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We had to turn to our friend, an original Leo fan club member gone apostate, and whisper, “Break na kayo ni Channing Tatum, ano?” Photo from the Hollywood Reporter

Not gaudily sublime or sublimely gaudy, but gaudy and sublime.

In the first half-hour we didn’t know whether to stay or go. Then Leonardo DiCaprio appeared in the most ridiculous movie star introduction in memory, and the movie was on.

Of course the 21st century soundtrack produced by Jay-Z is entirely appropriate: his music is about climbing, money and power. Don’t forget that Gatsby is the story of a very successful social climber.

We couldn’t wait to review the movie so we wrote this over dinner.

* * * * *

Those extravagant character introductions follow Scott Fitzgerald’s explicit stage directions.

Daisy’s introduction:

We walked through a high hallway into a bright rosy-colored space, fragilely bound into the house by French windows at either end. The windows were ajar and gleaming white against the fresh grass outside that seemed to grow a little way into the house. A breeze blew threw the room, blew curtains in at one end and out the other like pale flags, twisting them up toward the frosted wedding cake of the ceiling—and then rippled over the wine-colored rug, making a shadow on it as wind does on the sea.

The only completely stationary object in the room was an enormous couch on which two young women were buoyed up as though upon an anchored balloon. They were both in white and their dresses were rippling and fluttering as it they had just been blown back in after a short flight around the house. I must have stood for a few moments listening to the whip and snap of the curtains and the groan of a picture on the wall. Then there was a boom as Tom Buchanan shut the rear windows and the caught wind died out about the room and the curtains and the rugs and the two young women ballooned slowly to the floor.

from We Can’t Hear the Mime!

Gatsby’s

He smiled understandingly—much more than understandingly. It was one of those rare smiles with a quality of eternal reassurance in it, that you may come across four or five times in life. It faced—or seemed to face—the whole external world for an instant, and the concentrated on you with an irresistible prejudice in your favor. It understood you just as far as you wanted to be understood, believed in you as you would like to believe in yourself and assured you that it had precisely the impression of you that, at your best, you hoped to convey. Precisely at that point it vanished—and I was looking at an elegant young rough-neck, a year or two over thirty, whose elaborate formality of speech just missed being absurd.

from Business Insider