The Multi-Million Dollar Gatsby

The Great Gatsby exposes the fallacy of the "American Dream."  It critiques superficiality through the condemnation of the wealthy and the "careless" people.  It eerily reveals the lavishness and greed that precipitated The Great Depression.  And, most of all, it promises us that we will never find happiness or true fulfillment if we search for it through material gain.

Perhaps this is why I found it so ironic that the Baz Luhrmann film version of The Great Gatsby, which I have been so looking forward to, and that began filming recently in Australia, is a film drowning in excessive spending.  According to the extremely academic and exceedingly accurate source, TMZ, Luhrmann's 3D adaptation is costing around 125 million!  Some of this ridiculous budget coming from Luhrmann's purchase of very expensive old cars to, you know, make the film more authentic and such.

Poor F. Scott Fitzgerald would be driven to drink if he heard about this...

Oh, right...

Well, he wouldn't be happy about it, that's for sure.

Luhrmann better hope that this movie appeals to a broad audience so that he makes back his money.  If he had polled my Juniors before embarking on this project, he would probably have hovered around a thousand dollar film budget.