Movie Reviews

GONE GIRL, starring Ben Affleck, Rosamund Pike

Gone Girl is a smart, suspenseful ride with frightening plot twists. I liked it all the way through to the last five minutes. And then I didn’t.

(This is better than the movie I watched recently that I liked all the way until I got into the car to go home and then didn’t like.)

Here’s the story: beautiful Amy (Ms. Pike) meets charming Nick (Mr. Affleck) in New York City. They fall in love, get married, and then move to Missouri to care for Nick’s mother as she battles cancer. After the mother’s death, the couple inherits her house where things go from love and trust to distrust and hate, culminating in Amy’s disappearance.

Amy’s parents are crazy authors who wrote a series of books about the daughter they wished they had (also named Amy) who gets all the toys and experiences real Amy never got. Try that on for emotional bullying.

Amy’s husband looks like a million bucks, but may not be the world’s most faithful guy, something that won’t go well for him once the police and FBI start to get picky about little things like evidence and “Do you love your wife?”

Throw in a couple of Amy’s old boyfriends, each of whom has plenty of motive to want her off the planet, Nick’s old father who appears to hate Amy, and his sister who certainly does, and there are plenty of suspicious folks around.

The acting is great. Ben Affleck–as a man who may have murdered his wife in cold blood–is thoughtful and convincing, bringing back bad memories of Scott Peterson. Rosamund Pike is beautiful and versatile as a wife whose marriage has not turned out as spectacularly triumphant as she imagined it would. Tyler Perry is great as Nick’s defense attorney.

As I mentioned above, I was on board with this movie until the very end. I love an unpredictable movie like this one that is full of plot twists and sudden gasps from the audience, but the thing is this: I want movies to end. Unless it is known there is going to be a sequel, the end should tie off the major dramatic questions and provide a sense of closure. If a movie is going to leave things hanging, there had better be a good reason.

For example, Inception ended with that awful spinning-spinning-maybe-falling-maybe-not top. It was important that we go away wondering whether Dom was still dreaming, and of course I choose to believe he was home at last with his children. You can believe what you want. Don’t start with me on this.

In Gone Girl, it’s different. There’s no happily-ever-after possibility. There’s only the possibility of looming dreaded disaster or family-crushing catastrophe, and the only question is how bad it’s going to get from here. There’s zero hope of normalcy, no hope for a yellow brick road or even a silver lining.

There are so many ways they could have ended this movie other than the way they did. So many ways that could have provided a glimmer of something resembling at least a chance of hope. They chose not to. I’m okay with it, and I think you should see this movie if you like a good suspenseful ride, I just wish they had sewn it up nicer.

DAWN OF THE PLANET OF THE APES, starring Andy Serkis

First let me say that it’s cool beans to see the words “Andy Serkis” at the top of the credits. ‘Bout time. Now, on to the bad parts.

There’s nothing wrong with this movie but the script, and what follows is all spoiler, so please stop reading immediately if you’re going to see Dawn of the Planet of the Apes. I’m about to ruin it for you, and I apologize for that. Stop reading. Go to the movie, then come back and read this.

I looked forward to this movie for three years, same as you did. I wanted it to be amazing. Sadly, the scriptwriters went all nutty on us, but you can’t really blame them. They were tasked with making a tense, edge-of-your-seat story out of an isolated community of law-abiding, family-oriented Apes who just want to live by themselves in the woods and bow down to their benevolent Caesar. In order to do that, they had to bring in some very stupid Humans.

It’s been ten years since “simian flu” struck down 499 out of 500 of those who caught it, leaving (obviously) 1/500 of the world’s population, assuming every person on earth was exposed to the virus. Given the isolation of some communities, I’m not sure this is a reasonable assumption, but even if it is, something that is certain is that the one-in-five-hundred who survived in San Francisco were not high scorers on the SAT, and by SAT, I mean the Stanford Achievement Test. Dummies! They stay within spitting distance of Muir Woods when there’s perfectly good Sacramento a hundred miles away, perfectly good Vallejo less than half that distance (plus it has a Six Flags, and with everyone dead, no more long lines). More on the moving-away idea later.

