CGI in "The Great Gatsby"

As I was doing my daily interwebs browsing this morning I stumbled upon an interesting YouTube video showing a visual effects before and after sequence of scenes from the 2013 adaptation of "The Great Gatsby." When I watched Gatsby over the summer I knew that there was a considerable amount of CGI in the movie, but I had no idea that basically 90% of the sets are digitally rendered.

Take a look for yourself! It's actually a REALLY interesting video and a little bit eye opening in some respects.

Let me begin my analysis of this video by saying that I am not a Baz Luhrmann fan at all. I think that he's completely over-the-top in his visuals and ruins classic stories by trying too hard to modernize them. His pacing is terrible, his dialogue is unimaginative, and I find very little artistic merit in his movies. 

Plus Leo says the phrase "old sport" 59 times during the movie. That's almost once every two minutes!

Now, I'm not a big fan of CGI in "The Great Gatsby," and let me tell you why.

Whenever I see excessive CGI in a movie like "Gatsby" that doesn't exactly require it (in other words, any movie that contains only real people and "real" settings) it takes me out of the moment. Some of the effects look completely fake and remind me that I'm in fact watching a bunch of actors talk in front of a blue screen. For me, it also takes away from the story because Luhrmann uses effects as more of a "look at how flashy and extravagant I can make the background" rather than a tool to enhance the actual story in any way. Plus, all of the swooping crane shots in "Gatsby" that float the camera hundreds of feet in the air and fly between buildings and do freaking loop-de-loops over Manhattan before zooming in on Tobey McGuire's face remove me from the story because they are way too distracting and unnecessary in general.

That's just my opinion though. I've never really been a fan of recreating sets with CGI when you could make them for just about the same amount of time and money in real life (see "The Hobbit").

To close, here's a video compilation of every time someone says "old sport" in the movie.