This week we got a first glimpse of Baz Luhrmann’s forthcoming adaptation of The Great Gatsby. DiCaprio as Gatsby, Maguire as Nick Carraway, an Elton John fever dream as the Jazz Age, all visible in Doctor T. J. Eckleburg 3D this Christmas.
Do you love the idea or hate it? Would you kill your own mother to see it, or kill your own self before letting that happen? Tell us in the comments, anonymously or otherwise. The floor is yours.
P.S. — For more info on the artist behind the song that opens the trailer, see here.
UPDATE: What about this one?
– Michael Moats
Maybe he’s going mega-meta, deliberately making a movie that suffers from its excess in order to reinforce the novel’s original idea.
More likely, all of this will be true except the part about it happening deliberately.
Maybe Lurhmann will surprise us all, but like Brian says, much of the novel’s essence is rooted in the lyricism of Caraway’s narration, whereas the trailer is loudly, bombastically prosaic. Gatsby is nothing if not a novel about the failed promise of the American Dream, and the movie, from what little we have to go on, appears to be merely a lavish spectacle of rich people partying until the music stops, disregarding that the party was metaphor in the first place.
Jazz Age or Jack off? Jack off.
Perhaps I’m being unfair after only seeing a trailer but it seems like they took all the dramatic subtlety and gorgeous minimalism of the novel and turned it into some kind of flashy melodrama. I will not watch, at least not in the theatres.
It strikes me as tawdry. Not in its visualization of the story, which actually looks quite beautiful and exciting (as you’d suspect). But in the way it externalizes a story that I always felt was very internal. Maybe this is indicative of the different roles that books and movies play in general. The best parts of the novel are inside Nick’s head, in his language, and in the mystery of Gatsby’s perspective. This movie appears to beat all of that nuance out. It’s all speeding cars and sensuous kisses and roaring DiCaprios.