Let’s talk about the Apes’ insistence on using American Sign Language, when they can speak. What’s up with that? We have to read yellow subtitles for endless minutes to understand the Apes’ conversation, when–darn it–ten years have passed and Maurice (the orangutan) is teaching school. He’s literally teaching reading to the youngsters, so maybe, just maybe, he would have taught some classes on speaking, though in Usual World, it’s parents who teach their children to speak.

Back to the craziness of the Humans. The population of San Francisco currently is around 837,000. Divide by 500 and you get 1,674. There don’t seem to be that many, but that may be because the smart ones took a fleet of Hertz Rental Trucks, backed them up to Wal-Mart, loaded up with supplies, and headed over to the Central Valley to get started making a life away from the loonies who stayed in town and let it overgrow with weeds. What is wrong with these people? Almost two-thousand people and they can’t set up a working township? The Pilgrims would hang their heads in shame at this level of helplessness, and they weren’t the smartest kids in class, but don’t get me started.

Talk about helplessness, these people have waited ten years to try to contact other survivor communities. Give me a break. In ten years, no one made a call to LA or drove down, looting Starbucks for trentas along the way? No one phoned home? Called the one remaining Member of Congress? Got ahold of Anderson Cooper? (Anderson would totally survive.) Failing phones, no one in ten years has established so much as a telegraph? Frisco is chock-a-block with high rises, luxury homes, townhouses, stores, and no one has worked out that there may be generators around? No one raided Walgreens for double As? These people have dissolved into helpless “Please, Leader, tell me what to do” instead of using their combined brain power to establish a working city.

It’s as though the scriptwriters want us to believe that when 499 out of 500 people die, there are no cars left either. Dystopia descends, when, really, everyone would be living in luxury. Everyone has his own building! Closets full of clothes! Fleets of cars! It’s as though the Rapture happened without the Tribulation following. Think what you could do with the stuff of 499 other people.

Would you really stay squashed downtown bowing down to a guy who doesn’t have the brains to leave? You would not. You would go to Malibu. You might leave the nice Apes a note: “If you don’t mind, we’ll take everything south of Fresno.” The Apes would think, “Agreed. Who wants Fresno?”

Back to math. That same little “divide by 500” effort reveals that the United States alone (I used 300 million) would have a population of 600,000. No small potatoes, and speaking of potatoes, how ’bout taking that Ryder Truck out to Idaho and getting busy? Why stay in the crowded downtown next door to your natural enemies? The world population is around 7 billion, right? Divide by 500 and you get 14 million. This is a lot of people to work with, and even if most of the people who survived in San Francisco aren’t working with a full deck–blame the super-easily-available marijuana in a post-virus Frisco–other populations might have survived with some people who are running on full tanks. Some of them would have the sense to fly airplanes around and see if anyone’s home.

Now, on to the story: the Humans of San Francisco need electrical power. For whatever reason, they let the power plants die, there are no more electricians, and the Army Corps of Engineers is disbanded. The only way they can make electricity is to go exactly into Muir Woods and try to get some water power plant thing place (whatever) going. There’s no way to, say, go to San Jose or Oakland. The only possible way to get power is to go to Caesar’s hideout. (Thomas Edison himself would throw a tantrum here. He made electricity out of almost nothing, and these people let a decade go by without dealing. Obviously, the smart people shook their heads and left, the only question being, “north or south on the Five?” with the “duh” answer being, “Hippies, head north to Eugene, all other Californians go south, all transplants hit Highway 80 and get yourself out to New York or Washington.” You need to remember that the only smarty-pants Apes on the Planet are the few who live in Muir Woods. It is going to take them a very long time to get more than a little forest community going. You’re completely safe once you cross the Sierras.)

The Apes, by the way, are minding their own business. They are bothering no one. They aren’t interested in taking over San Francisco, and everything would have been fine, had the IQ-challenged Humans managed to figure out to stay away from them. My youngest son said, “But, Mom, they had to have a story.” With which I agree, but couldn’t it have been something better?

Isn’t it even sort of un-American to be all, “Oh no. I don’t have electricity. I’m going to have to lay down and die!” I thought we were pioneers. I thought we were survivors. The Founders defeated England without enough electricity to zap Ben Franklin’s kite, after all. I thought we would have the sense to get the heck out of Dodge and go someplace that does have working power. Is there not a cruise ship in the harbor? Is there a person who can pilot it to Honolulu? Get me a deck chair; I’m going. You don’t need electricity to live North Shore.

