Romeo + Juliet (1996)

Sick Product of a Sick System

Overrated and overhyped

Very good movie overall, highly recommended. Most of the negative reviews don't have any merit and are all pollitically based. Give this movie a chance at least, and it might give you a different perspective.

Actress is magnificent and exudes a hypnotic screen presence in this affecting drama.

Seriously this adaptation is garbage from 1996, should be placed in a time capsule, and that time capsule needs to be destroyed.Once in a while you see a film from the 80s or 90s and you say "huh. that really didn't hold up very well."Well this one makes all of those look like MASTERPIECES.Utterly laughable, certainly not timeless, worthy only as an example of the most atrocious acting by big names you'll find from the 1990s.Just ignore the Shakespeare reference - Baz sure as hell did.

The main problems with this movie is the directors style, which is generally a cringe worthy mix of something you would expect to find on MTV combined with a YouTube video where the editor had just discovered all of the effects. Just in the beginning scene alone, there's a scary number of consistent annoying zooms into close ups and the scene consistently interchanging between normal and slow motion. Instead of helping to progress the story, as any good film should, it instead gets in the way of the story, feeling as if the director was more worried about showing of his previously mentioned style and trying to be noticed instead of creating a good film adaptation of Shakespeare's work.The film then plummets to an even more more intolerable level as it reaches its first talking scene. Not only does the pacing of the film majorly slow but you realise that all the dialogue is written in old English. This makes some of the performances seem very flat because it is as if the actors don't actually know what they are talking about. Overall, this film isn't worried about its story but instead, it is constantly distracting you from it with the director trying to say "Look at me and my style". This makes the film very hard to sit through due to its cringe worthy style, weak performances and uneven pacing.

Wildly fun adaptation of William Shakespeare's play by writer/director Baz Luhrmann. Changing the setting of Shakespeare's plays for film adaptations isn't a new thing. It had previously been done as musicals, westerns, samurai films, gangster pictures, indie dramas about street hustlers, teen comedies, teen dramas, and so on and so forth, but none of those films brought the exuberance and audacity as this film. Set in a Venice Beach-like setting between two feuding wealthy business family empires, Brian Dennehy as Ted Montague and Paul Sorvino as Fulgencio Capulet, with their star cross lover children, Leonardo DiCaprio and Claire Danes, in roles that really put their stars on the Hollywood map, at the center of the drama. The film faithfully follows the source material's story and all of the dialogue is taken straight from the play, but the dialogue is amazingly accessible and understandable from the actors speaking the lines in a very naturalistic manner. Laurence Olivier was actually criticized in his day for delivering lines in too naturalistic of a manner and not in the traditional more sing-song of manner, which Kenneth Branagh took even further, but this film puts that on a whole new level. Actors here are gangsters, street punks, and thugs and deliver their lines as such, but their words are accessible in a way I'd never seen before that retained Shakespeare's original words. In some ways, it's kind of like Martin Scorsese's "The Last Temptation of Christ" where most all of the characters spoke as if they were off the mean streets of Brooklyn. In both cases it served to connect the characters and stories to modern audiences and crate less of a distance between the two. The film also drips of 1990s cool, with a very hip soundtrack and many fashions of the day (with a hint of Elizabethan). The film features a strong cast that also includes Harold Perrineau, Pete Postlethwaite, Paul Rudd, Vondie Curtis- Hall, M. Emmet Walsh, Jamie Kennedy, and a memorable Vincent Laresca. But the real start is Bad Luhrmann, who's combination of visuals, sound, and editing created a film so full of energy and audacity that it stands apart from any other Shakespearian film adaptation and is something truly unique. My only complaint about the film is that the modernization of the story also makes Romeo and Juliet's drama and romance seem overly trite and self important in a way that I found annoying. To the teens and teen audiences, I'm sure their love and feelings are very real and serious and worthy of live & death, but at the same time these are kids and they really shouldn't be taking themselves all that seriously. Leo and Clair might as well be the self important teens from "13 Reasons Why" for how overly serious they take themselves. Still, I don't think middle age men were Luhrmann's target audience here (i.e. me), so my criticism is probably not valid (i.e. I'm just being a cranky old man). Still, this is a wonderfully original film that demands multiple viewings.

The way Shakespeare wrote is so far removed from modern English that it's like a different language. When I tried to read his work, I needed to often refer to a book which translated words and phrases of that time into modern English. I had to refer to it so many times that it made reading any one of his plays a long, slow and tiresome task. I was very pleased when I heard that a modern remake of Romeo and Juliet was being made, so that I would be able to understand it without translation. I was puzzled and very disappointed when I watched it and it was in the original dialogue! It had already been filmed many times in its original dialogue and 16th century setting. What's the point in setting it in the present day if you're going to use archaic dialogue?!