Baz Luhrmann's name sounds like a "Raspberry" and that is about what his films deserve!

This "director" should be in porn only! At least with porn, bad music, 3-D, shots from every angle, gaudy staging, a complete lack historical context and a total lack of understanding a story works, because WHO CARES! m/r

A Triumph on the Page, The Great Gatsby Founders Miserably on the Silver Screen | Observer

Director Baz Luhrmann takes a meat cleaver to F. Scott Fitzgerald's literary masterpiece.

by Rex Reed 5-7-13

This was the look of Gatsby when I first read it.
All Scribner's Classics looked like this then.

Let’s face it. The Great Gatsby never has been—and probably won’t ever be—successfully turned into a great motion picture. Many have tried (four flop movies, not to mention various small-screen attempts, including a truncated but memorable Playhouse 90 with Robert Ryan and Jeanne Crain in the golden days when TV still knew what quality programming was). Robert Redford was a perfect Gatsby in the pretty but boring 1974 version by Jack Clayton, but the movie was dead on arrival. The best I’ve seen is still Elliott Nugent’s black-and-white 1949 version, with Alan Ladd at the top of his form as the screen’s most glamorous Gatsby to date, heading a cast that included Betty Field, Macdonald Carey, Ruth Hussey and Shelley Winters. Mired in mysterious litigation for six decades, it has never been released on home video, is never shown on any cable or network channel, and cannot be appreciated by the legions of F. Scott Fitzgerald fans who have never seen his work properly adapted to the screen. And so his literary masterwork remains nothing more—an elegant but elusive triumph of words over images, best savored on the written page.

You don’t realize just how much misguided damage can be done to a great novel until it is vaporized by a pretentious hack like boneheaded Australian director Baz Luhrmann. Some critics, through the years, have put forth the unpopular theory that Fitzgerald specialized in style over substance, but as any college English major knows, he was famous for pruning away the clutter. With the cinematic meat cleaver that Mr. Luhrmann wields in one bloated misfire after another (I still haven’t recovered from the nausea-inducing Moulin Rouge), style is all there is left, and in The Great Gatsby it looks alarmingly like clutter. ...

A Classic Look and Read.

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