The Great Gatsby, Possibly My Next Favourite Movie

I just watched The Great Gatsby trailer and I am in love. I know, the trailer came out five months ago but I refused to watch it. Allow me to explain.

Every time a movie comes out that I want to see but it's based on a book, I feel that I have to read the book first. Most of the time, this doesn't work out. Water for Elephants looked amazing; it seemed like a magical, heart-wrenching story with a gorgeous circus for its setting, not to mention, I love elephants. So, I bought the book, but I didn't read it. I didn't see the movie in theatres because I was so determined to read the book first. After a while, the movie came out on DVD and I gave up. I watched it. It was good, but not amazing. A year later, I read the book. Now, that was amazing. Sometimes, it's the other way around. Although I didn't badly want to see Savages, I had the book, so I read it. It was terrible. It was a painful read, so much that I didn't really care to live through it again if the movie might be so terrible. So, I didn't see the movie. Both of these scenarios had played out a gazillion times.

I heard they were making a Great Gatsby movie. The book had been on my "to read" list for too long. I didn't really know much about it except that a lot of people loved it. I told myself that I would read the book before the trailer came out. I didn't. But I refused to watch the trailer. I didn't want the images of the actors to alter my perceptions of the characters in the book. Luckily, the movie got pushed to a later date and I wasn't bombarded with trailers on TV, so it was easy to avoid.

I finished reading The Great Gatsby last night. It was alright. I'm not a fan of the writing style but the story is just poetry. What the story needs is a new visualization, something dramatic and pulsing, glamourous and decadent. It needs someone who isn't afraid to be bold, who paints his scenes with glitz, who will give a love story the power it needs to crush you in the end.  Moulin Rouge! is my favourite movie because it is all these things, as well as a beautifully poetic story. What this book needs is exactly Baz Luhrmann and absolutely no one else. Luhrmann and The Great Gatsby is purely magic-in-the-making and it better break my heart.