“That was amazing!”

“Yeah, it was incredible!”

“I loved it!”

I was walking out of Baz Luhrmann’s new 3-D version of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s “The Great Gatsby” with my friends David and Oscar.  They were SO excited.  I was silent.  They were raving.  I kept my glasses.  

Keeping the glasses has become my silent protest when I spend the extra bucks to see a 3-D flick and don’t think it was worth it.  I have a lot of pairs of glasses.  I can’t remember which movies they’re all from, but it started with “Avatar.”  When a theater employee asked us to return the specs, a guy in the back yelled, “When you give me my five bucks back!” I thought he had a point.  Then when the show was over and I was monumentally disappointed, I held on to those glasses.  It was my personal “Screw you!” to James Cameron and everyone else who thought $15 was an acceptable price for a movie that was a pale retread of every “tough guy with a heart of gold joins the oppressed to fight the oppressors” story that’s ever been told.

Unlike “Avatar,” “Gatsby” wasn’t massive in its failure.  In some respects, it was interesting and kind of fun.  I knew Luhrmann wouldn’t go for a conventional retelling of the story – which is fine.  Where would the excitement be if he had?  I’m not a purist who’s married to the source material – not this time, at least.  I’ve matured since I went ballistic over the inaccuracies in the first Christopher Reeve Superman movie.

To be honest, unlike most of the American public, I hadn’t read the book in high school.  And I’d tried to plow through some of Fitzgerald’s other works with little success.  The only reason I knew the story was because I’d seen the 1974 version with Robert Redford and Mia Farrow.  I didn’t remember loving it, but it was pretty.  I figured I could make quick work of 180 pages, so I downloaded it to my Kindle and finished in a few days.

While the ’74 flick stayed true – and possibly too true – to the feel of the book – slow, quiet and too stilted to be really involving, Luhrmann was dead set on bringing it fully and crazily into the new millennium.  It’s Art Deco at 100 mph with the throb of hip hop underneath.  I was surprised that all the high-speed tire squealing and near misses didn’t give my friends a hint that something bad was going to happen with a car.  I expect they were caught up in the excitement.  I probably would have been, too.

I don’t have a laundry list of things I didn’t like about “Gatsby.”  I could point out that Leo DiCaprio was too creepy for the title role.  He always looked more like an axe murderer than a farm boy trying to reclaim a lost love.  I could mention that the costumes are all from 1927 rather than 1922.  (Yes, there’s a HUGE difference.)  I could say that the production is too gimmicky and tries much too hard to be high style.  The billowing curtains in the scene where we first meet Daisy Buchanan screams “Look, look!  I’m doing something artsy here!” without adding anything to the drama.  See?  A few things.  Not many.  (I’m not going to bother mentioning that Leo never once pronounced his signature phrase – “Old Sport” – with the final T, which got really annoying by the last reel.)

And that’s all forgivable.  What’s not forgivable is that the movie was flat-out boring.  Yes, boring.  It was big.  It was pretty.  It was dazzling.  It was bright.  And it had even less soul than the very-polite Fitzgerald text.

By the time the characters had all gathered for the showdown lunch at the Buchanans’ mansion I was done and I groaned when I thought about all the ground they still had to cover before the big, sad finale.  Luhrmann took lots of liberties in his presentation, but he was almost absolutely faithful to the original plot.  I was sure nothing would be left out.  David and Oscar knew nothing about the plot.  They were clean slates.  Maybe that was better.  They could take the ride with no expectations.

Wait!  There was one more demerit point.  3-D?  Really?  Why?  I think it was what made the careening driving scenes so urp-inducing and it made some of the close-ups pop in a disorienting way.  Still, I never thought it added anything at all.  I wanted to see the regular version at The Kabuki Sundance, where I could reserve a seat for an extra two dollars and where I could sip a glass of wine in an over-21 theater.  That was a Gastby-esque experience, I thought.  But the boys were jazzed about the special effects.  So I went.

And I kept the glasses.