7. The Great Gatsby
If you've read The Great Gatsby, you'll know that F. Scott Fitzgerald isn't exactly a fan of all the excess in which his titular character indulges. Indeed, it's quite the opposite. He's very scathing of all the decadence Gatsby lives in, making it very clear that he's just compensating for the real lack of emotional depth in his life. Everything's distant, far-away and cold, exacerbating the problem of Gatsby's riches because while he knows he's rich, it still won't fill any sort of hole in his life. Yet when it came time for the 21st century movie, a very different message was at hand, and this was all made possible by the catastrophically crazy choice of director. I'll explain. Baz Luhrmann is an excellent director, but only if he's directing certain things. Simply put, he's not the best at subtlety, so it's a bit of a shock to see him helming material which is supposed to mock the central subject and surrounding characters for their lavish ways. But the way Luhrmann stages his sets, you can't help but be enraptured by just how goddamned beautiful everything is. The tragedy is that this shouldn't be the point, that you're supposed to hate everything that Gatsby stands for, all his hedonism and emptiness. But by choosing a director whose main talent is making even the mundane look like a roller disco set in a tart's boudoir, this apparently empty excess instead seems like a damn awesome possibility. After all, where else are you going to get champagne pyramids, if not from cinema's most exuberant director? By making the whole thing seem impossibly glamorous, he's missed the point completely in favour of dressing up a more part of Gatsby's nihilism as a pretty awesome source of extravagance, and that's a shame.