Albums : Various Artists : Music From Baz Luhrmann's Film The Great Gatsby

Albums : Various Artists : Music From Baz Luhrmann's Film The Great Gatsby

Listen To Various Artists : Music From Baz Luhrmann's Film The Great Gatsby

Baz Luhrmann's lavish adaptation of The Great Gatsby, one of the season's most hotly anticipated films, has been greeted with mixed reviews in America. David Denby, film critic of the New Yorker, decried the Moulin Rouge director's "vulgarity" and "stunning absence of taste" in his handling of F Scott Fitzgerald's classic. He did, however, acknowledge that the film's star, Leonardo DiCaprio, is "a more forceful Gatsby than placid Robert Redford was in the tastefully opulent but inert adaptation of the book from 1974".

Alonso Duralde of the influential film blog The Wrap seemed similarly non-plussed, concluding that "the cardinal sin of this new Gatsby is that it’s dull". And, in the industry magazine Variety, Scott Foundas wrote that the film feels like nothing so much as "a well-rehearsed classic in which the actors say their lines ably, but with no discernible feeling behind them".

Of the American critics who have given their verdict ahead of the film's May 10 American opening (it will be released in Britain on May 16, the day after opening the Cannes FIlm Festival) The Hollywood Reporter's Todd McCarthy was perhaps the most positive, describing it as a work that "feels vibrantly alive while remaining quite faithful to the spirit, if not the letter or the tone, of its source".

Until the British reviewers deliver their verdict (and the other major American critics have their say) it would be unfair to declare a consensus. After all, to borrow a phrase from Fitzgerald's narrator, Nick Carraway, "reserving judgements is a matter of infinite hope".

Music From Baz Luhrmann's Film The Great Gatsby
The exhilarating ripple of her voice was a wild tonic in the rain." Daisy Buchanan from "The Great Gatsby" gets to be reincarnated on the film's soundtrack under the guise of artists such as Beyonce, Lana Del Rey, Sia and Florence Welch. Their honeyed charm work on the listener in the same indiscriminate, intense manner that Buchanan's does on the narrator and her entourage.

The Jay-Z-produced musical roller coaster mixes electronica, hip-hop and rock with jazz-age sounds into a breathy, sexy, dangerous, electric result. It was to be expected from the master of mind-blowing pastiche, director Baz Luhrmann, to create a totally anachronistic companion to his lush film that works to drive the story's point home - illusionary love, the excess of the leisure classes, the curse of money.

The songs, which meander in themes among partying, murder and heartache, mostly set their buttons on eerie and sad. The album is full of new cuts, previously released ones and covers. They all work, except for Emeli Sande's strange version of Beyonce's "Crazy in Love," which fails to combine modern sound with Charleston. It's more of a vaudevillian joke that falls flat.

Jay-Z's own tracks -- "$100 Bill" and the Grammy-winning jam "No Church in the Wild" -- hit techno-rap notes that propel us into the seediness of Gatsby's life. Beyonce and Andre 3000's rendition of Amy Winehouse's "Back to Black" embraces a dark, twisted mood with a hypnotizing dub beat. The xx's "Together" is both literally and figuratively a sound drip, while Nero's "Into the Past" explores an ambient electro world. But it is Del Rey's haunting vocals in "Young and Beautiful" that leave you asking for more.


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