Gatsby gets the green light

A new film version of The Great Gatsby is in the works. It’s going to be filmed in Australia by Baz Luhrman, who gave us the frantic and over the top “Moulin Rouge” with two stars who couldn’t sing—but did anyway.
The movies love remakes such as King Kong, True Grit, Arthur, The Count of Monte Cristo plus all the foreign films they purloin for Hollywood purposes. They’re usually never as good as the original (because they’re not original!). It’s like illustrating a snake and then painting legs on it for good measure.
Gatsby is my favorite book so I’ll be in the audience just as I was for the Alan Ladd and Robert Redford versions. They were films packaged for their era and the new one will have attractive stars of the day, a hot director, costumes and a hip music score. The only thing missing will be the literature, the moral and the language. The melodramatic parts will be front and center.
One of the real stars will be absent: New York City (they don’t have one in Oz). Sometimes I think that the only one who could do justice to Gatsby is Woody Allen.
And so we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.