The good news is, after Caesar & Co. deal with all these sixteen hundred brainless Californians, the other [14,000,000 – 1,674] Humans who are left in the rest of the world can go on living their uninterrupted lives, rebuilding, repopulating, and (with any luck) co-existing with the Apes up in NorCal, who, frankly, don’t look all that interested in living in houses or moving to NYC to get a look at the Statue of Liberty. They don’t even wear clothes. Plus, they’re nice, on the whole. They only get mad at the Humans, when the Humans shoot them, which seems normal, right?

So blame it on the San Franciscans. They don’t have the brains to tap into the windmill generators. They don’t have the brains to move out of the big city. They don’t have the brains to drive down to Los Angeles. Or better, Chicago. No Ape wants to live in Chicago.

Me, I’d be down at Huntington Beach with my family–or whoever I scraped together after everyone else died–catching some waves and enjoying the uncrowded beaches. Maybe live at Disneyland and bike over to the beach occasionally. There would be enough food in the SoCal stores, warehouses, and shipping containers to last the Five Hundredths all their days, enough generators, enough stored gasoline. There’s enough cropland in the Central Valley to feed the world, and, trust me, in such a situation, the survivors would be farming it.

We knew Koba would turn out to be bad. Anyone who has Stalin’s nickname is going to be trouble. But I felt sorry for him. As Caesar says (or signs, I forget), the Humans made Koba hateful. Totally understandable then that Koba would go nuts when Humans come in shooting.

How could the plot have been better? Maybe make the Apes more aggressive? Pit Koba against Caesar from the beginning and make it a turf war in which the Apes are forced to go into the City to get weapons, whereupon they encounter unsuspecting, terrified, and heavily armed Humans? Have a nuclear explosion (from abandoned, core-melting nuclear plants) or other disaster that makes a bunch of Apes sick, so they have to go into the City to find medicine? Or maybe they burst into the hospital and demand the surgeons get to it? I don’t know. But there had to have been a better idea than the one they settled on, which was: We can’t live without electricity, so let’s go shoot the Apes.

Seems like, also, the Apes would have gone back to Gen-Sys for the rest of the ALZ-113 so they could keep it on hand to intellectually liberate the Apes of the world. Then all they would have needed to do was head over to SFO, commandeer a 747, hold guns to the heads of various pilots (or learned to fly themselves), and made a sort of missionary venture out of bringing freedom to Apes the world over. Along the way, maybe they crash land and have to work with Humans to survive together.

The end of this movie is identical to the end of the James Franco movie, which was far better. All the Apes are bowing down to Caesar, acknowledging his overlordship. We’re back where we started, except there are fewer humans, and San Francisco is more beat up. I hope they make a third movie, and I hope it has a much better plot.

Obviously, there’s going to be a giant Simian vs. Homo Sapiens war, but I don’t see why that has to be. The Apes are peaceful and just want to be left alone. There needs to be a better plot than just another series of pitched battles where the Apes have the advantage because they operate in three dimensions, and the humans have the advantage of having more rocket launchers. Please, please give us something a little more cerebral.

Rotten Tomatoes is ga-ga over Dawn, way up in the nineties, and I don’t blame them. It’s a good movie. I liked it all the way through. Then the lights came on and my brain restarted.

(There’s also a teeny little glitch where Malcolm [Jason Clarke] yells, “No, Caesar, no!” having not been told Caesar’s name before that. Caesar turns to him, and I wanted him to say, “How did you know my name?” which would have been followed by some explanation of his friendship with Will [James Franco], Caesar’s “owner” in Rise of the Planet of the Apes. That could have been something. As it is, it’s just a glitch.)

Caesar’s son is intriguing. I have hopes for him in the third installment. I hope they don’t kill off Caesar in order for Junior to take over. I want Caesar to live out his days in peace, maybe retire in Boca.

