That film repeatedly alternates between the transcendent and the insufferable in the span of a single cut, but its manic omnivorousness empowers Luhrmann to celebrate and exploit the timeless power of love stories. In “Moulin Rouge!” he captured the high-class hedonism of turn-of-the-century Montmartre (and effectively romanticized the poorer, more Tubercular people who made it possible) by dressing it up like a Bollywood musical and using a jukebox’s worth of iconic pop songs as a visceral emotional shorthand. In “Romeo + Juliet” he thread Shakespearian iambic pentameter through an explicitly ’90s milieu, combining the feisty tribalism of Verona with the florid style of Venice Beach in order to restore the present tense to a tragedy that feels like it predates all of civilization. Repeating the past (and then repaving it with the molten stuff of his singular imagination) is what Luhrmann does best - in some respects, it’s what he does, period. But Luhrmann, a manic Australian aesthete whose career has been predicated upon the act of transmuting history into spectacle, has more in common with Jay Gatsby than he might care to admit. on an $105 million, special-effects driven riff on The Great American Novel. On the surface, Baz Luhrmann might seem like a strange choice to adapt “The Great Gatsby” - of course, it’s not like anyone else was pitching Warner Bros. The more that Hollywood leans on the past, the more that the most improbable blockbuster of the 21st century emerges also emerges as one of its most fascinating and relevant - no other movie so thoroughly exemplifies the ethos of modern Hollywood, and no other movie so thoroughly rebukes it. But, as was the case with Fitzgerald’s book, time has been as kind to the film as it was cruel to its namesake. On the surface, it seemed like the worst of all possible worlds, The Great American Novel cranked up to the volume of a summer tentpole and boiled down to nothing but raw spectacle. So when Baz Luhrmann’s cacophonous adaptation was released in the summer of 2013, many people - myself included - didn’t really know what to make of it. Needless to say, there’s something painfully ironic about making another version of “ The Great Gatsby” in this climate, of exhuming the past in order to tell a classic story about the futility of exhuming the past. They didn’t work out so well for Gatsby, but it’s hard to resist the allure of “the orgastic future that year by year recedes before us,” particularly when the money is coming in by the billions. Scott Fitzgerald, those words were the deluded mantra of a man who was doomed to chase a dream that had slipped between his fingers - for modern Hollywood, those words are practically a business plan. “Can’t repeat the past? Why, of course you can” might as well be written out and framed above every studio executive’s desk the same way that Billy Wilder had “How would Lubitsch do it?” mounted above his. Martin Scorsese's Favorite Movies: 58 Films the Director Wants You to SeeĢ023 Emmys Predictions: Outstanding Lead Actress in a Comedy Series Wants More Baz Luhrmann Movies, Gives First Look Deal to 'Elvis' Filmmaker Kate Hudson 'Really Wanted' to Star in 'Moulin Rouge!' Before Nicole Kidman Was Cast And those aren’t even the same people who just tried to resurrect “CHiPs.” Once upon a time, Disney adapted classic fairy tales into lushly animated musicals - now, they just lazily transpose those musicals into live-action spectacles in order to exploit our natural inability to recognize the things that money can’t buy.
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