Romeo and Juliet Hailee Steinfeld Romeo Modern Romeo and Juliet Art
Fellowes actually manages to rob the play of its poetic power and make the dialogue more than obtuse at the same time.
Other productions of Romeo and Juliet On Screen:
Rudolph & Margot Trump Romeo & Juliet
Other cinematic presentations of Shakespeare On Screen:
Coriolanus—Fiennes Finds the Nowadays in Shakespeare'south Ancient Roman Tragedy
Much Ado Nigh Cipher—Innate Understanding of Shakespeare's Ways Underlies Whedon's Masterful Much Ado
Julius Caesar—Brando in a Toga Ushers Shakespeare Into the Modernistic Movie theater
A Midsummer Night'due south Dream—Resurrecting an Unearthly Relic
Productions of Romeo & Juliet On Stage:
There's a First Time for Everything
Stripping the Play to Its Characters, ASC Proves This Tale's Timeless Place
The Extremities of Youth
Fire and Brimming Passion, and a Juliet to Dice For
A Commedia Romeo and Juliet—Tragic Hilarity, and a Romeo to Die For—Thrice
This Production Is a Rush
Fight Time
A Juliet That Makes You Misty-Eyed
ane Plus i Sums Up with the Power of Ane
A Lovely Libretto Bails Out in the End
Petty Larceny Robs a Grand Blueprint
In Fair Chaparral, Nosotros Set up Our Play
Details Add Texture to This Fun Family Feud
Great Verse + Teen Passion – Horniness = A Chaste Play
Oh Romeo! Wherefore Art 1000 Romeo?
Romeo and Juliet: Choose Your Own Ending: Aligning the Fates for Tragical Mirth
Juliet & Romeo—Lesbian Love in a World of Detest
Shakespeare's R&J—Freeing Romeo and Juliet from Censorship
Rachel and Juliet—A Multigenerational Juliet in One Woman
Other true dearest ending in tragedy On Stage:
Othello—A Five-Sided Triangle
Antony and Cleopatra—A World's Pool of Humanity; A Whirlpool of Passion
Cyrano—The Comedy and Tragedy when Linguistic communication Fails Us
Dido, Queen of Carthage—Manner + Substance = Engrossing Theater
Shakespeare adaptations On Phase:
Othello: The Remix—Othello Gets a Good Rap
Village, Prince of Grief—Toying with Shakespeare
I, Malvolio—'Is This the Kind of Thing You Similar?' It Is
The Very Merry Wives of Windsor, Iowa—A Play Total of Manure, Literally
Productions of Romeo and Juliet On Air:
The Tone Is Out of Joint
Romeo and Juliet In Print:
Judi Dench's And Furthermore
Too on Shakespeareances.com:
The Shakespeareances.com Top forty
A list of productions seen on stage, including Romeo and Juliet.
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Romeo and Juliet
Too Dumb for Tweens
Amber Entertainment, Echo Lake Productions, Indiana Product Company, Swarovski Entertainment (2013)
Directed by Carlo Carlei. With Hailee Steinfeld (Juliet), Douglas Berth (Romeo), Damian Lewis (Capulet), Paul Giamatti (Friar Laurence), Kodi Smit-McPhee (Benvolio), Ed Westwick (Tybalt), Christian Cooke (Mercutio), Lesley Manville (Nurse).
Had Douglas Booth been allowed to play Shakespeare'southward real Romeo, girls would melt. Photograph courtesy of R&J Releasing, Ltd.
The moral of the story of Romeo and Juliet is that had Michelangelo fallen in love with the only daughter sprung from his only hate, we never would have had the Sistine Chapel or the statue of David. That's what I gleaned from the just-released film version of Romeo and Juliet, directed by Carlo Carlei with a screenplay by Julian Fellowes adapted from William Shakespeare's text. Romeo, Montague's merely son, is a sculptor and painter in fair Verona, and he is even able to gear up a nice studio in the few hours he's living in Mantua.
I'thousand existence no sillier than this picture show. The real moral in this telling of Shakespeare's classic tale of doomed young love is that when you become to a cinema playing it, cull to see something like Machete Kills instead. I wish we had; pulling weeds, fifty-fifty, would have been a far more interesting mode of spending a Saturday afternoon. I've always held that even the worst Shakespeare product has some redeeming value in our understanding and appreciation of The Bard'due south piece of work. That contention has stood the examination of the 350-plus stage and screen productions I've seen; this one is the outset to challenge information technology. Or perhaps we course this Carlei-Fellowes collaboration every bit something less than worst.
But I'll attempt to find redeeming value here. I'll try. Damian Lewis, who plays Capulet, is a Imperial Shakespeare Company veteran and tremendous role player—in other things. Paul Giamatti, who plays Friar Laurence, is one of my favorite actors—in other things. Watching them hither, yous are reminded of the talent that helped make Band of Brothers and Homeland, Sideways and Cinderella Man such entrancing viewing. Leon Vitali equally the apothecary is kind of absurd in a creepy Mickey Rourke kind of way. Other highlights came when I imagined this flick was really Monty Python'south Romeo and Juliet, though clearly that was non the intention of Carlei and Fellowes, and my attention wandered off to thoughts of how much fun a Python take on Shakespeare would take been.
The exotic scenery and Italian location shoots by cinematographer David Tattersall and the lush costume designs of Carlo Poggioli might earn Oscar nominations, only their piece of work is hard to see when you're cringing at the script. Douglas Booth equally Romeo, in addition to being OMG cute, does speak Shakespeare's poetry pretty well—he merely doesn't go a lot of Shakespeare'south poesy to speak. Thank heavens he at least keeps the line "Dark's candles are burnt out, and jocund mean solar day stands tiptoe on the misty mount tops," for with his glistening, night bluish eyes he says those two lines mesmerizingly. And then, that v seconds of this 118-minute movie is worth sitting through.
