Luhrmann to direct Great Gatsby

I wish I could find where I originally saw this:
http://screenrant.com/the-great-gatsby-3d-sandy-95699/

Baz Luhrmann (Moulin Rouge, Australia) is set to direct a film version of the Great Gatsby, with Leonardo Di Caprio touted as likely to play the lead.

Thoughts?

I think that could go pretty well, actually. He did Romeo + Juliet with di Caprio, too.

But why in 3D?

(I'm rather fond of Baz, he's got a great visual style. But having said that, I failed to garner enough energy to watch "Australia" after Mum described it as "embarrassing".)

Oh, geez, I missed the 3D - didn't click the link and thought it was just some quirk of the blog software.

Ugh, 3D sucks. I can't watch anything "3D" without massive headaches and strain, no matter what kind of filter I view it through, or where I am in the theatre. I think it might be because of my astigmatism, but I don't know... maybe it's because one eye is nearsighted and the other eye is farsighted. (I prefer watching 3d movies without the special viewing filters, even if it ends up being fuzzy and weird.)

Either way, I wish the movie business would drop the 3D nonsense already.

I do like Baz's visual style generally, but I find it often comes at the expense of fully developing the story. I can't figure out what 3D could possibly add to it.

Why the heck do they need 3D for an ordinary drama with no whizz bang special effects? They must be planning some big changes to the story - e.g., the advent of aliens or something.

I'll take Redford any day. Better yet, just read the book. It's about the prose anyway, film doesn't do it justice.

7: I was never impressed by the book, despite being forced to read it in high school. Gimme some Joseph Conrad any day. Then again, I'm a huge fan of Evelyn Waugh, who dealt with the same milieu over in Little Britain.

I heard about this as well and was looking forward to it. I think DiCaprio is the lead for sure, but forget who is playing Daisy. I had high hopes, but won't see it if it's only available in "3D", I don't do that.

#8 Maybe it's a gender thing because I could never really get through Conrad because he seems too macho for my tastes. I love Waugh, tho.

I didn't really find that at all (re: macho-ness) in Conrad's work. What fascinates me about Heart of Darkness is that it exposes the staples of masculinity -- exploration, colonialism, racial superiority, expanding the free market, and quasi-mystical authoritarianism -- as corrupt and rotten.

I've never really gotten into the manly writing of Hemingway either. My reaction to A Farewell to Arms was "meh." Note: It was another book I was forced to read in high school.

But I loved Moby Dick and the excerpts we read from Paradise Lost Granted, all of this is a matter of taste, since Fitzgerald and Hemingway are masters of Modern Literature. Can't say the same for Modern Sci Fi Grandmasters like Heinlein and Asimov. Ugh, beige wallpaper in print.

Well, I hate Hemmingway but love Moby Dick, too. And while Heinlein and Asimov do indeed suck, Bradbury was pretty good.

>8 kswolff:
Yes, Fitzgerald is overrated. I admire his attempt to fuse a poetic, hopeful intensity to narrative prose, I just think he burnt out long before he was able to achieve that effect.

Look at the original version of Gatsby, it's clear his editor helped focus it into something better (though parts of the original are interesting because it answers some ambiguities in the story, so perhaps Fitzgerald was drunk when he was reworking it and forgot portions).

http://books.google.com/books?id=BLomOZbGMWsC&lpg=PP1&dq=original%20gats...

I don't think Daisy is developed at all. I think that plays into the idea people have of the tragic, mystery of the love story, because it's not fleshed out, but having read much greater literature since high shcool, then rereading Gatzby a year or two ago for work, I now realize why I didn't respond to it as an adolescent, or as an adult.

But the idea of being super rich and throwing decadent parties where people don't even know you and you are above it all, it's a crappy American fantasy, I don't see the appeal.

Jay Gatzby isn't a great character either. I like the name though.

Luhrmann seems like he's a match for the fuzzy, champagne-drunk style of Fitzgerald. I don't think trying to fully develop the story will matter, because parts of the book just aren't fully developed either. I like DiCaprio, but I think he'll overact this role. Unless he's Nick Carraway.

But the idea of being super rich and throwing decadent parties where people don't even know you and you are above it all, it's a crappy American fantasy, I don't see the appeal.

