Carey Mulligan Is Daisy Buchanan in Baz Luhrmann’s ‘The Great Gatsby’

Carey Mulligan, one of Hollywood’s brightest and most beautiful starlets, will portray Daisy Buchanan in Baz Luhrmann’s upcoming adaptation of The Great Gatsby.

This casting comes on the heels of a recent developments that presented names like Leonardo DiCaprio and a virtual who’s who of top female actresses for parts in the Gatsby remake. Ironically, she wasn’t even on that list last week.

After exploding on the scene with An Education, Mulligan has taken roles in increasingly high profile films in just the last two years. In that short time, she has been in five movies, starring in four of them (she had a small cameo role in Public Enemies). Each was critically well-received and her performances drove much of the praise.

Carey Mulligan in An Education

Mulligan’s beauty is only enhanced by her elegance. The 25-year-old British actress is perfectly built to portray Daisy Buchanan in this adaptation of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s story. While she may fit the bill physically, her typical on-screen characters are nothing like Daisy. This departure from her normally strong female leads will be an interesting angle for Mulligan.

Daisy is the epitome of a ditsy woman that you might find circling a mall for ten hours in modern society. Will Mulligan bring a shroud of maturity to the role? It could work, but might not fit the tone of the character’s arc within the story.

Baz Luhrmann’s eccentric style will be another new fit for Mulligan. But her ability to transform into the characters she has played on camera will help the transition – as will the apparent rehearsals with Luhrmann.

Baz Luhrmann gave Deadline this photo of Mulligan as Daisy in rehearsals.

Luhrmann told Deadline that the pair rehearsed the character in early November and he snapped the above photo of her in full makeup. Luhrmann has also shown a propensity for directing period pieces.

The Moulin Rouge! and Romeo + Juliet director has always been committed to workshopping the roles before casting. This is what ultimately led to his casting of Leonardo DiCaprio in Romeo + Juliet.

We still do not know who will portray Gatsby, but the early rumors of DiCaprio would be a fun match on screen. This is a good start for Luhrmann’s adaptation, but he is still unsure if The Great Gatsby will be his next film. He is in the early stages of pre-production, so we shouldn’t jump the gun here, but casting Mulligan is a great starting point.

What do you think of Mulligan in the classic role once played by Mia Farrow? How would she fit across Leonardo DiCaprio? Share your thoughts in the comments section below.

Source: Deadline

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3 great ways to share, use and discover audio with SoundCloud

November 14 2010 by admin in News |

SoundCloud is one of the hottest services in web audio and yet it gets very little attention from the tech press. Yesterday, SoudCloud announced that there are now 100 third party apps using its API. That sounds to us like a good time to take a look at different ways you can use it yourself.

Launched in 2007 as a way of helping musicians share work and collaborate on songs, Berlin-based SoundCloud has developed into what is now a highly flexible way of working online with any type of audio.

Like a “YouTube for audio”, all clips uploaded to SoundCloud are searchable by others and can be embedded in web pages. There’s a lot more to it than that though. Let’s take a look at some of the ways you can use Soundcloud even if you’re not directly involved in music yourself.

You may have noticed that here at The Next Web we use SoundCloud to host our podcasts. Why? Not only can we embed the podcasts right here on the site, they’re shareable too. Just as you can embed someone else’s YouTube video on your own site, you can embed our podcast too. This helps boost our potential audience.

There’s more, too. Social media sharing buttons are built into the player, you can set Creative Commons rights for what others can do with your audio and of course there’s a download link so your audience can take the file with them. When it comes to finding out how many people are listening to your podcast, SoundCloud’s stats package is invaluable.

One area SoundCloud is working on improving is integration with podcast aggregators. For now, if you want to get your SoundCloud-hosted podcast onto iTunes, the company suggests this workaround using WordPress and Feedburner.

If you’ve ever put together a video, set it to music but then found that YouTube strips out the audio because you’ve used it without permission from the copyright holder, you may wonder how you can find tunes you won’t get penalised for using.

SoundCloud hosts a vast library of Creative Commons licensed music. The service’s advanced search feature allows you to specify only music that you won’t get in trouble for using, as well being able to choose the precise genre, duration and tempo to suit you. Give it a go, you may well be surprised by the quality of what you find. Just make sure you adhere to the terms of the Creative Commons license each uploader has specified.

SoundCloud enables uploaders to specify their location. Taking advantage of this is a site called CitySounds.fm. This lets you explore the “sounds” of cities around the world.

What is London uploading? How does that differ from music being made in Helsinki or Chicago? The website is also available as an iPhone app, and if you’re feeling adventurous it’s a great way to discover new music.

There’s so much more to SoundCloud than what we’ve touched on here. Explore the now 100 app strong App Gallery for an idea of what’s possible – from music discovery, to collaboration, to sharing. If you create your own audio, we highly recommend signing up and trying it out.

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First look: Twezr, really great social contacts for iPhone

You’ve never seen a contact list like Twezr, a free iPhone app that launched tonight.

This one shows a list of your friends or business contacts, just like contacts usually do.

But this one shows you whether those contacts have emailed you. Or if they’ve sent you a Facebook message. Or if they’ve DM’d you on Twitter.

This totally transforms your contact list and makes it a lot more useful.

Here, read what the Next Web has to say about it.

I interviewed the CEO, Delip Andra, about what Twezr is and how it works. I find it to be a great new example of how apps are starting to add value by connecting other services together. Really great, and is real innovation to contacts.

Yes, it’s only for iPhone right now, but a similar system is out for Android from Aro Mobile. I have a video of that, too, here:

So, why are these new mobile contact managers so important? Because it’s so hard to see everything someone sends you. Lots of people switch between sending me Facebook messages, for instance, and emails.

What does it do?

It shows you a list of your friends, but they are arranged by who has sent you recent messages. It shows you whether there’s email, DMs on Twitter, or Facebook messages. It also lets you search through all of those.

Finally, it doesn’t ignore SMS or phone numbers. Shows you everything in a unified contact list. Really great.

What do you think?

UPDATE: One major argument against using these kinds of services is that you need to put your Gmail, Twitter, and Facebook user names and passwords into it. That’s nasty. Why not use oAuth? But we did cover that in the video a bit.

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