The Great Gatsby

The Great Gatsby

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Jay and Daisy face to face

This is The Great Gatsby no one talks about. Not the Baz Luhrmann one from 2013, or the Robert Redford one from 1974, but the 1949 version starring Alan Ladd as Jay Gatsby, the poor boy made good who’s trying to chummy up to old money and finds it comes at a cost. In 1949, films about the jazz age were largely off-limits and so to get this film made, a moralising preamble and postscript was added – as if F Scott Fitzgerald’s original book weren’t a cautionary tale to start with. Ask AI to summarise the difference between this film and the book, as I just did, and it really goes off … Read more

11 November 2013-11-11

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Charlie Hunnam in Pacific Rim

Out in the UK This Week   Pacific Rim (Warner, cert 12, Blu-ray/DVD) Guillermo Del Toro, everybody, which raises expectations – Pan’s Labyrinth and Cronos being not too shabby. And Hellboy being a yawn but at least a formidably realised one. Throw a director of that ability at a story about alien creatures rising up out of the Pacific and waging war on humanity – who wage it right back with huge robotic leviathans controlled by human drivers – and the result should be something fairly awesome, shouldn’t it? And Pacific Rim actually is awesome up to a point. We have Charlie Hunnam showing his formidably sculpted abs. We have Idris Elba as the … Read more