Let'due south exist clear that other than such brief, brief moments, this motion picture is not Shakespeare. The story follows Shakespeare'south plotline pretty closely, though it has some bothersome aberrations. Mercutio (Christian Cooke) is a Montague, not the Prince's kin, which undermines the significance of his murder. In fact, it is Mercutio who wins the tournament between the 2 families that starts off the play. You run across, to cease the civil broils between the Montagues and Capulets, the Prince established the tournament (thus Chorus tells us), a race between ii jousters trying to lance a ring as they gallop around Verona's streets. The Prince's strategy backfires, for the Montagues later on make fun of Tybalt'due south (Ed Westwick) losing to Mercutio, and so the families are at information technology once again in a jiffy.
Giving Mercutio to the Montagues, Fellowes adds a pregnant character to the Capulets' side, too: Rosaline. There'southward a hint of Rosaline's relation in Shakespeare'south text—the guest list for Capulet's masque includes "my off-white niece, Rosaline," and, notably, Mercutio, too—but Rosaline'due south relationship to Capulet is brought to the fore in Fellowes' version (and Mercutio dropped from the invitee list). Thus, with Romeo already hitting on a Capulet long earlier he encounters Juliet, that whole falling in love unknowingly with your enemy aspect of the play loses its edge—you lot call back?
The messenger, Friar Laurence'southward novice, fails to reach Romeo in Mantua not because plague waylays him only considering he choses to aid heal a poor farmer's ill child with some of the herbal pharmacology he's learned from his mentor. When he does arrive in Mantua to discover that Romeo has left, the friar-in-training says, "God'southward ways are difficult for us to penetrate." Fifty-fifty the 12-year-onetime girls in our audience snickered at that.
That's the worst abomination of this film: the polluting of Shakespeare'southward text. Modernizing Shakespeare is not the issue here; if his script were tossed altogether and replaced with current vernacular, a la A Knight's Tale, it would be far more palatable than Fellowes mingling Shakespeare'southward original with his Shakespeare-sounding alterations. Fellowes actually manages to rob the play of its poetic power and brand the dialogue more obtuse at the aforementioned time. Speeches starting time out with original text and suddenly foray off into huhland, like a bad thespian forgetting his lines and making up substitutes. We all know that Shakespeare coined many famous sayings, so let's throw in some more profundity that sounds similar things he could written. "I thought all for the all-time," Romeo says (from Shakespeare) when Mercutio notes how he was injure past Tybalt under Romeo'south arm. "The best intentions pave the road to hell," Mercutio replies (from Fellowes). Mercutio goes on to claim "a plague" of the two houses though, retrieve, he is a Montague and is cursing himself.
The question is whether Fellowes thinks he'due south a better poet playwright than Shakespeare (he'due south not) or he really thought he was modernizing Shakespeare'due south text (he didn't). My conclusion is that he thought modern audiences are dumber than they really are. If the intended audience is that gaggle of 12-year-former girls sitting in front of us, they were won over the moment Berth as Romeo appears for the start fourth dimension in his studio. When he turns around to greet Benvolio and we get Booth'due south puffed-lip, doe-eyed, soft-complexion, tousled-hair visage filling the screen, the gaggle of girls went into conniptions. Romeo could have been speaking Klingon and those girls would have followed along; if he were speaking the original Romeo's lines, they would have ended the screening in a mass of rapt putty; equally he was speaking Fellowe's lines, they concluded upwardly snickering and talking derisively among themselves past the time the film entered the play's 5th act.
Nurse (Lesley Manville) stands by every bit Romeo (Douglas Berth) and Juliet (Hailee Steinfeld) part until night in an extraneous post-nuptials scene in Carlo Carlei's movie Romeo and Juliet. The wait, says Juliet, "seems a yr away." "Simply a year? Y'all exercise not beloved me so," replies Romeo. Photo courtesy of R&J Releasing, Ltd,
Booth'due south counterpart, Hailee Steinfeld as Juliet, likewise gets her large awww! isn't she cute full-frame moment when she first appears. Well, she's cute only non near equally pretty as Booth. Nor is she as talented. Yes, Steinfeld is the amazing young extra who earned an Oscar nomination for her portrayal of Mattie Ross in True Grit, handling that movie'due south peculiar language patterns as adeptly as her costars Jeff Bridges, Josh Brolin, and Matt Damon. That Steinfeld could take brought home the definitive Juliet. The 1 that showed upwardly for this flick, though, speaks the verse (both Fellowes' and Shakespeare'south) flatter than a high school jock angling for a D in English class. She runs through her "Wherefore art thou Romeo" speech as if she were reading an due east-mail to herself.
OK, this flick does have one, enduring redeeming moment: the terminate. I don't really mean to seem ironic in saying that. Equally the bodies of Romeo and Juliet lie in country in a cathedral funeral service attended by all of Verona (the motion-picture show's last departure from Shakespeare), Benvolio (Kodi Smit-McPhee, way young for the part simply way better than much of the residual of the bandage) leaves his pew, walks between the biers begetting the two expressionless lovers, and places Juliet'southward hand in Romeo'southward. The final scene is an overhead shot of those two easily united in expiry. Oh, did two of the 12-year-olds in front of us weep at that; I even felt a genuine tugging at my eyes. What a cracking image to end this bang-up play. What an emblem of the true tragedy of this movie, too; had Carlei sans Fellowes filmed Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet, nosotros might take had a cinematic masterpiece instead of existence left with the nagging truth that Monty Python would take done information technology all better.
Eric Minton
October 22, 2013
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