Roméo et Juliette

This movie does an excellent job of combining Shakespearian dialogue with

modern imagery. Admittedly, I first watched this movie when it came out

because of Leo; eight years later (and seven years after middle school ended), I realize just how well-done this film actually is. Luhrmann did an excellent job of making the movie believable while using the quaint language. This movie

brings new life into the words of Shakespeare, and even if you know the play

almost by heart it is refreshing to hear the words in an entirely new context, and one which makes sense. This version of Romeo and Juliet actually does add

something to the extensive history of the play. The soundtrack is excellent, the acting is appropriate (Danes and DiCaprio do a wonderful job of portraying the young lovers), and the scenery is fabulous. This film jump-started the trend of modern-day Shakespeare remakes, and I think it's the best one.

Like many who saw this as a teenager, this was a movie that felt like the most sophisticated thing I'd ever seen, while also being accessible enough to my immature brain. And that's pretty much how I'm going to judge it today.

This is Shakespeare. It's as much Shakespeare as any other adaptation over the centuries. And yet Baz Luhrmann went in with a very specific approach, not only to modernise it while maintaining the poetic dialogue, but to also make it enticing for a teenage audience; the audience most arguably suited to the tale of Romeo and Juliet. It's chock full of the same hallmarks of modern day teen dramas; beautiful teens from wealthy families, sudden and passionate love affairs, with a dash of violence and murder, capped off with an emotional gut-punch or two. It's a tale quite literally as old as time: Star-crossed lovers finding each other against all odds, fighting to keep what they have against the forces around them, and the near-miss of longevity, like every Rom-Com airport scene. It's the type of story that has endured so long precisely because it appeals to us at the most emotional and vulnerable time of our lives, speaking to how we feel about the world around us. It's a hormonal barrage of narrative cues.

So Luhrmann takes this timeless classic, and decides to transplant it into a modern day setting to appeal to modern day teenagers. Or at least, the teenagers of the late 90s. You could probably trace a line from all late-90s fashions back to this movie, either creating the stereotypical aesthetic of the time, or merely doubling down and reinforcing it. This movie is garish. It opens with a newscast acting as the narrator, followed by quick-cuts and flybys of a city centre framed by two imposing skyscrapers, each with the name of a respected mafia-like family conglomerate plastered over the roof. Between them is a giant statue of Jesus himself, almost as tall as these skyscrapers. It's almost cartoonish in its aesthetic. We're then introduced to the Montague boys, clad in Hawaiian shirts left open to flap in the wind, riding a bright yellow topless jeep. They pull up to a gas station and encounter the rival Capulet boys, clad in dark blues and leather, with clean-cut facial hair and a menacing glare. If the Montagues gave the instant impression of good guys having fun, the Capulets give the immediate impression of brooding and serious antagonists. After an exchange of insults, they break out in a gun fight. The saturation is turned way up, the camera shakes and zooms uncontrollably, the editing cuts every second or two. It's beautiful and ugly all at the same time, as Tybalt, the Prince of Cats falls on his knees dramatically, pulls out his pistols, attaches an excessive sight, and takes aim at the fleeing Montagues. It's big, it's bombastic, it's completely lacking in subtlety. There's bright colours and shouting, and emphasis put on every footstep and gun cocking. It's so bad. It's so 90s.

Fortunately this style isn't maintained throughout the movie's runtime, but it never entirely leaves either. We get another frenetic array to the Capulet party, whereby a sexually-ambiguous Mercutio laces Romeo with Ecstasy creating a fever dream of visuals. And then there's that iconic meet-cute. The meet-cute to end all meet-cutes. And the movie slows to a halt. It remembers this isn't a story about the outlandish gang war between two mafia families, but a story about teenage love. Its garish and frenetic nature gives way to something more brooding and enthralling. Things turn serious, characters start dying, the prospect of marriage and a new life become real entities.

