The Great Gatsby (M)
Starring: Leonardo DiCaprio (Django Unchained), Tobey Maguire (The Details), Carey Mulligan (Drive).
Director: Baz Luhrmann (Australia).
Screening: Reading Cinemas Queenstown
There ain't no party like a Baz Luhrmann party - the Australian film-maker would make a New Year's Eve set Bollywood film look like a British ''Grim up north'' kitchen sink drama.
The magpie director of such love-them-or-loathe-them films as Strictly Ballroom, Romeo + Juliet, Moulin Rouge! and Australia creates another spectacular sequence of hedonistic abandon as he shows the bright young things of the Roaring Twenties party hard into oblivion, complete with synchronised high energy dancing, fountains of Champagne, falling confetti, fireworks and modern dance music.
Just as grieving Ewan McGregor typed about his time in the Moulin Rouge before him, thin-lipped Maguire as Nick Carraway looks back on his days of gleeful debauchery while feverishly typing about the great Jay Gatsby (DiCaprio), megawealthy thrower of wild parties and a prince, a spy, or a murderer, depending on whom Carraway speaks to.
DiCaprio plays the mysterious Gatsby like he played Howard Hughes in The Aviator, but without the nervous twitches.
Our unreliable guide is swept into Gatsby's inner circle and becomes his accomplice in winning back his lost love Daisy (Mulligan) from her alpha male husband Tom (Joel Edgerton, Zero Dark Thirty).
The Sydney-shot romantic drama cast is enhanced by such familiar Australian faces as Isla Fisher, Jason Clarke, Vince Colosimo, Steve Bisley and Nick Tate.
However, those expecting an earnest Merchant Ivory-style adaptation of F. Scott Fitzgerald's classic will be baffled, for style always becomes substance through Luhrmann's lens.
Audiences in this age of austerity will be forgiven for finding it tough to sympathise with self-absorbed Jazz Age characters who have it all, but are still not happy.
The central love affair is weakened by there being more mutual love and admiration between real-life buddies DiCaprio and Maguire than there is between DiCaprio and the pale wisp of a girl, Mulligan.