All the action and actors and filmmaking in general is great. It’s just the script that’s all wrong. But you should see it anyway, because Caesar and family are so great. And Koba is great–I wanted better for him. And the nice Humans are great. Malcom’s son is adorable; I hope he’s important in the next movie. The possibilities are endless. I hope they pick the rights ones.

BELOW SEA LEVEL

Below Sea Level is a documentary about the lives of some of the residents of Slab City, an abandoned military installation in the Southern California desert. You can watch it here.

As you drive up to Slab City, you are struck with the emptiness of this place. A few RVs, a couple of broken down cars, some tents, strewn around in the vastness of the unending California desert. It seems peaceful and calm. A haven for overworked souls who want to get away from the noise of the city.

But then you meet a few of these people and you are gripped with the soul-deep sorrow that leads a person to find himself out in the middle of absolutely nowhere, deep in a desert far from family, home, society. What leads to this? What comes of it?

The movie is raw and graphic. We follow the lives of several people disjointed from society by heartbreak. One woman spent all she had fighting a losing custody battle. Others became “residentially challenged” for other reasons. One, “Insane Wayne,” may not be in possession of all his native faculties. He is scary to look at. Cindy is a trans woman who keeps a hair and nail salon in her trailer. Mike is a struggling song writer with no ability to sing, but a decent back-up band, “The Slabettes.” Kenny, the most articulate of the slabbers, expresses a desire to keep pushing forward into normalcy, though at the end, he seems to despair of getting out, coming to believe his projects and plans are make-work, self-imposed to make him think he’s progressing.

These are the Slabbers. Homeless, living out on the vast desert, minding their own business. Some hope to get out and back into society. One woman has an interview for a live-in situation. She’s hopeful. Others hope for long-lost family members to pick up the slack and bring them home. Some call family members to make connections, but it’s clear the people on the other end are patronizing them. Trying to get off the phone and back to their lives. I didn’t blame them. I don’t know how I’d feel if my son ended up there.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QPjvDCpb-IQ

Rather, one wonders how a son could end up there. At what point did he get beyond the ordinary family care that says, “Come home, we’ll help you out”? At what point did that bond snap or get cut?

Frankly, the film is heartbreaking, and brings up more questions than it answers. Do the Slabbers want to live in-society lives or is it better for them to be separate and unnoticed? If they wanted to be integrated into society, would it be worth the bureaucratic nightmares of lines and forms and interviews and crowded public housing? Is it preferable to live essentially alone and unbothered out at the Slabs?

It’s not easy to watch this film, but I would recommend it for anyone who wants to know a little bit more about homelessness.

I was left with great uneasiness. If people drive a hundred miles out into the desert and camp there, do they want be left alone or do they want to be rescued? What would that rescue look like? Would it “stick” or would the homeless person be out at the Slabs again next year? How much does mental illness play into this, and is anyone looking to find out.

EPIC with Christoph Waltz, etc.

What’s a mother to do? Your kids want to see a movie and you have no objection except that it looks “dumb”? I went. It was fine. It was kind of cute. In fact, my biggest problem was the title. Epic why? For the sake of marketing the silly thing, perhaps? Or maybe Epic is short for e-pic, as in “We made this motion picture on computers”? Because, obviously it should have been called Secret Little People in the Forest or Tiny Elves Versus Tiny Orcs or even Christoph Waltz Awesomely Voices a Villain While Sounding Just Like that Evil Man He Plays in Inglourious Basterds. You pick, but Epic, seriously? Because it isn’t epic in any way.

Appropos of that question, I found this:

I don’t know Spanish at all, because I don’t like to do what everyone else does, which is why I didn’t read Lord of the Rings until it was required in college (“Christian Classics” or En 202), and why, in high school when I got to pick whether to take language class from Senor Mantzke or Monsieur Mantzke, I chose Monsieur, never mind I lived in Southern California. (Pause to remember Ron Mantzke, who died a couple of weeks ago. Adieu, Monsieur.)

Going on, I don’t know Spanish, but I’m pretty sure that “el reino secreto” doesn’t translate to “epic”. Someone clue me in.

Anyway, there’s this nutty father who thinks there are little elves and orcs in the forest, but no one believes him because he’s basically crazy. His daughter comes to visit and tries to bug out the moment he’s out of the way, because he’s certifiable nut-house material. Happily, she finds the little people and falls in love with a tiny man she could carry around in her pocket if she wanted to, and frankly, sometimes that would be a blessing.

