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The best way to enjoy Baz Luhrmann’s big and noisy new version of “The Great Gatsby” — and despite what you may have heard, it is an eminently enjoyable movie — is to put aside whatever literary agenda you are tempted to bring with you. I grant that this is not so easily done. F. Scott Fitzgerald’s slender, charming third novel has accumulated a heavier burden of cultural significance than it can easily bear. Short and accessible enough to be consumed in a sitting, the book has become, in the 88 years since its publication, a schoolroom staple and a pop-cultural totem. It shapes our increasingly fuzzy image of the jazz age and fuels endless term papers on the American dream and related topics.

Through this fog of glib allusion and secondhand thinking, the wistful glimmer of Fitzgerald’s prose shines like the green light at the end of Daisy Buchanan’s dock. If “The Great Gatsby” can’t quite sustain the Big Ideas that are routinely attached to it — a fact that periodically inspires showboating critical contrarians to proclaim that it’s not such a big deal after all — it nonetheless remains a lively, imaginative presence.

When the Lord God forbade his worshippers to bow down before any graven image, Rosario Dawson’s face was exactly the kind of thing He had in mind. No other star can boast such sculptured features—except Vincent Cassel, who is pretty damn graven himself. When the two of them make love, in ‘Trance,’ one strong bone structure pressed against another, it’s like a clash of major religions. What if they had a family? The kids would be practically Cubist.

Who will stay with this film, and glorify it? Two sorts, I reckon: real revellers, randy for sensation, out of their heads; and, a block away, coffee-drinking PhDs, musing on the cinema of alienation, too lost inside their heads to break for spring.

The big picture (allowing for some exceptions) is this: The six major studios want to make three kinds of movies. They want to make blockbusters costing $150 million and up (with another $50-100 million spent on promotion)—that is, films that are based on comic books, video games, and young-adult novels. These movies mostly feature angry pixels contending in the dead air—action sequences of total physical abandonment and virtually total meaninglessness, in which nothing imprints itself on your memory except the experience of being excited. They want to make animated features for families, some of which—especially the ones from Pixar—are very good. And they want to make genre movies—thrillers, chick flicks, romantic comedies, weekend-debauch movies (female as well as male), horror movies. Movies that have a mostly assured audience. Some of those are very good, too, and I sometimes praise them…. But it’s not all that we want from movies.

Quentin Tarantino is interested in watching somebody’s ear getting cut off; David Lynch is interested in the ear.

‘HHhH’ is about the rise and fall of Reinhard Heydrich, the monster whom even Hitler called “the man with the iron heart.” … Heydrich is most infamous as the man who convened the Wannsee Conference, on January 20, 1942, in an elegantly sombre villa on the shore of Lake Wannsee. It was at this meeting of high-ranking civil servants and senior officers that the Final Solution was proposed and formalized….

Many of those present at the Wannsee Conference lived justly shortened lives, and the most abbreviated was Heydrich’s. Four months after Wannsee, he was assassinated, in Prague, by Jozef Gabčík and Jan Kubiš, two parachutists trained in England and sent from there by the Czech government-in-exile…. The parachutists ambushed Heydrich’s open-topped Mercedes as it slowed to round a bend in a city street. But Gabčík’s Sten gun jammed, and only Kubiš’s quick response saved the moment: he threw a grenade, which wounded Heydrich (who died a week later, from septicemia). Reprisals were blind and absolute: the village of Lidice, near Prague, mistakenly thought by the Nazis to have some connection with the parachutists, was burned to the ground, and nearly every one of its inhabitants was shot or sent to a concentration camp. The assassins, along with five other resisters, were hidden in a Prague church. When the Germans eventually discovered them, the seven men held out for hours, against nearly eight hundred S.S. Storm Troopers. None were taken alive.

One development is the repeated use of Beethoven, sparing but extraordinarily precise; at three cruxes in the story, we hear the same short exerpt from the slow movement of the “Emperor” Concerto, deliberately unresolved. Not until the final credits is the piano allowed to enter. I was left prostrate by this, I must admit, and other, comparable flourishes — Kubrick’s elaborate, often synthesized bursts of the Ninth Symphony, say, in ‘A Clockwork Orange’ — suddenly feel clunky and overwrought. Only Bresson, with his careful placing of Mozart’s C-Minor Mass in ‘A Man Escaped,’ is on a level with the Dardennes, and you feel a Bressonian presence at the end of ‘The Kid with a Bike.’

It ain’t rocket surgery.

I do feel sad to have lost some of my close friends in recent events but am beginning to wish that they got the real Qaddafi — ever since his body double was killed in Libya last year, he’s been hanging around my palace and now he won’t leave. For his birthday in March, I gave him luggage. Luggage, for Christ’s sake! But he just used the small carry-on sized wheelie case for a visit to Eurodisney and then came straight back! And he’s so annoying — always leaving the wrong DVDs in the wrong cases — I go to watch “Batman Returns” and there’s “Jumanji” in the case! I couldn’t understand at all why the Libyan people hated him until I actually had to live under the same roof as him!