I may spoil by suggestion, inference, allusion and omission. That still spoiling? Like Harve Bennett before him, J.J. Abrams rebooted Star Trek for Paramount. Both took a loved but semi-popular franchise and had to reimagine it to serve the fair-weather fan and the audience who treated the mythology like a religion.

Baz Lurmann’s Great Gatsby is garish and bright, chocked with the bling you hoped he’d throw around like it’s cheap—and it is. His high-budget/low-brow spectacles are perfect for reproducing the moral vacuum of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s book, and for all its anachronisms, Lurmann’s reproduction couldn’t be more loyal to the text:

In introduction to the State of the Cinema Address at San Francisco International Film Festival, Film Society Executive Director Ted Hope told an old story. While producing his first project, a one man show about an actor with AIDS, Hope asked a friend for Soderbergh’s number and the result of a cold call (an industry no-no) was not just Steven Soderbergh’s allegiance, but a dedication to “make this (one man show) happen.”

May 3rd the director who “decoded” gaslight melodrama and Shakespeare with uber-modern over-the-top-ness, will perplex and delight with his revisionist play on Fitzgerald. I can’t wait. Ironically, it’s not a subject I love. I don’t have special affections for the book or for director Baz Luhrmann (Moulin Rouge, Romeo + Juliet), it’s just a perfect storm of form and function, old and new, and every body likes a perfect storm.

Shane Carruth’s first film, Primer was a low budget, high concept time travel drama that sidestepped science fiction to look at how we subjectively experience time. His sophomore effort, Upstream Color, also investigates the conflict between subjective and projected realities, but this time through the POV of a girl who’s infected with a parasite and manipulated into undoing the life she's built.