Recently one night a young director named Baz Luhrmann couldn't sleep. He tumbled out of bed and moved over to the television where he watched MTV for an hour. Then he moved to his kitchen where he spent the same amount of time eating spoiled food. Then he took down a volume of Shakespeare's work and read it cover to cover - never really paying attention to the words or plot. And then, as a climax, he took out his video camera and pressed the "On" button.
The result? William Shakespeare's Romeo + Juliet - the worst film ever made and a complete failure.
Though, to be fair, an interesting complete failure. The idea at the film's core is to make Shakespeare appealing to the crowds. This is done by moving the camera around at a rapid rate so that we can't see what is going on. And filming the dialogue in voice over. And shooting Leonardo DiCaprio like a Calvin Klein model. And making the frame go still while flashing the character's name at the bottom. And filming long tedious action sequences in slow motion.
I mean, man, this is the 90s, dude.
However I've seen terrible films that are fun to watch. ( Examples are Batman and Robin and The Island Of Doctor Moreau. ) That rule doesn't apply here. This is a film that takes itself seriously. That is it's major fault.
Another problem was pointed out by my friend, Alex ( who was singing songs by Leonard Bernstein throughout. ); the original play is a powerful piece of work because the author remained neutral and didn't take sides. Here it's clear that we are supposed to side with Romeo. ( Just look at the way they film him. ) From the begining he's our hero and this doesn't work. And DiCaprio's awful performance doesn't help.
Luhrmann never decides if he wants to entertain us or enlighten us. The result is a mess. You can feel him striving to be something he isn't. He tries to pull of a mix in which drag queens are filmed from purposefully arty angles. He tries very hard. Key word: tries. "Oh look, he's filming above water action from below. Pretty. What does it represent?"
Why do people do ugly things? I scrambled away from my tv set feeling guilty as if I could never read the play again and keep a straight face.
Grade: F
The review above was posted to the
rec.arts.movies.reviews newsgroup (de.rec.film.kritiken for German reviews).
The Internet Movie Database accepts no responsibility for the contents of the
review and has no editorial control. Unless stated otherwise, the copyright
belongs to the author.
Please direct comments/criticisms of the review to relevant newsgroups.
Broken URLs inthe reviews are the responsibility of the author.
The formatting of the review is likely to differ from the original due
to ASCII to HTML conversion.
Related links: index of all rec.arts.movies.reviews reviews