The credits are really pretty, and I mean it. The screen never goes to just black with words crawling across it–the credits tell a story all the way through, although it doesn’t resolve as I’d hoped, which left me longing for Epic 2, wherein there is more Big People family involvement and they have to gang up with the little people to fend off Matt Damon and his giant natural-gas corporation (I haven’t seen that movie, so I don’t know how it ends, probably with him protecting the land from the evil capitalists–and down with them, you know?–with his own body.).

Rent it at Red Box later, because this weekend (and all other weekends for the foreseeable future) you will be seeing IRON MAN 3 or the beautiful STAR TREK: INTO DARKNESS.

STAR TREK: INTO DARKNESS, starring Chris Pine and Zachary Quinto

In the 2009 Star Trek movie, which we’ll call Alternate Reality, we rejoiced because they’d gotten it right. They took our old friends and re-made them perfectly. Perfectly cast, perfectly written, and even better, because Captain Pike wasn’t a head attached to a box that beeped once for yes and twice for no.

We rejoiced for the familiarity of the people: Spock raised his eyebrow just so. Adjusted his shirt like that. Said, “Fascinating.” Kirk was brash and disdained regulations. McCoy was plainly and simply (and oh so metaphorically) Bones. It all clicked. Plus I cried my eyes out at the beginning when a young man gave his life for his crew.

Someone else does it this time. In a neat nod to the needs of the many, we see a mirror image of a scene we’ve loved for years. This time it hurts more. This time it matters more.

Into Darkness is the story of Captain Kirk being brash, bold, sacrificial, facing a Kobayashi Maru lose-lose scenario with gut-wrenching honesty: “I don’t know what I’m supposed to do, but I know what I can do.” Isn’t that how it often is in times of crisis? No sci-fi there. That’s real.

This is the story of a friendship we’ve admired for decades being formed. Last time, we saw its tentative beginnings. This time we see the bond take hold, take root, become permanent. It’s not breakable now.

But mostly, this is the story of Commander Spock exploding out of Science Officer nerdness into full-blow action-star mode. Yeah, we know he knows everything and can fix anything and is the steady logical mind bearing up and ballasting Kirk’s brash bravado. But he’s far more than that now. He’s da man and he rocks righteous violence and delivers righteous vengeance. This is my Spock. We always knew he could do this—not just when he lost control in freak moments where his human weaknesses overcome him, but when anger needs to be unchecked and unhindered. When the needs of the one outweigh the need of a half-Vulcan chill-machine to stay calm, Spock unleashes his five-times-human strength, powerfully delivering–without reserve, without second thoughts–deserved and necessary brutality.

He can unleash his anger because he is no longer hampered by his previously-greatest fear: that he might slip and show that he’s half-human. That doesn’t matter now. He’s faced death alone and afraid, resolved to die without panic, without psychological disintegration. He’s faced the end of the world and the end of himself with the knowledge that sometimes you must do what you must do and damn the torpedoes (or lava waves, as the case may be). Having faced that, he is free to be what he knows he needs to be for his friend, when the moment comes where only he stands between his friend and death.

There are other heroic, self-giving moments in this movie, but I’ve been watching Spock for a long time now, and I am pleased to say that what we see here is Real Spock—embracing his Vulcanness, embracing his humanness—being who he really is and, in doing so, saving himself and his friend.

End paeon.

And yet I wonder whether we need to move on into plots and characters that are less familiar in order for future movies in this franchise to do well. We don’t really want to see re-makes: we want new adventures with aliens we’ve never thought of before, planets we haven’t yet encountered, dangers yet unconceived. We want new, wildly unpredictable things to happen: like Scotty’s “friend” betraying him, or Mr. Chekov growing up. I don’t really want Yeoman Rand to show up or Charlie X or the Horta. I want to go where no Trekkie has gone before. Nero gave us that in Alternate Reality, so we know the screenwriters are up to the job.

I’ve read that Zachary Quinto is, earlier rumors to the contrary notwithstanding, onboard for the next installment. At least we know that if Spock dies in that one, he will die daring greatly, his face marred by dust and sweat and blood, not sitting at his console monotoning the infinitesimally-small odds of his survival.

