Claire Danes in William Shakespeare's Romeo + Juliet

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K-man
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Post by K-man » Dec 3rd 2002, 2:40 pm

Here's my two cents:

I can't comment on the R&J crying scene b/c I only made it through about 15 minutes of that movie. Couldn't stand it. Just my opinion.

Better off Dead is hilarious.

Basketball Diaries was very cool. Love those true stories. Jim Carrol rocks!
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Post by Bubba » Dec 3rd 2002, 3:06 pm

I would recommend giving R+J another shot. Its first 15 minutes are, admittedly, the most difficult to take in. But, it's a lot like the first 20 minutes of Moulin Rouge: a conscious challenge to the audience to get them into the universe and used to the film's rules and "gimmicks."

After the gas station shootout, the movie settles down a little bit.

A bit: Mercutio's a cross-dresser, and Friar Laurence ain't playing with a full deck.

But the "balcony" scene, the final scene, and most scenes involving both of the star-cross'd lovers were done with a great deal of respect for the emotions involved.

I would give the entire movie at least one fair shot. :)
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Post by Natasha (candygirl) » Dec 3rd 2002, 3:18 pm

K-man wrote:Better off Dead is hilarious.
I love John Cusack! He is one of the most underrated actors of our time, IMHO.

He is a great "every man" like Jimmy Stewart, but since Tom Hanks already holds that title, I guess that makes John Cusack Tom's redheaded stepchild.

:D

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Post by fnordboy » Dec 3rd 2002, 4:32 pm

I'm glad to know I am not the only one on here that hates that movie. Actually i don't like any of his movies (what i've seen).

K-man wrote:Here's my two cents:

I can't comment on the R&J crying scene b/c I only made it through about 15 minutes of that movie. Couldn't stand it. Just my opinion.

Better off Dead is hilarious.

Basketball Diaries was very cool. Love those true stories. Jim Carrol rocks!

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Post by K-man » Dec 3rd 2002, 4:51 pm

What's eating Gilbert Grape was different. I guess I liked it but it was kinda depressing. Reminded me a little of the dead-end small town I'm from. :cry: I'm not a Leo D. fan, but B-Ball diaries was good and I did like Titanic. But that had a lot to do with when I saw it and who I saw it with. :wink: At least it was cool to see it on the big screen.
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Post by Natasha (candygirl) » Dec 3rd 2002, 5:00 pm

Prior to the release of Titanic, my boyfriend kept making remarks like, "Well that's going to be a titanic failure" and "I can't wait to see the headlines when this movie comes out - like The Titanic sinks again!"

We had seen Rent the year before and I told him how I am such a sap because even when I know that I am going to be emotionally manipulated by a movie or play, I cry anyway.

When we went to see Titanic, we sat down in our seats and then he turned to me and said, "Do you want some napkins from the concession stand?" and I said, "Why? What are you talking about?" He replied, "Well, you know the boat is going to sink at the end, right?"

Smartass.

:D

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Post by Bubba » Dec 3rd 2002, 6:55 pm

I have learned that ticket sales are not everything: certainly, Titanic did much, much, much better than anyone predicted, but I still think it was little more than the most expensive chick flick ever made. It pushed out of the foreground the grand tragedy of the actual event (and the interesting historical figures involved) just to tell a adolescent's love story and make vague cliches about how the rich are inherently wicked.

Pheh.

EDIT: Of course, this is just my opinion, and I'd rather not cause this thread to diverge too far from its intended purpose.
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Post by Natasha (candygirl) » Dec 3rd 2002, 7:08 pm

But I think that was the intention (besides making lots of money): to show that tragedies like that mean much more to younger generations when there is a name, face, or story to help them understand that was one death among over one thousand.

I mean, it's just a number when a history class teacher tells students how many people died in a battle. When people understand the hopes and dreams that die with that person and how their death affects others, the sheer numbers start to mean something - that every number has a story and a family.

People who lived through the 60s understand what Vietnam means. People who lived through World War II understand too - those numbers are their brothers, fathers, husbands, sons, friends. To people who haven't experienced loss on a grand scale, a statistic doesn't mean much.

Hopefully Titanic was able to convey what the loss of one life really means to a generation lucky enough not to live through such a tragedy.

