The Great Gatsby
It’s something we’ve all been through – you finish reading The Great Gatsby and think to yourself, yeah not bad, but it would be much better caked in CGI and set to a Jay-Z soundtrack.
Hunger no more. Baz Luhrmann has been handed the keys to Fitzgerald’s melancholy masterpiece and has gleefully smashed it straight into a wall. He was the obvious choice – after all, The Great Gatsby has big parties in it, right? No brainer: bring on the master of the cinematic blowout – the thrower of all-singing, all-prancing zoomfests; the man who can make vomit come out of your eyes; the man who can take his high-pressure stylistic hose and blast away all the annoying subtlety of the book. Bring on the Bazza. Read more
Film adaptations of popular books are a regular occurrence in the world of cinema nowadays but oftentimes, aspects of the book fail to make the connection when on the big screen. Andrew Nicholls’ attempt at transferring Stephenie Meyer’s bestselling book The Host onto the big screen suffers from this particular problem.
Reality is all the rage in Hollywood. Whether it’s political Oscar bait, schmaltzy biopics, or those horror films that dubiously claim to be ‘based on real events’, modern audiences apparently crave a bit of authenticity. Fiction is passé, imagination is out – we want stories about real people doing real things, and we want them here, and we want them now.
