The Green Light in 3D!

Rating: 9/10 (11 May 2013)

It is a very good movie and does as good a job as possible at adapting a movie to a great novel like "Gatsby". Most "professional" reviews have it all wrong. As some other positive reviews point out very well, the people making these bad reviews must not understand the novel. The "over the top" and "excess" criticism -- the most prevalent in the bad reviews -- completely miss the point that the novel is in part about the excess and over the top nature of the Roaring Twenties. The music is appropriate I think and done well. Is it worth your time and money (the bottom line)? Absolutely. Remember you are seeing these characters through the observer in both the book and the movie, not through the eyes of the characters themselves. Remember it is not just a love story, it is also a commentary on the American Dream (the Green Light is the symbol for that dream, btw) and the Jazz Age written in the middle of it. They take one literary departure. They turn Nick Carraway (get it -- "care-away") into a writer looking back from the Great Depression. This allows them to use the words of the novel more than most movie adaptations and also describes after the fact something that Fitzgerald was able to see in real time (a very rare talent). The bad thing to me was I don't understand how their hats were supposed to stay on while racing across the Queensboro Bridge, and I think the ending would have been better if had stayed exactly like it was in the book. But then I guess they had to condense some of that for time reasons. The best thing about the movie? The ending paragraph of the book -- perhaps the best single description of The American Dream in literature -- is also the end of the movie, and they throw it up on the screen in a way that is cool in 3D. A little trivia - that paragraph is also on Fitzgerald's grave stone in Maryland. So go see it.