EDIT: I didn't mean to leave out the deaths of 9/11 which have obviously had an impact on everyone as well. No disrespect intended.

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Post by Bubba » Dec 3rd 2002, 7:12 pm

EDIT: I have NO problem, per se, with making a large tragedy personal, even if that personal story requires a fictional character or two. My problem with Titanic was that the personal story was so cliched, so immature, and devoid of any profound truth.

(That, I think, makes the difference between Titanic and Saving Private Ryan: both may have used cliched fictional characters in a historical setting, but SPR's lesson was that, like Private Ryan, we the audience should not waste the freedom we've been given through the sacrifices of others. I didn't see anything in Titanic that was nearly quite so profound.)

It seemed to me that the historical background characters - the captain, Molly Brown, the ship's designer - seemed more realistic and interesting than any of the main fictional characters. That, to me, indicates that not enough time was spent fleshing out these main characters, and it begs the question: why not focus on the captain and Molly Brown?



Returning to the topic of Romeo + Juliet, I'd like to add a few random comments I failed to mention last night:

- This movie is what really sparked my interest in Shakespeare. Regardless of its flaws (if any such flaws exist), it may well serve as a turning point for a lot of kids' opinions on the Bard, and that's a very good thing.

- DVDs rawk. If you get a chance, buy/rent the special edition for R+J: the commentary track and the behind the scenes clips are really cool, particularly the clip showing how the elevator scene was filmed.

- I've been re-watching the R+J DVD.

One forgets how stunning Claire Danes really is.

<sigh>

:)
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Post by Bubba » Dec 3rd 2002, 7:33 pm

To continue the discussion, I know I'm probably begging the question: how are the lovers in Titanic (Jack and Rose) different from Satine and Christian (Moulin Rouge) and Romeo and Juliet?

Actually, there's not much difference: they're all more-or-less melodramtic cliches. BUT, Jack and Rose are on the Titanic and surrounded with the naturalism of very human historical figures. The over-the-top style no longer works. The setting called for something more realistic, like the romance in Casablanca.
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Post by Natasha (candygirl) » Dec 3rd 2002, 8:07 pm

Bubba wrote:EDIT: I have NO problem, per se, with making a large tragedy personal, even if that personal story requires a fictional character or two. My problem with Titanic was that the personal story was so cliched, so immature, and devoid of any profound truth.

(That, I think, makes the difference between Titanic and Saving Private Ryan: both may have used cliched fictional characters in a historical setting, but SPR's lesson was that, like Private Ryan, we the audience should not waste the freedom we've been given through the sacrifices of others. I didn't see anything in Titanic that was nearly quite so profound.)
I thought that Titanic's message was (gawd, I'm almost choking that I have to quote Celine Dion's song here) that your heart will go on, that life goes on. As heartbreaking as it is to lose someone that you love, you can't just wallow in that forever. Rose mourned and then she found someone else to love - and I don't mean that in a cold, heartless way. If she had spent the rest of her life crying about Leo's death, she might as well have died with him. Although we don't learn anything about her husband or much of her life, the audience sees that (1) she married someone else and had a family that she now loves very much and (2) she never forgot Leo. I mean Jack.

:wink:

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Post by Bubba » Dec 4th 2002, 1:29 am

I'm not denying it had a message, but Titanic's message of moving on after a tragic death isn't that profound; I didn't think it justified the movie's length. Besides, how far did Rose actually move on, since she went out of her way to find the expeditionary ship?

If the movie moves ya, great. I just don't think that it stands well alongside other films who won (or should have won) the Best Picture Oscar: Gone With the Wind, The Godfather, Braveheart, Saving Private Ryan, etc. Nor do I think the couple of Jack and Rose are as compelling as Romeo and Juliet, Christian and Satine, or Rhett and Scarlett.

To me, the movie feels like Independence Day for romantics. Like Independence Day, Titanic had a huge budget, great visuals, and a tremendous following, but it still never transcends the genre (alien invasion and historical tragedy, respectively).


