Baz Jazz Hands: Celebrating baseball victory with The Great Gatsby

This is the penultimate viewing in my 2023 bi-monthly series rewatching the six feature films of Baz Luhrmann. 

I won my fantasy baseball league on Monday morning my time.

It's my second win in three years, after I took home the trophy in 2021 as well.

Woo hoo.

I obviously don't talk about it a lot on here -- this is a movie blog, in case you weren't aware -- but fantasy baseball occupies a sizeable percentage of my brain from early March to early October each year. (Early October if I'm lucky and make it all the way to the finals, as I did this year -- otherwise I begin the weaning off process starting as early as mid-September, depending on how quickly I'm eliminated.)

The end of the fantasy baseball season, in fact, usually begins the transition to my obsession with movies (and the NBA) that takes me through to my year-end rankings. At which point -- lo and behold -- it's almost time for baseball again. (Nice to have obsessions that fuel you year-round, I've found -- it means you always have something to look forward to.)

To celebrate my win, I decided to watch The Great Gatsby on Monday night for Baz Jazz Hands.

That might seem like a disconnect, but hear me out.

The scenes I remember most from my first two viewings of The Great Gatsby, which both occurred ten years ago in 2013, are the lavish party sequences taking place at Jay Gatsby's West Egg mansion. Their celebratory atmosphere seemed just the thing to crown my fifth fantasy baseball championship in 30 years of playing fantasy baseball. (Of course, I forgot that a lot of the rest of the story ranges from mildly to very depressing.)

As I was watching these scenes again, it struck me how they are similar in time period and bacchanalian excess to the party scenes depicted in last year's Babylon from director Damien Chazelle. The feeling of the scenes, though, couldn't be more different, and points up the essential underlying optimism that characterizes Baz Luhrmann's work and continues to make him -- I think I can now say it with confidence -- a favorite director.

Those scenes in Babylon feel like Chazelle smearing our faces in the dog shit of the characters' lurid deviance. The Gatsby characters, while probably getting equally drunk and engaging in similar shenanigans, feel like innocents, people having the time of their lives as they are seduced by the grandeur of Gatsby's orbit. 

I prefer the latter -- not always, but certainly given the mean-spiritedness with which Chazelle depicts these scenes, and their comparative lightness in Luhrmann's film. (I should add that my first viewing of Gatsby was in 3D, which just made this stuff all the more delightfully delirious.)

Watching these Luhrmann films back to back has made me even more aware of a Luhrmann Template that I continue to enjoy. Gatsby is just his latest example of a movie told by a writer in recollection of a period of ecstasy in his life, one that is now sadly in the past and out of reach. Its most obvious corollary in his filmography is Moulin Rouge, with the slight difference that Nick Carraway (Tobey Maguire) is more of a third party in this film whereas Christian (Ewan McGregor) is the central figure in the earlier film's featured romance. Luhrmann is big on song and dance as a means of showing his characters at the height of their happiness and glory, though because he's a romantic, we know these films also have to end in tragedy. Romeo + Juliet is certainly another example of that tragic ending. 

Strictly Ballroom and Australia both end happily, but are no less effective for it. Especially since I reacted so positively to Australia this time, I'm starting to think that Luhrmann is effective in any mode, and I have yet to find a film of his where his missteps are any more than minor.

I do have one humorously significant complaint about The Great Gatsby, but it can be chalked up more to an idiosyncratic tic than anything I really want to criticize about the filmmaking.

Namely: Was Leonardo DiCaprio paid by the number of times he used the phrase "old sport"?

In F. Scott Fitzgerald's original novel, "Old Sport" -- probably more appropriately capitalized, because it functions as a nickname -- is what Gatsby calls Carraway whenever he speaks to him. He uses it when speaking to a few other people, but we see him speak to Carraway more than anyone else.

And I say "whenever he speaks to him," I mean "whenever he speaks to him" -- at least in this film, if not the novel. 

If your name was Nick and you had a conversation with someone where they said "You know, Nick, I was thinking about an idea I had. Nick, I thought I would throw a party tonight. It's because I'm celebrating, Nick. You see, Nick, I just won my fantasy baseball league." You'd think that was weird, right? Everyone knows your name is Nick. You don't need to say it every sentence.

It's even weirder when it is a goofy, quaint, awkward nickname like "Old Sport."

Was this Luhrmann's idea? DiCaprio's? Is the frequency of this nickname established in the book and they are just trying to be faithful in their adaptation?

I don't know. But it's annoying as hell. Next time I watch The Great Gatsby -- maybe another ten years from now -- I will make a drinking game out of it. Or at the very least, count the actual number of occurrences.

