Film Review: The Great Gatsby (2013)

The best thing that could be said about Baz Luhrmann's The Great Gatsby is that it's the sort of film that F. Scott Fitzgerald's characters would find terribly profound and moving, even though it's possible that no one else would. Using the same hyper-real and kinetic style that he employed to dizzying/disorientating effect in Moulin Rouge!, Luhrmann re-creates the Long Island playground of West Egg, home to the rich, beautiful and carefree denizens of an America drunk on success and illicit booze. It's a world of empty pleasures and idle existences, populated by people whose greatest concern is where their next good time is going to come from.

Half-Time Top Ten

July marks the half-way point of the year and, as has become customary, both for myself and pretty much the whole of the Internet, that means that it is time to take stock and try to figure out what kind of year it has been so far. And obviously the best way to judge something as ephemeral as quality is arbitrarily ranking vastly different films. Yay, film criticism!