Peter Suderman Reviews The Great Gatsby
After seeing The Great Gatsby in hip-hopified 3D, Senior Editor Peter Suderman writes that he's looking forward to the other similarly hip updates on other early-20th century literary classics that are sure to follow if the new Gatsby is a success. Imagine: Ulysses, in IMAX! The Old Man and the Sea, the Ride! The Awakening, in Smell-o-Vision! Director Baz Luhrmann's ecstatic, occasionally spastic, adaptation of F. Scott Fitzgerald's 1925 novel isn't much less ridiculous than any of those ideas, yet what's surprising is that some of it works anyway—not in spite of Luhrmann's revisionism, but because of it. What Luhrmann loses in nuance and tonal faithfulness he makes up for with glitz and zest. The director doesn't adapt the book so much as extract its key components, strap on some fireworks, and then let the whole thing explode.