The Great Gatsby

This is for all the critiques out their bashing the new Gatsby remake.  You are crazy.
         I mean of course it wasn't as good as the book, but never in my lifetime have I seen a movie that was better than the book, that just goes without saying.  Also, you have to take into consideration that The Great Gatsby is a hard book to make into a movie, its plot doesn't suggest a naturally entertaining screen play.
         So given what the director Baz Luhrmann had to work with, I think his motion picture was a major success.  First off the cinematography was stunning, i'm sure some old fashioned moviegoers would claim it was over the top but from a modern perspective, I think it perfectly captured the roaring twenties in all their brilliance and glam.  Each video shot was simply orgasmic, the movie made the early 1900's seem like the robust, colorful magical era it was rather then the dull black and white we are used to imagining it in.  Gorgeous.
        Also the soundtrack was fantastic, all modern music which surprisingly, fit perfectly with the roar of the twenties.  In many ways the 20's mirror modern times more than any other part of the 1900's.  You probably remember "No Church in the Wild" from the movies trailer, I was also excited to recognize "I Can't Stop", a dubstep song originally produced by Flux Pavilion, in one of the party scenes.
        As to the liberties they took with the plot I had no qualms.  Sure some of them were significant but they did what they had to do to transcribe the novel Gatsby into the movie Gatsby.  And most importantly, Luhrmann left the main message and all the subtle symbolism intact, even expressing certain meanings more clearly than I think the book could.
        So although parts of it were overdone, I believe the Gatsby plot was told as well as it can be and the time period was conveyed in epic proportions.  Fitzgerald would approve.        

Trailer

Under the Dome

Stephen King is so successful because he understands the point of literature.  The characters aren't there to move along the plot, the plot is there to further the characters.
       Needless to say, in his recent, whopping thousand page novel Under the Dome, King's characters are stunning.  I was especially intrigued by the relationship between the coldly ambitious Big Jim Rennie and his sadistic son Junior, who together represented (I believe) pretty much all the evil possible in the world.
       The plot, despite being secondary to the characters, was also intriguing.  After all, who doesn't want to read a book about a backwards town trapped inside a giant shot-glass.
       There were somethings in the book that seemed to be missing, like say, an editor, and there were details I would've done differently...
       "SPOILER ALERT" somebody dies.  Actually, more than one, actually quite a lot of people die, pretty much in every chapter.  After a while it stopped feeling like a book and started to read like a well written synopsis of a thousand ways to die.  Two thousand ways actually.  The excessive death to survival ratios also started to make the book lose it's horrifying element, because I stopped counting the dead people stuffed in closets and started counting the people who escaped.  Then the book actually became kinda cheery.
      But overall I would definitely recommend Under the Dome as one of Stephen King's better books.  If you're on vacation and have a large chunk of reading time to kill, this book is like an assassin.
       It leaves everybody six feet below.
But no it's really good.