“A universe of ineffable gaudiness” — that’s how F. Scott Fitzgerald described the dreamworld inside the head of the young Jay Gatsby. He might just as well have been describing the aesthetic of Baz Luhrmann. There’s not an ungaudy scene in the Australian filmmaker’s adaptation of The Great Gatsby, whether he’s depicting a bash in Gatsby’s enormous CGI mansion (it looks like Barbie’s Dream Castle) or a more modest gathering in a downscale apartment.... Read more

You’re standing in a small studio with two people you barely know, preparing to act a scene set on a desert island. One of your companions must speak exclusively in rhymes in this scene; the other must pretend to be a mind reader. Your character is endowed with hooks for hands.

There’s no script to follow. Just be sure that, by the end of the scene, the audience knows exactly what these three characters mean to one another, why they’re on the island and what they want. Make sure to highlight their assigned quirks.

Oh, and make it funny.... Read more

Vermont-based filmmaker Eugene Jarecki recently delivered a TEDxHollywood talk on “storytelling in the digital age.” The decade since the start of the Iraq War has seen an incredible democratization of filmmaking, said the director of progressive documentaries Why We Fight and The House I Live In. The result is that, under the right circumstances, any individual with a camera can “have an amazing impact on the global narrative.” (Find the whole talk on YouTube.)... Read more

Can movies be programmed to be hits? A May 5 New York Times article profiles Vinny Bruzzese, a statistician who offers his consulting services to Hollywood and claims that yes, they can. Using past movies as points of comparison, Bruzzese might, for instance, advise screenwriters to nix a scene in a bowling alley, because such scenes “tend to pop up in films that fizzle” (sorry, The Big Lebowski). Or he might point out that audiences have historically preferred “guardian” superheroes to “cursed” superheroes.... Read more

Not long ago, Seth Jarvis taught a playwriting workshop at a local high school. Introducing the Burlington actor and dramatist, a teacher mentioned that he also happened to work at Waterfront Video, which sparked a telling discussion. ... Read more

There’s nothing original about Mud, yet it casts a little spell on the audience. Maybe that’s because it has such old-fashioned pacing — leisurely and lyrical, like a well-crafted drama from the 1980s — or because it takes place mostly outdoors, in a world washed by sun-glimmers from the Mississippi River.... Read more

Emperor seems to have been tailor-made for high school history classes whose teachers like to give themselves a break by popping in a DVD. It’s (somewhat) informative about a pivotal moment at the end of World War II, it’s inoffensive and it stars a handsome actor all the kids will recognize from “Lost.”... Read more

It’s still National Poetry Month, and one local poet got good news last week. The University of Vermont’s Major Jackson has won a Guggenheim Fellowship. Jackson edits the Harvard Review and has published his work widely in journals, including the New Yorker, as well as in three collections. The most recent one, Holding Company, came out in 2010; my review compared it to a “big, ambitious concept album.”... Read more

Which is better: a movie that bites off exactly what it can chew and executes its conceit competently without surprises, or a movie that attempts to squeeze ample material for a richly detailed TV series into two hours and, of course, fails?... Read more

All you really need to know about the Evil Dead remake is that it will appeal to moviegoers who can imagine, under the right conditions, enjoying scenes where hapless characters hack off their own limbs. Those who cringed reading that sentence should stay home, but then, they probably never had this flick on their must-see lists.... Read more