Crass Baz - The Gross Gatsby

This is just offensive to all the senses! m/r

The Gross Gatsby by Stefan Kanfer - City Journal

by Stefan Kanfer -  16 May 2013 

Baz Lurhman’s version loses its place.

Francis Scott Fitzgerald knew movies from the inside. He wrote screenplays for MGM and published 17 autobiographical short stories charting the sorrows and triumphs of a Hollywood hack. In 1940 “Fitz,” as friends and fans called him, was working on The Last Tycoon, a discerning novel about a film mogul, when he died at 44 from the effects of alcoholism.

By then his most famous work, The Great Gatsby, had been made into a silent feature. There would be three more adaptations. The first sound version, released in 1949, starred Alan Ladd in the title role. Lost in copyright limbo, the film noir is unavailable on DVD and is never broadcast on television. The second, starring Robert Redford and a somnambulistic cast, was a box-office flop, but it tried to catch the spirit of the Jazz Age. The last—and by all means least—is in theaters now.

Baz Luhrmann’s Gatsby is everything the novel is not—overlong, gross, and perverse. The book is a lean, lyric 180 pages; the movie galumphs on for two hours and 23 minutes. (It comes in two versions: 3-D and 2-D.) The Roaring Twenties, in which Gatsby takes place, introduced Broadway’s finest melodists—Cole Porter, Irving Berlin, George Gershwin, Richard Rodgers, Jerome Kern, et al. But there’s hardly a note from these giants in Luhrmann’s film, save for an occasional phrase—Porter’s “Let’s Misbehave” when lovers are misbehaving, or the opening of Gershwin’s “Rhapsody in Blue” at the first appearance of Jay Gatsby (Leonardo DiCaprio.) The rest of the score consists of lush or ominous chords by Craig Armstrong or anachronistic rap interludes by the film’s co-producer, Shawn (Jay Z) Carter.

Yet the fiasco cannot be blamed on the film’s music, ... [But it was no help, as bad as it is]

-go to link-