Judging this movie literally is a recipe for disaster. Literally it's an over-edited series of scenes full of shouting and bad judgment, about a young boy and girl falling in love immediately, getting married the next day, and then committing suicide over one another a mere four days later. Literally this movie makes no sense. It's ridiculous. But the movie knows that. It's painfully self-aware of how ridiculous this story actually is when you boil it down, so it embraces it. And this is why the prose was kept largely intact: It's poetry. The whole movie is poetry. This isn't a movie about plot points and character development. It's a movie about feelings and moments, about capturing that teenage urgency in a glowing, multi-coloured bottle. I know I had these moments as a teenager, where everything felt like the most important thing ever, where I fell in love with pretty girls without even knowing their names, where anger and joy, love and hate were all so painfully intense. Every scene is bathed in this intensity, including that opening of garish colours and overemphasised sound effects. It's a movie so chock full of hormonal energy it's intoxicating.

Leo is still a fairly young and inexperienced actor here, and his ego shines through his performance. He delivers his lines which such ferocity, like he too felt he was participating in the most sophisticated thing he'd ever done. But at this level his line delivery loses all emphasis, causing it all to merge into a mumble of Shakespearian vocabulary. That said, he's just about as perfect for Romeo as you could get. Claire Danes doesn't fare much better, seemingly struggling with the emotions of it all. It's like they were both put on auto-pilot while delivering their lines. Honestly I can't really blame them. Shakespeare's dialogue is in poetic verse, written for a different time with different dialects and slangs. We the audience are encouraged to just feel what's going on rather than follow and dissect every single word spoken. That said there are some genuinely fantastic performances her that prove that dialogue as outdated and wordy as this can be engaging and emotive. Harold Perrineau plays Mercutio with a fire in his eyes, like he poured over the script and accurately pinpointed which words needed more emphasis, and where he could embellish with gestures and intonation. John Leguizamo is also electrifying as Tybalt, grasping the over-the-top antagonism of his character and having fun with it, creating a whole new style of gun-fu to portray Tybalt's apparent fancy fighting style.

And of course, I couldn't talk about this movie without talking about the soundtrack, which gave us one of the best Radiohead songs ever written (which is a bold claim, I know). It captures the 90s the same way the rest of the movie does, with OK Computer-era Radiohead, Garbage, Des'ree, Butthole Surfers, and The Cardigans. It's rocky, it's ravey, it's as garish and frenetic as the movie's cinematography, and if you're at all a fan of 90s pop music, this soundtrack is a snapshot of that exact taste. Of course this ages the movie horrendously, but hey, we're approaching the time of 90s nostalgia, so now's the time to embrace it.

Romeo + Juliet is an interesting movie to judge, because it's a strictly terrible movie. The modern setting and 16th century dialogue goes together as well you'd imagine, despite some imaginative transpositions (like each gun's brand being a type of blade; Sword 9mm, Dagger .45, Rapier 9mm, or in the case of shotguns; a Longsword). It's so intensely bright and colourful, the editing so frenetic and hard to follow, and the story being somewhat nonsensical by modern standards, but its self-awareness makes up for it, making it all feel deliberate and purposeful. We hold Shakespeare up on a pedestal these days, as some form of high art, but in his time he was basically writing the best soap operas, aimed at entertaining the commoners (the exact same trajectory as actual operas, incidentally, which are nowhere near as sophisticated or intelligent as modern high society would have you believe). With that in mind, and Luhrmann's attempt to make what Shakespeare would've made today (in 1996), I think this movie nails every goal it aims for. It's pure visual poetry, encouraging you to feel the story than follow it intently, blasting you with the intense emotional highs and lows of hormonal teenagedom. I give Romeo + Juliet a bizarrely successful 8/10.

Everyone is familiar with William Shakespeare's boy-meets-girl love story, and it has already been interpreted into films, plays, TV adaptations and songs. But Baz Luhrmann gives this world-known love story a modern-day twist, setting it in Verona Beach, and piling on the religious imagery. The result is quite spectacular.

Leonardo DiCaprio and Claire Danes play the star-crossed lovers, and, whilst the latter is sadly a little bland, never truly convincing us in her portrayal of Juliet's loss of innocence or torment of feelings towards the foe, DiCaprio completely redeems her performance. He is a revelation. His Romeo is a wonderful mix of sad eloquence, a loving heart and a troubled soul, and all these elements come together beautifully in a performance hotter than a pepper sprout, with more layers than the proverbial onion. He is the very embodiment of sexy in his role. There is an extremely alluring way in which his character is filmed, which only enhances Romeo as a lover. This is epitomized in the opening shot of him, where the Leo is illuminated illustriously against the sunlight, and Radiohead's languid, sexy tune "Talk Show Host" plays.

