Romeo oh Romeo...
Romeo+Juliet....how I loathe thee...
Let me count the ways...

Where do I even start? I can literally give an entire commentary on why this pisses me off. I can write essays upon essays on why this just wrong. I can go on for days why Baz does such a horrible job representing Shakespeare. I can probably write a long ass essay for this review, but why waste your time by making myself slip into madness the more I talk about this travesty? I just hate this with every fiber of my being. I never realized how much I hated this before, but on this rewatch (committed against my will) I really fucking hate this movie. Now, I…

Goddammit this movie could've been so good. It had great casting, a great idea. . . and then just fell flat. I feel like the director kept switching back and forth between whether he wanted to make a comedy or drama, and just decided to mix both together mediocrely. Paul Rudd and Harold Perrineau are such genius casting as Paris and Mercutio I was tempted to forgive the film for it's other sins and call it ok, but it kept making terrible decisions over and over again. I feel like a more experienced director who goes inbetween Comedy, Drama, and Action could've dealt with this movie better. Yes, that's right. I'm asking Quetin Tarantino to remake this movie. He could…

I slowly walked into the English class this morning, and found myself to be greeted with the worst horror imaginable. A fear-filled scream resonatated the dark room, echoing the inevitable cries of the children in the classroom. It was Romeo and Juliet.

An horrific clusterfuck of awful editing, misfitting dialogue and visuals more than ready enough to annihilate your eyeballs with it's bright flashes, hideous transvesites and rapid movements, this movie should have been banned before it was even made, Romeo and Juliet really feels like Baz Luhrmann was trying to murder Shakespeare's masterpiece.

Now, I'm not a fan of Moulin Rouge either, and I can tell I won't be of the Great Gatsby, in fact, you could say I…

I always thought I hated this because of Leonardo DiCaprio and the anachronistic setting. Upon rewatching it for the first time in over 15 years I was blown away by Leo's acting skills and I enjoyed the modern environments. The soundtrack was pretty enjoyable too, but I was also blown away by how terrible everything else was.

The second half of the movie is actually decently well paced and engaging, but by then my experience had already been ruined by the opening. The absolute worst of the cast is on parade in a cheesy fight scene full of annoying editing and fast motion. It appears that half the cast thinks it's in a slapstick action-comedy and the other half in…

Film #2 in my Baz Luhrmann project

So I have one main objection to Romeo + Juliet, and maybe it's an unfair objection, but it's an objection that did truly keep me from loving it.

I hate it when people change the setting of Shakespeare plays and don't change the text.

It's just lazy. I understand when it happens in the theatre (though I still don't like it). Theatre is built upon reperforming and reinterpreting the same plays over and over again, and when some of those plays are five hundred years old, it can be hard to find some novelty.

But if you're going to remake a movie, you should really be doing it because you want to do…

Romeo and Juliet is without question Shakespeare's most accessible play but it is also among his best. It is perhaps not quite as profound as some of the later tragedies but there is quite a bit going on under the surface. It's far from a simple story of young love gone bad, portraying a cautionary tale of young people inexperienced in life rushing without caution into a world they aren't prepared for.

Romeo + Juliet, on the other hand is a fucking travesty.

I refused to see this when it came out in 1996 despite the fact that I was working at a movie theater and could have seen it for free because from the little bits I'd watch it…