9. Baz Luhrmann
Many movie-goers are consistently enamoured by Baz Luhrmann's signature style, one which often comes across like an explosion in a Valentine's greeting card shop. Luhrmann's films are, after all, heavily stylised, something the man himself refers to as "Red Curtain" - a surprisingly efficient way of summing up all that velvet and all those bloody cushions. For my taste, though, Luhrmann's films are too much of a certain thing - and that certain thing is melodrama. After about 10 minutes into one of his films, I begin to get a sickly feeling, as though I knew I shouldn't have tried to take on so much at once. Like a child left alone in an ice cream parlor, I'm stuffed far too quickly. Aside from their aesthetic qualities, though, Baz Luhrmann films are painfully jarring: messy and incoherently edited (I get that that might be the point). I fear for
The Great Gatsby, as any honest person familiar with both Luhrmann and Fitzgerald might fear.