The film itself has "sexy" written all over it, and, with the Gen X teenagers as his target audience, I don't think Luhrmann would have things any other way. But, unlike with that atrocity Moulin Rouge!, with Romeo + Juliet, the over-stylization is appropriate, making the movie more accessible to teens, for example, through gun warfare rather than swordplay, and the canny symbolisation of Queen Mab as a drug. But perhaps the most ingenious stylistic technique here is the slap-in-face Shakespearean references, which range from a ball called the Merchant of Venice, to 'Such stuff as dreams are made on' from The Tempest, making the film an absolute goldmine for trivia fans.

Style aside, there is more than enough substance. Romeo is presented exactly as the play does – at first, the mawkish, gawky, lovesick teenager, then, the fickle boy, and finally, the devoted and caring lover, and much of this loyalty to the play is due to the screenplay from Luhrmann and Craig Pearce, which maintains the original memorable dialogue and descriptions, but also dares to stray from the sidewalk in some of the plot turns, and the film completely benefits from it. The set designs are intricate and beautiful, and suit every frame of the film perfectly, and the icing on the cake is the music. Craig Armstrong's score for the swimming pool scene is as stunning as it is original, and the use of non-original music, from Kym Mazelle to The Cardigans, give the film the added edge of cool, making Romeo + Juliet one of the boldest, sassiest and most unforgettable adaptations to date, and English Lit. GCSE has been made far more digestible for us kids across England. It's what Shakespeare would have wanted. A-.

This is not Shakespeare's best play, but it has his best poetry; that's because the play is ABOUT language, about the difference between what something is and the language used to describe it. So among the plays, this may be one of the hardest to film. But alas it suffers from another blessing which is also a curse: the story itself is so powerful that one can build any sort of film or play or whatever around it and have it be likely to work. Thus, we often lose the language.

Zefrelli made his own choices in the earlier film; these were relatively conventional. While it cut some valuable language, sacrificed to the gods of contemporary patience, it is by far the better version. But here we have some interesting choices.

First the setting. Italians to Shakespeare's England were a comical people, and his setting of the play there would have encouraged the audience to bring heavy stereotypes to the drama. Latins in his day were considered: Foppish: Quick to violence (a stereotype that has been inherited by blacks today, but to Londoners, Italians were nearly Africans): Incredibly proud especially as regards slights to masculinity: Obsessed with weapons.

Today, we roll those up under the relatively crude notion of stupid Latin macho. In this film, the director has exaggerated the Latin macho ethic to have the same effect 16th century Londoners would get. It works because these stereotypes are powerful memes which attract many hosts which perpetuate their underlying truth. Baz adds the additional dimension of the people being captured by the superstitious underbelly of the Church.

He deliberately straddles the border between apparent truth and satire. These Latins are superficial visually and not verbally. So here is the solution to the problem on how to make a film (which is primarily a visual medium) out of a play that leverages poetic language. The solution is to convert all the metaphors from language to vision. Hence the much-noted lack of poetry. I imagine Baz directing the players to not worry so much about the poetry.

Both Romeo and Juliet are incapable of performing the poetry anyway: they are children learning on the job. And what acting skill they have from film is all in the face, not the tongue. They are pretty enough though.

I like this film for its boldness. Some of the experiment works since we get the message of the difference between what we see and what is true. This is why Juliet has to see a LIVE Romeo at the end. Living under water is used to good effect. But in the real play, there are so many and such subtle explorations of the theme, and these are scoured away here for a few broad effects. The real message, which comes through loud and clear if you know the play (or even Zefrelli's film) is not the distance between the reality of events and the language, but the reality of the richness of the real play and this film. Equally vast. Equally powerful statement. So we have a playhouse with the back part blasted out to the sea.

As a separate matter, the play has three anchors: Mercutio, the Friar and the Nurse. These are handled interestingly here.

