Gatsby? What Gatsby?

Baz Lurmann's last film

 is the best advertising for a book I've ever seen.

Movies are released with a great delay in theaters here, in Tokyo. So, here I am with my thoughts, a month after the world-except-tokyo-wide premiere of The Great Gatsby 3D.

I had time to read several reviews and got upset about "this dreadful film". But now, after I watched it, I became upset with the critics who didn't get the idea at all.

The book was written 88 years ago, and the film is the 5th adaptation so far! We all should have already known the story by heart. So, it's hard to understand this type of "it's not what I expected, there is not enough book quotes" guys. Why on earth would you want to listen a book from cover to cover again? It just doesn't work this way! The point is to show you something about the book that you wouldn't have imagined yourself, to do it clever and with taste. I think the TGG crew did the great job here.

Baz Luhrmann didn't want you to listen to jazz from 20' to explain the Jazz Age. You wouldn't be able to feel anything but nostalgia about it anyway. You wouldn't be able to catch the emotions of people who were at the edge of opening their door to something new and luxurious. So, It was very important to combine both the realistic picture of Roaring Twenties and the mood of modern, so We could feel it. Nothing was chosen randomly in this movie. 

"We didn't want a nostalgic 1920s. We wanted a modern 1920s" said Catherine Martine, the chief designer of the movie, "This is a revolutionary time. It's a time in which women are much more employed because of the war. You also have women fashion designers—like Coco Chanel, like Jean Lanvin—all actually speaking to women and making clothes for women. And that is something that Muiccia Prada does today. Just like those designers spoke to women in the 1920s, she's speaking to women now.. And I think that's why Tiffanys just felt so right. Because there's a sense of history, but also a modern company moving toward the future."

The same was with music. Baz Luhrmann called our age "the hip hop age", so hello the hip hop stars! Although, I don't like hip hop myself, I love that Luhrmann's idea; he made hip hop in the movie look really high-level. Even Eleanor Lanahan, Scott Fizgerald's granddaughter approved it!

I also like it, when  with a release of a new picture comes a boom which repeats the mood of the past but according to our days . Trying to affect as more areas of live as possible.  I mean, look at the Brooks Brothers who made a special Great Gatsby Collection and so did Tiffany and Co 

(Aww!). 

The windows are amazing!

Another interesting thing about the movie is that the director took time to show us all the evil the main characters have in themselves, before destroying everything, so that we had nothing but true feelings about them and wouldn't whine about their fates. They have pretty much deserved all they got.

Nevertheless, personally I burst into tears fifteen minutes after the movie ended. But for the different reason. I don't get what did Gatsby (and whoever else) find in Daisy. So it seemed so.. easy for a girl to attract a man. All these emotions, ego and chic of that era.. It's all gone now, and I won't ever be able to feel the way, the sophisticated girls of the 1920s could feel. I won't never knew, how it feels to be loved that way.  Now came the age of cynicism which of cause has its own charms, but there will be no more feelings shown the way they were shown, and I speak specifically about true and decent ones (all the vices has never changed, so nothing interesting to discuss here). And well, it made me cry. Sorry. Nevertheless, Daisy Buchanan has said it all:

"I hope she'll be a fool - that's the best thing a girl can be in this world, a beautiful little fool."