Also endearing here were Mr. Sulu’s first moments in The Captain’s Chair, portending a great future with (one hopes) the U.S.S. Excelsior, and perhaps a cup of tea. He, as we say here, deals with the bad guy, with good effect.

Speaking of the bad guy, let me just say that Benedict Cumberbatch has the most sonorous voice in the history of voices and may he continue to talk like that forever. He is the best of villains—the kind you can understand, empathize with, and root for, if only part of the time. He gets a chilly send-off, but one is left with a feeling that they are going to put him down on Ceti Alpha Five and things are going to go south from there, without, it is hoped, any creatures crawling into his ears and lodging there, because he’s scary enough when he’s in good health loving his peeps.

The screenwriters did a great job of giving us real men reacting to terrifying prospects. Real men (even half-Vulcans and three-hundred-year-old Supermen with Superior Intellects) feel, make mistakes, fumble, fall, and occasionally save the beautiful woman (read: USS Enterprise, she of the ample nacelles) at the last second.

Carol Markus shows up. You know what that means. At least they picked a really pretty girl. I hope she sticks around. It is a five-year mission after all. David could be four years old before we’re done. I hope his nanny is the man on the bridge who speaks out of an amplifier on the back of his head, because that is just too cool for words.

Leonard Nimoy. I’m a fan, but this needs to be the end, okay? Unless we can somehow–please oh please–get Shatner on for next time. Bill’s 81, so we need to hurry. What is the use of time-warps if we can’t get Shatner back to teach Chris Pine and Zachary Quinto how to play a little Fizzbin?

THE GREAT GATSBY, starring Leonardo DiCaprio, Carey Mulligan, and Tobey Maguire

By ten minutes into this movie, I wanted to leave. By fifteen minutes in, I was gripping the arm rests to keep myself from rushing out. I felt like I’ve occasionally (okay, often) felt in church when the speaker says, “My second point is…” and starts rambling on a barely-even-tangentially-related (if alliterated) rabbit trail, and you know you are in for a long, boring haul because there are always three points.

I stayed for Leo. I love Leo. I have always loved Leo. I loved him as Jack Dawson in the goofy Titanic. I loved him as Romeo. I loved him in Gangs of New York, Catch Me if You can, The Aviator, Blood Diamond, The Departed, Revolutionary Road. I loved him in Inception, in J. Edgar, and in Django. (I’ve been too much of a scaredy-cat to watch Shutter Island.) If it were up to me, he’d have a shelf full of Oscars.

I didn’t love him in this. I didn’t like him in this. I don’t think it’s his fault. I think Baz Luhrmann had a very particular thing he wanted to do, and that is what happened. That is what directors are for: to put their vision on the screen.

I didn’t like the vision.

What we see on screen is all sap and fluff. There are pretty costumes, but the people are not really all that pretty. Giant houses without charm, parties that I’m sure lots of people would enjoy, but which look like too much humanity crushed into too little space with too-loud music—basically an outer circle of Hell to this introvert. If I were at a party like that, I would have sudden and urgent needs to gasp for air outside, far away, somewhere near an all-night Starbucks.

I never read the book. Now I’m not going to. The story didn’t resonate with me, and it’s not just the 1920s thing. Lots of movies in historical settings are brilliant–there are universal themes: longing, hope. This movie is about a creepy, lying fraud who stalks a married woman. Which I might even go for (cinematically) if he were confident and happy and refined (think Vronsky), but he’s pathetic and creepy. “I built this house for you” may have played well in former centuries, but today, a woman would turn on her stilettos and run for her life. Nothing says “This guy will read all your emails and check how many miles you drove today” like “I built this house for you, never mind you are married to someone else, but looky my pool!”

I kind of wish Luhrmann had done the Romeo thing again and set the story in San Francisco in 2013. That might have resonated with me more. Gatsby could have secretly been a drug lord and could be suffering from PTSD from his time in Afghanistan, where he met the poppy men who supply him. Daisy could have been married to a Silicon Valley nerd-gone-billionaire with a penchant for mail-order Asian women, while Daisy’s heart truly beat for Gatsby whom she thinks is so rich because his real name is Armie Hammer.

