The Great Gatsby Set to Open the Cannes Film Festival
Posted March 12, 2013 03:42 PM by Webmaster
The Cannes Film Festival organizers announced earlier today that Baz Luhrmann's The Great Gatsby (2013) will open the prestigious event on May 15th. This is only the second 3D film to start the festival.
Luhrmann's adaptation of F. Scott Fitzgerald's classic stars Leonardo DiCaprio, Carey Mulligan, Tobey Maguire, and Joel Edgerton. The film, which is distributed by Warner Brothers, is set to open in theaters across the United States on May 10th.
The Great Gatsby follows Fitzgerald-like, would-be writer Nick Carraway (Tobey Maguire) as he leaves the Midwest and comes to New York City in the spring of 1922, an era of loosening morals, glittering jazz and bootleg kings. Chasing his own American Dream, Nick lands next door to a mysterious, party-giving millionaire, Jay Gatsby (Leonardo DiCaprio) and across the bay from his cousin, Daisy (Carey Mulligan) and her philandering, blue-blooded husband, Tom Buchanan (Joel Edgerton). It is thus that Nick is drawn into the captivating world of the super rich, their illusions, loves and deceits. As Nick bears witness, within and without the world he inhabits, he pens a tale of impossible love, incorruptible dreams and high-octane tragedy, and holds a mirror to our own modern times and struggles.
Note: Jack Clayton's The Great Gatsby (1974), starring Robert Redford, Mia Farrow, and Bruce Dern, will be available on Blu-ray on April 23rd. See our listing here.
I like the actors chosen for this film, but I'm still worried about this adaptation. Even more troubling that they're using so many modern artists to fill the soundtrack, I actually like most of them but they don't really fit for Gatsby.
The guy in the trailer that IMO looks like Christoph Waltz is actually Amitabh Bachchan, the Bollywood legend best known to Western audiences as the answer to the first question in Slumdog Millionaire. (Edit: Bachchan actually once hosted the Indian version of Who Wants To Be A Millionaire as depicted in Slumdog.) With the music and Leo in the trailer, if it had been Waltz instead of Bachchan I would have called this Django Unchained 2 -- or more accurately, Inglourious Basterds 3. Looks more like Tarantino than Luhrmann...
The book is one of a few I'd pack to take with me to a desert island, but every time they make a movie version out of it, they always seem to pick the wrong details to emphasize, and this seems no different. A story about the inherently tragic side of the Jazz Age shouldn't be striving to make it seem like it was so much fun, 'yknow?
@lemonski: Helped out no doubt by people who make up their minds before actually watching a movie these days and then tweet all their friends their revelatory prediction. By the time the actual movie comes out, all anyone can remember is that they haven't heard anything good, even though they can't remember the source. Reading these discussions, it seems the adage "judging a book by it's cover" has already been forgotten, even though e-books are still in their infancy.
CaptainKronos - I don't think there will be an emo version of "Happy Together" in the movie itself. It's a trailer, remember? Remember that cool choir singing Radiohead's "Creep" in the trailer for The Social Network? Was that in the movie? No.
@Moulin: You get movie ideas from Twitter? I rely on the professionals to review movies. RT has yet to fail me. And this movie has bomb written all over it. At least that might mean a movie will be made without Leo manchild DiCaprio in it.
The Cannes Film Festival organizers announced earlier today that Baz Luhrmann's The Great Gatsby (2013) will open the prestigious event on May 15th. This is only the second 3D film to start the festival. 