I don't know, I enjoyed Trimalchio's Banquet in the Satyricon What's wonderful about "the rich" is their excesses, their lack of taste, and their moral squalidness. Waugh nailed it with Vile Bodies and Stephen Fry re-nailed it with his brilliant film adaptation, "Bright Young Things."

Decadence usually provides a wonderful petri dish for creating great poetry and prose. But I like that kind of stuff, especially Against Nature and Flowers of Evil One can't forget the dithering incompetence of Charles II and the bawdy lyrics of Earl of Rochester

Well, I think we are talking two different types of decadence here. Unfortunately, the Fitzgerald kind is what makes Paris Hilton and Kim Kardashian a success in America, role models even.

I think it's just the idea of that scene people repond to. Being rich and not caring. It's easy to wrap your head around, very quick, like when you purchase a lotto ticket, if you ever do that. Those instant fantasies that spring effortlessly to mind for the first few minutes after you buy it, and maybe throughout the day. What fancy car you would buy, what you would do, etc.

Beaudelaire, Petronius, the decadence they decribe, descry, lampoon, it's different. It's a little more insightful or contextualized. I think Fitzgerald is promoting, wants you to feel the wonder, the way he felt about money, or initially felt himself, when he's writing that stuff. I just don't feel it myself, or didn't feel the tragedy at the end, the way I think I should have felt it. I mean she doesn't marry him because he doesn't have money...he gets money, she's married, he's not happy...to me, the book needed a bit more to make that worthwhile.

I think it's successful at exposing the shallowness of the American dream if that was a goal, which I'm not sure it objectively was; and I'm not sure that's really what people respond to when they read it.

If the whole book was about that party, maybe then I could see it being Petronius great. But it's got a lot of flubbed conventions watering it down, hemming it in. I do give Fitzgerald some leeway because alcohol probably hindered him more than helped. Or only brought him to a certain point.

Poverty, frugality, those conditions have been a petri dish as well. So I don't think it matters too much.

Beaudelaire was pretty much penniless, or lived like he was. I mean he had sex with prostitutes, did drugs, if that's decadence, then he was decadent.

If Fitzgerald was promoting the rich lifestyle, wouldn't Gatsby have survived in the end?

While my thoughts on The Great Gatsby are still "Meh, whatever," I love Billy Wilder's gloriously vicious take on Hollywood, fame, and delusion, Sunset Boulevard The current raft of kleptocrats and pious thugs currently occupying Congress remind me of a cross between Norma Desmond and Ernst Roehm "I still am big ... the screens just got smaller." Or for today's generation, "I still am big ... the voters' heads just got smaller." To paraphrase even further, this time from Bull Durham, our current gaggle of dingbat plutocrats will continue to bless these United States with million dollar arms and ten cent heads.

Does Hollywood learn nothing from its own hideous mistakes? Why remake a crap movie like "The Great Gatsby"? It wasn't a great book, no matter what any expert says, it wasn't a Great American Story, it was a 1920s Less Than Zero by a Jazz Age Bret Easton Ellis.

Another crap movie, oh joy, oh rapture, and by a director capable of making *good* movies no less.

DanMat, I really agree with you on Gatsby and the general genre of "wow, the rich are really not like you or me, let's ooh and aah at their disgusting parties".

That's why high schoolers should read The Great Gatsby followed by The Communist Manifesto Unfortunately, it probably wouldn't fit into the US Lit curriculum and the mouth-breather waterhead Tea Party idiots breeding like rabbits would get all uppity and offended that their downwardly mobile larvae are actually reading something that exposes the socioeconomic forces that mentally and economically enslave the tiny brains of their parents.

But hey, Luhrmann ... oooh, shiny! Whatever. It's not like we're in a Depression with two wars going on or anything? Proles need their distractions before they shipped out and turned into corporate cannon fodder.

>16 kswolff:
Well, that's certainly a didactic reading of the Great Gatsby, but I don't think Fitzgerald was a particularly didactic writer, nor was Gatsby's death a real statement on money or wealth. I think it was merely a touch of the tragic (or sententious) for his little jazz age yarn.

