the point that animals under threat migrate.

3. Tommy Brock The Tale of Mr Tod Beatrix Potter

Now Tommy Brock is a very naughty badger, the kind of badger you could imagine the government wanting to do something about. Don’t be fooled by his smart waistcoat and downturned gaze. This is the kind of badger who would steal a nest of baby rabbits and hides them in Mr Tod’s oven. Now you might say that badgers don’t commonly eat rabbits in the wild. To that I say, foxes don’t commonly own ovens. We’re suspending our disbelief here. Suspended? Thank you. Many people love Beatrix Potters “good characters” but I’ve always had a soft spot for the villains. Yes, I prefer Samuel Whiskers to Tom Kitten, and I salute Tommy Brock for stealing the baby rabbits and making everyone wonder why Benjamin Bunny decided to sire a family with his first cousin Flopsy. Well, that’s rabbits for you.

4. Mr Badger The Wind in the Willows by Kenneth Graeme

I admire any badger that wears a dressing gown, and the solitary Mr Badger may have attempted to stage one of the first interventions in literature when he tried to dissuade Toad from his path of self-destruction by placing him under house arrest. Interestingly, Badger and Mole are driven out of Toad Hall by a crew of stoats and weasels. Did you know that the TB virus can survive for a very long time in empty badger setts, infecting any badgers which move into the area. Interestingly, since rats and weasels move into Toad Hall, rats, weasels and ferrets can also carry the disease. As can foxes. And deer… shoot anything that moves will be next.

5. Trufflehunter Prince Caspian C S Lewis

This Old Narnian badger rescues Prince Caspian and hides him when he is fleeing from his evil, murderous Uncle Miraz. As a good and true Narnian, he surely lives on in Aslan’s Country, the true Narnia. But you have to wonder what fate lies in store for less vocal members of the meles meles if the government proceed with this madness.

 

Honourable mention should go to Bill of Rupert the Bear fame and Captain Ramshackle of Automated Alice but I felt that we had one randomologist too many in the form of Owen Paterson at this time.

* Even if your name isn’t Sherlock, you will notice that I have used this post on fictional badgers to ram home my views on the cull. I make no apology for that, it is madness. A ten-year study has shown that culling will not solve the problem of Bovine TB. It may in fact make it worse as studies showed TB decreasing in cull zones but rapidly increasing in surrounding areas. 92% of the surveyed British public are against the culls so both the scientists and the people the government have been elected to represent are being ignored.

If you’re a UK resident and as annoyed about this as I am please sign this petition. It’s already been debated once and the cull was postponed. Hopefully a second debate will see the cull cancelled altogether and Bovine TB managed through vaccination, improved husbandry and better biosecurity.