10 Awesome Musical Scores That Deserved Better Movies

Baz Luhrmann's opulent costume drama was the fifth attempt to film the literary masterpiece of the Jazz Age and the fifth to fail to capture quite what makes F. Scott Fitzgerald's decadent tale of quixotic romance, hollow grandeur and the American Dream so enduring.

Maybe Luhrmann's film didn't quite land with audiences and critics in the way that his earlier reworking of Romeo And Juliet had because it lacked the more radically anachronistic reworking of the latter into something vibrantly, pop culturally contemporary, preferring a relatively safe, seen-many-times-before 1920s aesthetic.

Musically, however, The Great Gatsby absolutely delivered on Luhrmann's knack for mixing up the sounds of different eras to give just the right moodscape. Eschewing the obvious choice of an orchestral score drawing on era-appropriate jazz and blues, Luhrmann instead opted for a modern soundtrack curated by Jay-Z.

Through an eclectic mix of hip-hop, dubstep, electronica and lush ballads, all mashed up with samples of swing, jazzy trumpets and honky tonk pianos, artists including Andre 3000, Beyonce, will.i.am, Lana Del Rey and The xx, along with executive producer Jay-Z himself, deliver what essentially amounts to a dark and haunting party album, a paean to doomed romance.

Not all of these eccentric mash-ups work, but you can't help but wish that Luhrmann's direction was as bold and imaginative as his soundtrack.