Great F... Scott - Life after Lurid Luhrmann

All that Glitters is not Gold

Your Tireless Correspondent has not seen the latest filmic fantasia from The Great Luhrmann and has no intention of doing so. Body and soul can only take so much and this orgiastic glitter-fest will break me as surely as the rack.

I know this because I was roped to a chair, eyes propped open with some infernal eye-widening apparatus, in order to endure the abominable film Australia, merely to satisfy my loving family that I had a credible basis for criticism.

My terrifying experience inspired the copy-cat Clockwork Orange

I've served my sentence. I've done my porridge. I've suffered.

So, I'm going to fall back on the reliable old method of delivering a balanced and fair assessment, by avoiding nearly all personal knowledge of the subject in my stampede to lay on the assault and battery.

Moulin Rouge -reeled out of the room after 30 minutes with video clip overdose, fighting off  epilepsy;

A Luhrmann work of genius, as perfected

Australia - see above, but note that I am now convinced that the dazzling Baz has privileged access to a secret bag of gimmicks (sorry, unique technologies) to ENSURE that his works of genius are as crude, arrogant and repellent as galactically possible;

The Great Gatsby - my exacting analysis of this ... thing ... (as argued persuasively in my foregoing treatise) leaves only one conclusion - DON'T.

And so, to the real hero - F. Scott Fitzgerald

As a quasi-scholar (the most dangerous and deluded kind), I can say that there are distressingly few writers of whom I can say 'you are a bona fide genius'. We all have our opinions, and yours is clearly inferior to mine, but whenever I take up FSF's slim volumes the truth of this bold statement of writing mastery is confirmed.

It's bloody impressive. This takes some saying, as a professional cynic like myself is constitutionally disinclined to praise anything much. But, putting it another way ...

it's bloody impressive.

At fourteen I didn't think so, I must admit. Some imbecile slapped The Great Gatsby on the required reading list at high school. I cast it aside roughly, discerning correctly that it was deficient in the explosions and mayhem department.

Gatsby, as envisioned by The Great Luhrmann

There was one kid though, Loman, Lehmann, Leibling ... something like that ... who was unfazed. If the stuff lacked punch he'd damned well put it in. What a kid.

Now, a little older than fourteen, I am re-reading The Last Tycoon. It reminds me of Monty Python's assessment of Shakespeare's plays - all the right words AND in the right order.

Re-reading some books assessed as phenomenal in starry-eyed youth leave me convinced of only one thing - what a twat I must have been. FSF's books are not among the condemned. The reason I see more to admire is simple - there IS more to admire.

The learned, the cognoscenti, the faithful will tell you why this is so. All I know is that Baz and his dubious vision will take a back seat to the author of The Great Gatsby, ....

The Great F. Scott Fitzgerald

 

The Great Fitzgerald