The Friar is an alchemical master hiding under the cloak of the Church. The play equates the magic of language with the magic of potions, equally deadly. The congruence is lost in this film, but Baz definitely gets the magic part as well as the superfluous ritual of the church. This friar is a terrific, memorable performance of someone who believes he can defeat nature. Serves as an anchor as intended.

The Nurse is the true domestic, raw nature, full of uncompromised loyalty but ultimately compromised. Her character is lost here. We NEED to know about the dead sister and why the nurse turns on Juliet in order to save her life. Baz fails here, and so provides no center. For Shakespeare, she's the white space on the palette.

Mercutio in the play is a emotionally engaged visionary mystic. We understand that Romeo and Mercutio studied magic (`philosophy') abroad together much as Hamlet and Horatio had. The dream they shared the night before is the axis of the whole action: rather like the magic of the witches in Macbeth. Baz gets this as well: Modern magic is what? Drugs. So Hamlet is given a psychotropic by Mercutio before going to the party. Works for me, because it allows everything to be visually blasted and inexorably tragic. The whole thing after the party is a trip, see? It is why they can meet, become entranced and arrange marriage after an hour or two. (Remember that until this point Romeo is hopelessly smitten by Roseline.)

Anyone who wrestles with problems of filming the Bard and comes out alive deserves my respect. This is a weird interpretation, but that's the point.

Prior to watching "Romeo and Juliet", I had seen "Moulin Rouge" a few times and loved it. Luhrmann took an opera by Puccini ("La Boheme") and made a great tale of it, with music and visuals that will blow your mind. ("Rent" is also based on "La Boheme", but is trite and caters to an audience I am not a part of.) My expectations for "Romeo and Juliet" were fairly high, given my admiration of Luhrmann.

As you can guess by my 9 out of 10 rating, I was not disappointed. Luhrmann took the classic Shakespeare and super-imposed it over modern day Verona Beach. Like "Moulin Rouge" where he took modern rock songs and placed them in 1900 France, here he takes the language of Shakespeare and places it in the contemporary. Rather than simply changing the dialog to modern usage, he gave the text its due.

This works incredibly well, and makes the film so much better than regular language would. The story seems richer, more epic and most importantly timeless. And the story is the story of love, which is just that: rich, epic and timeless.

And the visuals were stunning! The colors set a mood (such as the darkness after Mercutio's death) and there was such vibrancy in the clothing. The water theme resonated well, with great effects of seeing a lover for the first time through a fish tank, the rain falling at key moments, and the film focusing on both a beach and near a swimming pool.

Luhrmann knows how to direct John Leguizamo, and I would say this is one of his two best roles (the other being "Moulin Rouge"). Harold Perrineau (Mercutio) shows great range, much more so than in other roles he's had since ("The Matrix" or TV's "Lost"). And this is probably the most un-funny Jamie Kennedy you'll ever see, which I mean in the most positive way.

Claire Danes is a delightful Juliet, giving a memorable performance (easily the peak of her career). She is physically perfect for the role, young and beautiful without being overly vulnerable or sexed-up. The only other actress I can picture capable of this kind of role is Julia Stiles, but I can't see her being as much of a fit and she would likely over-act... her Shakespeare style and Luhrmann's are not in synchronicity.

The role of Romeo, played by Leonardo DiCaprio, was perfect. Nobody could have been better. This isn't the young Leo from before or the rough and rugged Leo that appears in films later on. This is the Leo on the verge of adulthood, but still remaining tender enough to have the youthful idealism of a Romeo. As my co-viewer phrased it, he's a "babe" (in more ways than she meant). I know of no other actor who has the acting abilities of Leo, at least not in his age range. He has a long career ahead of him if he can keep up the intensity he has here (as well as in "The Departed" and "Gangs of New York"... though not as much in "The Beach").

A slight note on the music: As much as I love the Cardigans, I almost think "Lovefool" was a poor choice for this film... too poppy. But everything else was great: Butthole Surfers, Everclear, and especially One Inch Punch with the inspired "Pretty Piece of Flesh". And Garbage, a vastly under-appreciated band, with one of their better tunes, "#1 Crush". A great album for a great film.

If you haven't seen this film, your life is not complete. I went eleven years avoiding Romeo and Juliet, but having now broken my vow, I am glad I did. This film doesn't just impress, it inspires.