Still, it seems only fair that writer/director Christopher Scott Cherot should be permitted to take F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby, arguably the finest American book on the high school reading list, and put his own spin on it, in this case, by replacing Fitzgerald's lily-white characters with an all-black cast. The setting (the Hamptons) and central love triangle remain the same in G, but Cherot and his co-writers have embellished the particulars enough that no one's going to get away with watching the movie instead of reading the book.

The Hamptons have changed a great deal in the 80 years since Fitzgerald first published The Great Gatsby. The best thing about G is the way it suggests that the competitive social scene is still much the same, only now, the group upsetting the Hamptons' old-money residents are overnight hip-hop sensations with bling to burn.

Gatsby was a nouveau riche outsider who made his fortune with the aim of winning back the only woman he ever loved, throwing huge, tacky parties in the hope of attracting her attention. It's a model that translates easily to a Sean Combs-inspired hip-hop producer like Summer G. His money may afford him entrance into the neighborhood, but his background will forever brand him as beneath those born into their wealth.

As in the book, Summer G (Richard T. Jones of The Wood) tries to rekindle his relationship with his college lover, Sky (Chenoa Maxwell), who left him for Chip Hightower (Blair Underwood). It's interesting that the filmmakers decided to make Underwood's character a fellow African American; it would've been all too easy to cast a white actor as this rich, cheating cad.

Instead, as a professional black man whose wealth comes from more respectable (that is, conventional) sources than Summer's hip-hop fortune, Chip's behavior underscores the damage the African-American community is capable of inflicting on itself, inadvertently holding each other back out of pride, jealousy or ignorance

If these issues were more fully explored, G might have been a landmark film, but instead, it takes these and other elements from The Great Gatsby and tosses them into the Big Movie Blender. Key details (such as Gatsby's ostentatious set of wheels) are reassigned to other characters, where they make no sense, while the ending is mangled to produce another tragedy altogether

All movie long, Cherot battles the urge to let his movie devolve into silly melodrama, from the runaway romantic subplots to his soap opera-worthy score, and the ending effectively sinks what G had going for it. It's too bad that this fascinating study of the shifting dynamic in American wealth is pinned to such a weak retelling of Fitzgerald's classic.

[as featured in The Miami Herald]