Returning (again) to Romeo + Juliet, anyone think this movie will stand the test of time? I think it will since, like the Star Wars films, it doesn't adhere to a single style or era. (Imagine Star Wars with disco - and shudder.) R+J references gangsters, Spaghetti Westerns, disco music, 80's music, the Miami Vice motif, etc. It's too early to tell, but I think the movie will age quite well.
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Re: Claire Danes in William Shakespeare's Romeo + Juliet

Post by So-Called Loon » Jan 7th 2003, 9:47 am

NIGHTJESSI wrote:When I first saw this one in the theaters, I was actually pretty disappointed. But upon subsequent viewings and also purchasing the first soundtrack, I grew to love the movie more and more.
I liked it a bit better on a second viewing. Mercutio was the stand-out though.
...Claire and Leonardo DiCaprio. They were both more innocent and young then, and they fit their roles so well.
They really could have been good in a an unmodernized version. The film was an interesting concept but just wasn't very well pulled off. Image
Too bad since there were some interesting ideas going on.



On the topic of Titanic... On first viewing the effects blew me away but i had a few minor problems with the plot. I can agree with things said here about it personalizing the experience by following a few characters, but (and it's a big huge round one), when i viewed it again i realized that Cameron's worsening writing problem had gone a long way down.

THE PLOT TOTALLY SUCKED! Image
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Re: Claire Danes in William Shakespeare's Romeo + Juliet

Post by Nostradamus » Jan 8th 2003, 6:24 am

So-Called Loon wrote:They really could have been good in a an unmodernized version. The film was an interesting concept but just wasn't very well pulled off. Image
Too bad since there were some interesting ideas going on.
I felt that they got the film's concept backwords; they should have kept the original setting but updated the archaic language. Every text I ever read on Shakespeare claimed that one of his strongest points was his use of the common English language for his plays, which made them accessible to a wide audience. Why not translate them into the new common tongue?

As for the setting, IMHO Renaissance Europe is far more romantic than a skanky modern beach resort. Open-air plumbing aside, of course.

:wink:
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Post by Bubba » Jan 8th 2003, 5:37 pm

I've become quite the fan of Luhrmann's "Red Curtain" cinema (R+J, Moulin Rouge, Simply Ballroom), and from the commentaries and behind-the-scenes material, this is what I've gathered:

Romeo + Juliet is NOT just "Hamlet in Hawaii," Shakespeare set in a different environment for the sake of novelty. The text INFORMS the visuals, and intentionally so.

(One could derive this fact from the film itself, but the behind-the-scenes material reveals just how deliberate this process was.)

The idea was to keep the original Elizabethan text and use the visuals to explain it in a way that the modern viewer, inexperienced with that text, could still understand what was going on.

Shakespeare created a setting where the elite youth - and ONLY the elite - ran around brandishing swords and killing each other. The modern equivalent? Street gangs packing heat (guns branded with words like "Sword" and "Rapier").

Shakespeare's Tybalt was the "prince of cats," a very stylish sword fighter. In Luhrmann's film, the same character fights like a flamenco dancer: very artistic, very dangerous.

Shakespeare had a setting where politics and religion blended together, where - despite the violence between the ruling clans - marriage was upheld as an absolute prerequisite to sex. Hence, the Latin American setting where the city is dominated by a giant statue of Jesus and even the Chief of Police's office has a crucifix.

Look at the costume choices for the star-cross'd lovers' first meeting: Juliet was called a "bright angel" while Romeo was called a "knight."

Even the cinematography borrowed from other classic movie genres to explain the action: Shakespeare's play begins with a sword fight in a marketplace, and the film does the modern equivalent: a "Spaghetti Western" shootout at a gas station.

Beyond using the visuals to decode the text, even the decision to have most of the balcony sequence filmed with the two in a pool was a deliberate decision: it allowed the two immediate, close eye contact while physically separating them so they could talk.

It's not just setting the Shakespearean text in a modern setting.

(And, honestly, keeping the medieval setting but changing the dialogue would have made it a mere period piece. Nothing against the movie, but it would have been another "Ever After" - AND it would have abandoned one of the play's strongest assests, the dialogue itself. Once you get past the visuals, the movie's diologue is still amazing, full of wit and double entendre. A movie that lost the text would have likely lost that wit as well.)

At the very least, R+J is an enteresting exercise in using a grab-bag of visuals to explain very archaic text and a warm-up to Moulin Rouge. I believe it's more: I believe it's a masterpiece on its own merits.
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