…no one is more excited about this than loafing incoming high-school freshman, who either realize now, or soon will, that this over-the-top and glitzy Hollywood production may have just cut their required reading list for English class down by one. All we’re talking is two hours in an air-conditioned theater (maybe with a spiked Slurpee you smuggled in, I mean I don’t know how the kids get down these days) and, boom, you don’t even have to bother flipping through the Cliff Notes for Gatsby five minutes before class starts and trying to memorize, like, two key plot points to make it seem like you read the whole thing. (Yes, there’s a 1974 version with Robert Redford and Sam Waterson, but if these kids are this uninterested in a relatively short literary classic, they’re probably not too into seventies cinema, either).
~ Amos Barshad @ Grantland