Tobey Maguire should not have been in the movie. The whole schtick that he’s a wannabe writer who works on Wall Street, but really wants to write a book, and how he copes with his loss of Gatsby (who is shot—not a spoiler, this book was written, people, in 1925) is to write it up and then voila, looky, I have a whole book and I think I’ll call it, ta-da, The Great Gatsby. I hate that kind of book-ending. I hated it in The Wizard of Oz and I hate it here, but here it’s worse, because we have that annoying thing where we bounce in and out of Nick Carraway (wannabe writer, Daisy’s cousin/Gatsby’s neighbor) having therapy at a Sanitarium (should have been Betty Ford where he was addicted to anti-depressants and alcohol because of his experiences living next to a psychopathic stalker) where an old man and an old woman keep bringing him tea and blankies to help him through (try that, Lilo!).

(Parenthetically, I don’t like Tobey Maguire in anything, but I really don’t like him in this movie. He plays a man who stands around watching other people fall in love and he talks too much and says dumb things and then decrees that a lying creepy man who isn’t sensitive to anything is Great. And he has that squeaky-soft voice that crawls up my spine.)

I see on Wikipedia that Nick Carraway is the main character in the book, but please, people, when writers write books about writers writing books, especially when it’s a struggling writer struggling to write as he struggles through his inability to cope with life, then I’m seriously not on board. If you want to see a movie about writers struggling, and then succeeding, at writing, see the undying classic Throw Momma From The Train.

Speaking of annoying, if I hear the term “Old Sport” one more time, I’m going to break something. I think this term comes out of Leo’s mouth about 100 times, and there’s really no reason for it other than to irritate and enrage the audience who gets it already.

So Gatsby is this multizillionaire who’s in love with a woman he feels married to because he kissed her five years ago, which gives me nightmares from college days about boys who were sure beyond doubt that you were “God’s will for them” and that it was probably best if you began submitting today, and you can type my paper for me, can’t you? Daisy is the woman, and she’s married to a man who is having an affair with a woman he would never have looked at.

Gatsby–besotted beyond reason–although rich and famous, and able to throw enormous parties in a single bound, doesn’t have the nerve to invite the girl over. Glory be, the random caretaker’s cottage is rented (why would it be rented out?) to someone who must drive 20 miles to Wall Street to sell bonds every day, but who doesn’t have a car, so calls for a taxi every day, what?

Going on, the cottage is rented to a man who turns out to be none other than Daisy’s cousin, so wowee wow wow, now Daisy can be invited to tea, because although she can’t be invited to Gatsby’s for tea, she can be invited to her own cousin’s house for tea and then they can all walk 25 yards to the Big House where they can disintegrate into a pile of lust, Carraway disappearing at appropriate times, because he has no role except to watch people and then write about them later while he copes with having watched them.

Perhaps the best thing about the movie is that it is a public service announcement for relaxed divorce rules. Here, we have a couple, unhappily and unfaithfully married at a time when there was no such thing as community property laws and where Daisy, had she divorced her husband for Gatsby, would probably have received the short end of the deal, both financially and socially, though I’m not at all sure it would have mattered, Gatsby being as ridiculously wealthy as he appears to be, even though the story of how he got there is a lie. It was a time when appearances were more important in marriage than realities, and the fact that the marriage is intact at the end of the show doesn’t mean the people are any happier than they were or any more likely to be faithful to each other.

Actually, since we know what is going to happen in late October, 1929, all the money is probably moot. Somebody write the sequel. Make it one of those parodies: The Great Gatsby Marries Daisy and They Have Zombie Babies. As long as it’s set in San Francisco and has drug lords and lurking ninjas, I’m in.

When it was over, I breathed a huge sigh of relief, stayed all the way through the credits (waiting for the Song That Never Came), and then smiled: “Next Friday, Star Trek.”

Jay Leno provided automobiles from his collection.

That amazing song from the preview is not in the movie.

Jay Z is one of the producers, so props to him and Mrs. Carter. They both have singing/rapping credits. Lots of people don’t like the rapping, but I’m not a hater there. It was the peppiest part of the show.