If my high school years taught me anything, it’s that F. Scott’s Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby is about 215 pages long and not nearly as entertaining as Beavis & Butthead. Fortunately for today’s lazy AP English nerds, Gatsby is now a Baz Luhrmann film starring Leonardo DiCaprio as the titular man whom Thornton Melon once referred to as “great”.

DiCaprio’s Jay Gatsby re-woos Carey Mulligan’s Daisy Buchanan, while Tobey Maguire’s Nick Carraway and Isla Fisher’s Myrtle Wilson do whatever it is that they did in that book that you know you only read the Cliff’s Notes for, so quit acting like you’re excited to see it. Also, Gemma Ward has a small role in the film and I’m an admirer of some of her other work.

But now The Great Gatsby has a trailer and you can see just how Baz-Luhrmann-esque it all is, complete with a Jay Z soundtrack, because I hear he was huge in 1919.

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You Luhrmann'd my Gatsby! You Fitzgerald my Luhrmann! Either way, this Carraway is completely Tobey'd!

For lovers of Jazz Age literature, I thought it couldn’t get any better than Woody Allen’s fictionalized depictions of Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald (to say nothing of Hemingway) in Midnight in Paris. But in case the tongue-in-cheek time travel movie wasn’t, you know, sumptuous enough for you, vis a vis visual feasts, Warner Bros just released the first official publicity stills from Baz Luhrmann’s adaptation of The Great Gatsby (not to be confused with a batch of set pictures I posted a while back). Leonardo DiCaprio plays Jay Gatsby, Carey Mulligan gets to keep her regular hair as Daisy Buchanan, and Tobey Maguire embodies the dandy fancyboy rube role he was made for in Nick Carraway. The man was practically born with a carnation on his lapel.

On a separate note, if this succeeds in bringing back flapper headbands for girls again, I’m going to punch somebody.

One more picture after the jump, plus a Hemingway clip from Midnight in Paris, because I couldn’t resist.

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"Coloreds? This is highly irregular."

As if hipsters didn’t already have enough reason to buy vintage clothes, Baz Luhrmann is directing a film adaptation of The Great Gatsby set to open next Christmas, sure to be a sumptuous visual feast for everyone from the casual fan to the die-hard Luhrmaniac. It stars Leonardo DiCaprio as Jay Gatsby, along with Carey Mulligan as Daisy Buchanan, Joel Edgerton, and Isla Fisher. DiCaprio as the title character cuts a dashing figure in these new pictures from the set in Sydney’s Centennial Park, but something about the way Tobey Maguire rocks the collared sweater and floppy bow tie (as would-be writer Nick Carraway) absolutely steals the show for me. Tobey Maguire was born to play the Little Lord Fauntleroy role. He looks like what would happen if you brought a wedding-cake figurine to life and taught it skip around whistling jazz tunes. He’s like a human Jiminy Cricket.

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"It takes two to make an accident." - F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby, Ch. 3

Director Baz Luhrmann is currently in Australia shooting his adaptation of The Great Gatsby, starring Leonardo Di Caprio (Jay Gatsby), Tobey Maguire (Nick Carraway), Isla Fisher (Myrtle Wilson), and Carey Mulligan (Daisy Buchanan). Hopefully it turns out better than Australia (WOOF), but in the meantime, here’s a few pictures from the set. Either they’re just driving around the set in these and not actually shooting, or the costume designer decided to go real casual. “This is set when? Eh, I dunno, just throw on a t-shirt.”

Oh, and I thought the banner picture could use a little Gyllenhaal to brighten it up.

[FlynetPictures via ComingSoon]

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Tobey Maguire’s double life as a high-stakes poker player is coming to light as a result of an FBI investigation into a an embezzling hedge-fund manager who was also a degenerate gambler (shocking, I know).  Basically, this guy, Brad Ruderman, whose name couldn’t possibly sound more like the name of a douchey hedge-fund manager, lost $25 million of his clients’ money in secret poker games with Hollywood stars like Maguire, Ben Affleck, Matt Damon, Leonardo DiCaprio, and Webster.  Okay, I made that last one up. Now, some of Ruderman’s clients say they’re entitled to Maguire’s winnings, because they were acquired through illegal means, and because the money Ruderman money lost was rightfully theirs.  Yeah, yeah, and America “rightfully” belongs to the Indians, here’s me playing the world’s smallest invisible dick violin with my dismissive wank hand.

As Ruderman sits in a Texas jail until 2018, convicted on two counts of wire fraud and two counts of investment adviser fraud, lawyers for the clients whose funds he embezzled are filing a series of civil suits against those who won big in the illegal poker dens, in the hope of recouping some of their lost savings.
Ruderman lost $311,300 to Maguire, including one losing hand of $110,000, on July 30, 2007, it’s claimed.
The games were “exclusive events, by invitation only, and that there was a regular roster of players consisting of wealthy celebrities, entrepreneurs, attorneys and businessmen,” according to the lawsuit.
Tinsel town A-listers Leonardo DiCaprio, Ben Affleck and Matt Damon also played in the no-limit Texas Hold ‘em games held on a twice weekly basis in suites at the luxury Beverly Hills hotel, Four Seasons, and the Viper Room on Sunset Boulevard, which had a buy-in of $100,000, multiple members of the ring told Star.  DiCaprio, Affleck and Damon are not being sued.
Others who were part of the secret society and are facing hefty lawsuits include billionaire businessman Alex Gores, The Notebook director Nick Cassavetes, Welcome Back, Kotter star Gabe Kaplan, Paris Hilton’s infamous sex tape partner, Rick Salomon, record label owner Cody Leibel and Las Vegas nightlife entrepreneur and real-estate developer Andrew Sasson, among others.
Maguire won as much as $1 million a month over a period of three years, one source told Star, which is on newsstands Wednesday.
“That means he could have made up to $30 to $40 million from these games,” the whistle-blowing card shark predicted. [RadarOnline]

And I’m sure that’s an accurate estimate, because if there’s one thing I know about poker, it’s that your earnings from it are as constant and reliable as Old Faithful. One Hollywood A-lister whose name you WON’T find among the invitees to the games, however, is Paul Walker, who was no doubt presumed to have an unfair advantage. If you’ve seen any of his movies, you know the one thing that guy’s got going for him is an impenetrable poker face.

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