F. Scott

Last night I was forced to watch Luhrmann’s take on the Great Gatsby.

It’s a book I haven’t read since I was at school. But as it was a key book in one year of high school I must have read it at least three times and I studied it deeply, wrote essays on it, etc. So I know it well.

About the movie, it does demonstrate that purveyors of video clips don’t do ‘subtle’ very well. Every emotion in the movie was verbalised and the whole thing was over-acted.

The book was written ‘off-beat’; the real story was slyly hiding in the barely noticed percussion and not where it was expected. Also the book created an overwhelming feeling of an other-world story, re-told in an almost dream-like narrative fashion.

The movie did not create any of these feelings probably because the director never felt them in the first place.