So wow! What an interesting movie! The cinematography was a bit cartoonish and unreal (I saw the 3D version, maybe that emphasized it), but the director certainly got the desperate celebration and excess down. The relationship between Gatsby and Daisy was poignant and tender. Carey Mulligan and Leonardo DiCaprio did an excellent job of that. Daisy’s letdown was mysterious and dark, but not too much, just shadowing Zelda’s future mental state. The depiction of the book was very true, which is always a recommend for me. I hate when they change the ending, or the characters. Some of my favorite quotes from the movie (directly from the book): “All the bright precious things fade so fast … and they don’t come back.” Daisy. “Can’t repeat the past? … Why of course you can!” Jay Gatsby. “He knew that when he kissed this girl, and forever wed his unutterable visions to her perishable breath, his mind would never romp again like the mind of God. So he waited, listening for a moment longer to the tuning …

Fitzgerald’s term for the story dynamic he wrote about in The Great Gatsby was, “the dying fall.” *  Since this book was written from a similar life that Fitzgerald lived, we can basically talk about the book and the author in one breath, especially when referring to its bigger picture. Therefore, we can look for instances of Gatsby and Daisy’s dying fall and see something very similar in Fitzgerald and Zelda’s life. For example, Zelda spent the last 16 years of her life in mental institutions while Scott lived in Hollywood with his lover. Scott wrote, in a letter to her: But Zelda, what wouldn’t you give to go back to the beginning, to be those people again, the future so fresh and promising that it seems impossible not to get it right? ** Like Scott, Jay Gatsby exclaims, “Can’t repeat the past? … Why of course you can!” It has been a while since I read the book or saw a film version, so I am going to see the new film that is …