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Reviews
Troy (2004)
Epic.
Is it possible to do a review without a least a little spoilage?
This movie was so fantastic that I actually managed to shake my anal book-to-movie requirement checklist and just enjoy Troy. So what that Patroclus was not Achilles' cousin, that Briseis was nowhere near that prominent of a character, that the only god/goddess to make a cameo was Achilles' mother, Thetis, in a much smaller role than she was entitled to? Okay, so it bugged me a little bit. But the book is 3000 years old, and has been retold thousands of times in thousands of ways. If people don't get the gist of it by now, then who's to say that they ever will? It did bug me that they left out the whole story of Nestor leading Patroclus to his death. And I was a little miffed by the mispronunciation of Briseis, Menalaus, and Priam. But the discovery that Eric Bana actually CAN act well made up for it, I must say. And even though the scene with the knife was never in The Iliad, I must say that I appreciated its addition for Brad Pitt's Achilles.
All in all, I got past the book, which is something I can almost never do. I highly recommend this beautiful movie to anyone, and it is worth every minute of the three hours it takes. Four stars.
The Great Gatsby (1974)
Not the same... It never is.
I happen to immensely enjoy this book. But the movie did not capture it the way that literature could, through Nick's eyes. The book also was not laden with cheesy horror music that was, needless to say, grotesquely misplaced.
But in the book, Nick adds a humanity and depth to the story that it would not have otherwise had. Nick's first-person standing is what makes the book good in the first place. It is what makes the characters human, what makes the events at all relevantly to each other, and even what makes Gatsby great. I feel that this was compromised in movie form.
That's all I have to say. Go read the book.