Salon.com > Leonardo DiCaprio

How the GOP cast Obama as Gatsby (minus the parties)

Sat, 11 May 2013 18:00:00 +0000

One of the biggest differences between F. Scott Fitzgerald’s “The Great Gatsby” and Baz Luhrmann’s overblown new movie version, as Richard Brody of the New Yorker has pointed out, is that Fitzgerald’s book was (among many other things) a work of prescient social criticism, published at the very height of the Roaring '20s boom, whose dark side he saw so clearly. A few years later, the stock market crash and the ensuing Great Depression would smash all the champagne glasses, exposing the Gatsby-scaled dream of ever-widening affluence (which was only ever available to white Americans above the poverty class) as a mass delusion.

“The Great Gatsby”: Debauchery in Disneyland

Thu, 09 May 2013 00:00:00 +0000

All novels take place in the imagination rather than the real world, and F. Scott Fitzgerald’s “The Great Gatsby” is a particularly delicate balance of realism and fantasy, entirely filtered through the literary consciousness of its narrator, Nick Carraway. But that doesn’t mean it should seem entirely imaginary, which is one way of explaining the problems with Baz Luhrmann’s spectacular but oddly uninvolving new film version. “Gatsby” has long resisted successful big-screen adaptation, not least because of Fitzgerald-as-Nick’s famous poetic reveries – which are mostly extraneous to the plot – and because of its ambiguous mythic or fairy tale quality. Luhrmann embraces those elements with gusto (perhaps too much so) and creates a larger and more ambitious screen “Gatsby” than has ever been seen before. That doesn’t turn out to be the answer either.

Newest “Great Gatsby” trailer teases with plot, music

Thu, 04 Apr 2013 17:32:00 +0000

Though by now you may have already seen trailers for "The Great Gatsby," the adaptation of the F. Scott Fitzgerald classic, Warner Bros. on Thursday released the first trailer to reveal some of the plot of the film. The trailer also features new music from Beyoncé, Florence and the Machine, Lana del Rey and André 3000.

The film, starring Leonardi DiCaprio as Jay Gatsby, hits movie theaters May 10.

Tarantino’s incoherent three-hour bloodbath

Wed, 26 Dec 2012 14:39:00 +0000

Quentin Tarantino no longer makes movies; he makes trailers. “Django Unchained” feels like a three-hour trailer for a movie that never happens, a slavery-revenge melodrama cum salt-‘n’-pepper action film that would be awesome if it actually existed. Like so many trailers, it’s packed with memorable scenes that don’t go anywhere, and keeps promising payoffs that remain theoretical. It’s got Western scenery on a grand scale and scenes of madcap comedy involving inept members of the Ku Klux Klan. It’s got veritable geysers and fountains and gushers of blood, an ocean of fake gore even by Tarantino’s standards. You could claim that he’s “quoting from Sam Peckinpah” with those slapsticky water balloons full of blood, except that that’s not quite it. It’s more like he’s quoting from crappy ‘70s drive-in movies that were quoting from “The Hills Have Eyes,” which was quoting from something else that was quoting from Peckinpah. (I may be missing an intermediate stage there, such as a cannibal film that was dubbed from Italian into Spanish and projected once, with the reels out of sequence, at a downtown Los Angeles theater in 1983.)