This is an awfully pretentious high school you've imagined for yourself. And to think of all you'd be taking from the graduate TA's of our beloved colleges and universities whose solitary pleasure in life is to inure the wide-eyed co-eds with Marxist theory!

20: Considering the systemic collapse of our present free market system, I'd think a little Marx would do them good. Maybe we could simply bash in their faces with hardcover editions of Atlas Shrugged? Say what you will, of the two, Karl Marx was the atheist Jew who could actually write, as opposed to Rand, whose free market agitprop is pretty thin gruel, even for the small minds and low expectations that plague our undergraduate programs.

It's shocking kswollf, that you even believe in the existence of a free market, let alone labelling our particular flavor of capitalism "free market".

Yes, Marx wouldn't hurt, but would it help much either? Wouldn't it just recieve the same attention most other assigned books recieve, that is to say little?

I think after a while, you have to admit to yourself, that the system, no matter how hated, is not a function of principles or theories, but simply a distillation of the whole. Left, right, liberal, conservative, it doesn't much matter.

The thing is, class will probably never be recognized as a subject that can be discussed, let alone taught, in American schools. It's one of the reasons Americans seem so enamored of the rich from Gatsby to BEE to Kardashian.

As long as there are patents and copyrights, regulation and subsidies, there can never be a free market. The only truly free markets are black, and even they are not entirely free. Witness the drug wars in Mexico. Free Market is a particularly dangerous buzzword for legal theft. I know you were talking to karl, but I for one don't believe in Free Markets and wish the conception of such a thing would disappear.

I am not a Communist, nor am I a Socialist. I am a great believer in a well run, well regulated, modified market.

For all the talk about free markets in this country when was the last time you heard a discussion of eliminating farm subsidies, subsidies to the energy industry, various tax shelters, elimination of patents and copyrights as positive steps toward a free market? When? As I said, it's just a buzzword signifying someone's ideal, referencing nothing.

Like Ayn Rand's philosophy, as long as there are two human beings left on earth, it won't work. Damn that pesky human thingie. Wasn't that what made Communism so disastrous? Lack of consideration of the human?

22: Are you being sarcastic? It's hard to tell sometimes ... this from someone (me) who is an adept at posting sarcasting things on the Nettertubes. But I agree with your last statement: Right, Left, whatever. It doesn't matter anymore.

Ideologies are macro and do nothing when it comes to discussions. It's easy to turn things into shouting matches, as evidenced by the weaponized idiocy on news shows and election campaign speeches. Anything to rile the blood of the dingbats going into the voting booth.

This discussion has gone too afield anyway. I'll let you kids try and discover a Grand Unifying Theory of Economics ... and the cure for cancer.

"Have fun storming the castle."

That's funny, you've got the sarcastic meter on high and I've got it on low, so we're misreading or better yet "overreading" each other. I was a little concerned though that you might actually believe in the existense of free markets, so it was a solicitous sarcasm on my part more than anything else. If you did believe in free markets it would however have given me the opportunity to display my acute undestanding of economics markets, though this was preempted by geneg's response.

Regardless, I have a feeling neither you nor I will ever see this Baz Luhrmann movie.

26: The free markets existing have nothing to do with whether I "believe" them or not. Walter Benjamin wrote a succinct essay equating capitalism with religion. Free markets exist, I can't argue with that. Whether they actually work and whether they are actually "free" is something that has to be examined. I see Capitalism and Communism as two sides of a devalued coin. Two failed utopian schemas. Time for a Copernican revolution in how we arrange ourselves in the socioeconomic arena -- cue Iain Banks reference.

DanMat: I think you've got to misread Gatsby pretty badly to think Fitzgerald is in any way recommending Jay Gatsby's lifestyle. The book makes clear that Gatsby's use of wealth is, in fact, a "crappy American fantasy." On p. 2 Nick says, quite unambiguously, that Gatsby "represented everything for which I have unaffected scorn."

It's the fact (as you point out) that we continue to have that crappy American fantasy that makes the book continue to be relevant--and continue to be so teachable in my English III class. (I would argue that if you didn't get anything out of it in high school, you didn't have a very good teacher.)

I do, by the way, agree that Fitzgerald is overrated in general. But I think Gatsby deserves its place in all those top-100 lists. But I don't want to see Luhrman direct it.