Musique - "
Always" by Vincent Lopez and His Orchestra
Despite the great cast and the gorgeous art deco promos, I will not be seeing the upcoming
The Great Gatsby movie. The main reason is because I cannot abide by what Baz Luhrmann has done with F. Scott Fitzgerald's masterpiece. I loved
Moulin Rouge, but I hated
Romeo + Juliet. I get it that his style involves taking something old and makes it his own, but when he fucks with my favorite works, I get pissed. And F. Scott Fitzgerald being my favorite writer and the 1920s being my favorite decade, I honestly can't bear to watch a Gatsby movie that features modern music and can be viewed in 3D. I can totally understand that people are pumped to see this stylized version of Gatsby and so I watched the trailer for this movie a couple of times (a couple of months apart), just to give it a fair chance. But each time, I just got so angry at Luhrmann's treatment of this wonderful story and the horrible, horrible music accompanying it. So, why on earth would I subject myself to two hours of being angry at another person's art? Not gonna do it.
One thing that irritates me about Gatsby movies in general (perhaps just the last three) is the insistence that Daisy is a blonde and Jordan is a brunette. Hello, did any of you read the book?? In the book, there are two clear descriptions that Daisy is a brunette:
- A damp streak of hair lay like a dash of blue paint across her cheek . . .
- . . . and once he kissed her dark, shining hair.
And there is at least one clear description of Jordan being a blonde:
- The lamp-light, bright on his boots and dull on the autumn-leaf yellow of her hair . . .
It's such a silly thing to be bothered by, but it's one of my pet peeves about movies based on books. Wigs and hair dye are not hard to come by. It is extremely easy to make actors and actresses look like the characters they're playing as described in the book.
Another reason I won't be seeing the movie is that nothing compares to the movies in my own head when I read Fitzgerald's stories. I mean, I've seen the 1974 Gatsby and I didn't hate it, but I didn't particularly care for it either. And I actually kinda liked the 2000 TV movie version. But yeah, none of these films do this book justice in my opinion. Perhaps if someone like Martin Scorsese did Gatsby, I'd see it, but for now, I've decided to avoid any and all movies based on Fitzgerald's work. I much prefer my own imagined movies.
But you never know, I might decide to check it out when it comes out on DVD. That way I won't bother a theater full of people with shouts of "This is horsehit!" or "That didn't happen!" And hey, maybe it won't be as bad as I think it will. It certainly
looks pretty. Maybe I'll watch it on mute. ;)
