The Grate Gatsby

Rating: 2/10 (17 May 2013)

Okay, I wasn't exactly frogmarched to the box office and had a gun held to my head until I shelled out for a ticket. I went of my own free will despite having watched Baz Luhrmann's pathetic Moulin Rouge; in other words I knew Luhrmann was a Philistine, nay, a Philistine's Philistine, with no respect for true artists and an ego that makes Joe Wright appear bashful so I suppose I was just fascinated to see just how low he would drag Fitzgerald. Luhrmann resembles a filmmaker the way a slug resembles a swan and is about as sensitive as Stalin. His idea of filmmaking is to take a subject rooted firmly in the past - Romeo and Juliet, Moulin Rouge, now Gatsby - and distort it via 'modern' music. Although I have yet to see it there is reason to believe that the 1949 version of Gatsby with Alan Ladd in the title role is the finest to date. I can well believe this given that Ladd had both the clean-cut looks of Redford and the DeCapriot but in addition he could be convincingly 'tough' as and when necessary. Lurhmann clearly thinks he is taking as his source material a Redbook story rather than a classic novel and, like another misguided director (see: The Deep Blue Sea) he thinks he can write better than the sublime Fitzgerald and has seen fit to top and tail the story with Nick Carraway an alcoholic confined in a drying-out clinic. Baz, my old darlin', you can bring in all the cgi you like, have sentences coming out of the screen till you're blue in the face but do us all a favor and get yourself a job stacking shelves at Safeway, something you might JUST be suited for.