The Great Gatsby

Baz Luhrmann repeats what he did with Rome + Juliet and creates a horrible moster full of FX and exaggeration.

Still, the cast performs well.

An over the top portrayal of the classic novel, while at times excessive and tasteless, it truly hits home with the novels original critique on the excess of the time. The cast was excellent, the movie stayed true to the novel in all the most important ways. I personally feel the modern soundtrack wasn't appropriate in several cases, but a couple flawless executions.

See I don't know how to review this because I came into it hating the novel, and it's 2022, it took me over a decade to finally say "fine I'll watch the movie."

And unfortunately they didn't improve things. It's still, well, pretentious. It's still a story of someone that is living above his means, and living a very shallow life, that the audience is supposed to relate to enough to either like or dislike him...

... and I just never could. Holden Claufield was pretentious, but the magic of the Catcher in the Rye is that everyone could relate to him in some way, everyone could connect in some way, even if you ultimately didn't like him.

Jay Gatsby, you can't really relate to him. The best description for him is a false prophet, at le...

To be fair to Baz Luhrmann, this is actually quite a difficult story to adapt for the big screen. On the face of it, there are many contradictions right from the start (not least that our relatively normal narrator - trader "Nick" (Tobey Maguire) lives next door to the eponymous and enigmatic millionaire (Leonardo DiCaprio) and his Disney-esque castle). The story is told by way of a retrospective during which the now depressed "Nick" regales his psychiatrist with his tales of life in the fast lane that offered him the opportunity to mix with the rich and famous at the very end of the 1920s through his new neighbour. Simultaneously, he must cope with the unhappy marriage between his cousin "Daisy" (Carey Mulligan) and her selfish, womanising...