But as I said, this is a humorous complaint that does not detract from another excellently conceived vision by Luhrmann. It's not just the unparalleled attention to design details, resulting in a luxurious production design. It's not just the wistful feeling that suffuses the film. It's not just the incredible ability of Carey Mulligan and Elizabeth Debicki (who I first discovered in this film) to play flappers. It's not just the hissible villain, this time played by Joel Edgerton. 

It's all of it, which wraps me up in its spell, even though its second half is a downer compared to its first. The complete package leaves The Great Gatsby jockeying for position around the middle of my Luhrmann rankings, with the likes of Strictly Ballroom and my newly appreciated Australia. (As much as I did enjoy Romeo + Juliet on this viewing, I think it may now be looking up from the bottom.)

Where will Elvis fit into all this on my second viewing? We'll find out in December. 

The year that filled up

Now that we're past Thanksgiving, it's time to get in that reflective mood as the year starts to close down.

Too early for year-end lists, mind you, but not too early to start assessing what kind of year 2012 has been.

I don't think this has been a great year for movies, but it certainly has been a full one.

When was the last time you can remember hearing about four major releases that had to be shifted to the following calendar year?

Most release years include one or two movies that must move their release dates forward for one reason or another. But in 2012, The Great Gatsby, Gravity, Gangster Squad and G.I. Joe: Retaliation all jumped to 2013.

Must have something to do with the letter G, though The Grey, Goon, Gone, Ghost Rider: Spirit of Vengeance, Good Deeds and God Bless America were all spared.

So the market is becoming more competitive but less good. What else is new?

Then again, the best part of the release schedule is still largely ahead of us. And it was from now until the end of the year that the first three of the four delayed titles were scheduled to come out.

With The Great Gatsby, the reason for the delay (to May 10, 2013) is listed on wikipedia as "delays in the production schedule." But conventional wisdom suggests that perhaps Warner Brothers didn't want to send Leonardo DiCaprio up against Leonardo DiCaprio. The Great Gatsby was supposed to come out at Christmas ... which is when Quentin Tarantino's Django Unchained, starring one Leo DiCaprio, is also going to quench our Quentin thirst.

Gravity -- Alfonso Cuaron's long, long-awaited follow-up to 2006's Children of Men -- is cruelly having an entire year tacked on to that wait. Originally slated for the day before Thanksgiving this year, the movie now won't bow until next October 18th. It sounds like the reason for the delay is all the CG required in post. I'm reading that Cuaron is experimenting with all kinds of innovative technology, including an "uninterrupted" 17-minute take (though the article suggests that the take is done with digital assistance, unlike the long takes in Children of Men, which were au naturel).

Gangster Squad fell victim to that old problem of having a trailer containing subject matter that was rendered controversial by real-world events. The Gangster Squad trailer they were showing this summer had a bunch of baddies with tommy guns blowing away patrons in a movie theater from behind the screen. The shooting in Aurora, Colorado during The Dark Knight Rises pretty much killed that particular trailer. And not only is that scene now gone from the movie, but the whole movie was moved by four months from September to January 11th (a release date that would be a sign of very low confidence by the studio in most cases). Maybe it was reshoots, maybe it was just trying to keep a wide berth from those tragic events.

G.I. Joe: Retaliation has the most number of apparent reasons for its delay from this past June to next May. The "official" reasons are that 3G is being added in post-production and that Paramount is trying to boost interest in international markets. (Since when aren't international markets interested in Hollywood action movies?) However, the unofficial reasons include all of the following: reshoots to avoid the early death of Channing Tatum's character, after Tatum had officially become a star in 2012 (hey, it's not a spoiler if it isn't going to end up happening in the movie); a desire not to compete with Tatum's Magic Mike, which was set to open the same day (in a situation that echoes the potential Christmas Day DiCaprio double feature); and, um, that's it, but the rule of three dictates I list three things.

And come to think of it, it isn't only movies that start with G that have jumped ship from 2012. I just thought of a fifth movie that was supposed to come out this year, but didn't: World War Z. The adaptation of Max Brooks' popular zombie novel would have been part of that crowded late December release schedule had it not been for production delays and the seven weeks of reshoots that were required earlier this year. With or without those reshoots, the trailer tells me this movie might be a bigger disaster than an actual zombie apocalypse.

Of course, now that I've analyzed the reasons for the delays of five major would-be 2012 films, it seems pretty clear that none of them were delayed only because "too many movies are already coming out in 2012." In each case there seem to be other factors, even if they are as simple as too many movies by one of the movie's stars coming out during the expected release window -- not too many movies in general.

What I think this really illustrates is how over time, making movies is becoming an increasingly complicated proposition, with studios finding profit margins to be ever thinner, and the need seeming ever more paramount to fine-tune the movie until it's a perfect product released at a perfect time.

Or, maybe it's just a statistical blip.