William Shakespeare's Romeo & Juliet (Special Edition)

William Shakespeare's Romeo & Juliet (Special Edition)
by Baz Luhrmann

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DVD details

Actor: Claire Danes, Harold Perrineau, John Leguizamo, Leonardo DiCaprio, Pete Postlethwaite
Director: Baz Luhrmann
Producer: Baz Luhrmann
Writer: Baz Luhrmann
Producer: Catherine Martin
Producer: Gabriella Martinelli
Producer: Jill Bilcock
Writer: Craig Pearce
Writer: William Shakespeare
DVD: Region Code 1
Audio: English (Original Language), Dolby Digital 2.0 Surround; French (Original Language), Dolby Digital 2.0 Surround; English (Subtitled); Spanish (Subtitled)
Format: Anamorphic, Closed-captioned, Color, Dolby, DVD-Video, NTSC, Special Edition, Widescreen
Picture Format: 2.35:1
Running Time: 120 minutes
DVD Release Date: 2002-03-12
Audience Rating: PG-13 (Parental Guidance Suggested)
Studio: 20th Century Fox

DVD Reviews of William Shakespeare's Romeo & Juliet (Special Edition)

DVD Review: stunning, theatrical film
Summary: 5 Stars

A movie I can watch over and over again. Baz Luhrman's flair for the grandiose makes this film impossible to ignore.

DVD Review: No Good!
Summary: 1 Stars

This is just sad. This movie isn't artistic. Its dumb and can't even compare to the original. It's too bad that they used the wonderful words of Shakespeare to make this laughable mess.

DVD Review: :]]
Summary: 4 Stars

A really great representation and interpretation of Shakespeare's tragic romance. Good for a regular movie night or to help understand the written play.

DVD Review: <3 r & j
Summary: 5 Stars

this movie is a modern interpretation of shakespeare's tragedy of romeo and juliet. while the dialogue stays faithful to the play, the visuals were modernized and some minor liberties were taken, most notably by exchanging swords for guns (named sword 9mm) and implied drug use.

im not a huge fan of the silly beginning of the movie, but it quickly becomes more serious. i absolutely love the art direction and photography in this film and while im not a huge dicaprio fan, his acting is very solid with glimses into pure brilliance. his most moving scene is when he confronts and murders mercutio after tybalts death.

overall, i absolutely love this film. ive tivoed it several times and ive now watched the dvd close to a half dozen times in less than the same number of weeks. i absolutely love this film

DVD Review: VITALITY
Summary: 4 Stars

I was a gawky twelve-year old when this movie was released in 1996. I was negotiating for the first time the treacherous battlefield of middle school hallways: the gossip, the insecurity, and the foreign sensations, the blushing flush of first infatuations. It was a perfect time for me to see this movie. I remember the breathless trailers. Rat-a-tat shots of gang gunplay, adolescent romance, bright colors, and explosions, all backed by a pounding, bass-heavy soundtrack. Suddenly the old Bard of Avon seemed cool.

The theater was packed when I went. I recognized some kids from my school. The median age was probably 16. The lights dimmed. The screen flickered. The movie started. And off we went. Here was a world we recognized, a garish world of guns, trendy fashions, and solipsistic teenagers scribbling poetry in their notebooks. The audience snickered with recognition at Romeo's poolside pleading to Juliet, "Wilst thou leave me so unsatisfied?" And Juliet's retort, "What satisfaction canst thou have tonight?" Gunplay and drug use and raging hormones. Well meaning adults and over-possessive parents. It was so familiar, but heightened, transfused into grand opera.

I'm no longer the wide-eyed innocent thrilling to Radiohead b-sides and drooling over Claire Danes (okay, not quite true). So how does the movie hold up? I'll be honest: I can't quite dissociate myself from the movie's nostalgic associations. But I'll try and be objective.

What holds up surprisingly well are the performances. The supporting cast is filled out nicely with well-cast veterans and some fresh-faced newcomers. I love John Leguizamo's cocksure Tybalt, all pointy teeth and resin-lined voice. Harold Perrineau (now I can't help but see Michael from LOST!) is a surprisingly affecting as the cross-dressing, drug-dealing misfit, Mercutio. He feeds Romeo a suspicious looking pill (ecstasy? acid?) before the Capulet party, and the results are appropriately trippy.

Pete Posthlewaite as Friar Laurence possesses the kind of natural ease with the dialogue that suggests many years of hard-won training on the boards. He wraps his lips around Shakespeare's Gordian knotted language as easily as if he were reading a grocery list--and with a put-on American accent!

Since this film DiCaprio has proven himself a worldwide mega-star, headlining such moneymaking behemoths as Titanic and The Departed. Here he captures the passion, the poetry, and the primal rage that imprison Romeo at any given moment. He's a slave to his emotions. He spends his time scrawling poetry in little black books and looking fashionably disaffected. He drops Rosalind in an instant after a one-time encounter with Juliet. He kills Juliet's kin, Tybalt, to revenge his friend's death, his face twisted into a terrible mask of rage. Later, after exile, he dies by his own hand thinking Juliet dead.

Ah, Juliet. Claire Danes. Okay, here's where the objectivity becomes difficult. She seemed like the epitome of mysterious older girl sensuality to me when I first saw this movie and now I'm writing from the perspective of someone a few years her senior when she made this movie. Hindsight shows that she doesn't have quite the same grasp and fluidity with the words DiCaprio possesses. What she does have is a winning smile and angelic features and an almost painful sincerity that broke so many hearts on the popular MTV program, "My So-Called Life."

I believe the Bard himself would like this movie. It has the spirit of the play--the tempestuous first love, the overbearing parents, the head-on collision with fate. It's aggressive and passionate and full of tumbling forward-moving energy. "Vitality" is the word Harold Bloom uses to summarize Shakespeare's enduring popularity and I think the adjective applies here. Luhrmann understands that the generation-spanning attraction to Shakespeare isn't always his words, strictly speaking, but rather the intensity and the passion that the words emote. We all know what it's like to be young and in love. Shakespeare gives words to those feelings. And they happen to be better written words than any others in the history of the English language. So what's lost here is the purity of the poetry, but what's gained is a new generations of kids saying, "Maybe Shakespeare isn't so bad, after all." They'll discover the poetry in time.

Description of William Shakespeare's Romeo & Juliet (Special Edition)

Baz Luhrmann's dazzling and unconventional adaptation of William Shakespear's classic love story is spellbinding. Leonardo DiCaprio and Claire Danes portray Romeo and Juliet, the youthful star-crossed lovers of the past. But the setting has been moved from it's Elizabethan origins to the futuristic urban backdrop of Verona Beach.

Baz Luhrmann (Strictly Ballroom) takes a shot at reinventing Shakespeare's story of star-crossed lovers as a visual pastiche inspired by MTV imagery, Hong Kong action-picture clich?s, and Luhrmann's own taste for deliberate, gaudy excess. The result is explosive chaos, both in terms of bullets and visual sensibility, which some may find impossible to stick with for more than a few minutes. Leonardo DiCaprio and Claire Danes play the leads, though not with much distinction, while Pete Postlethwaite makes a huge impression as this movie's version of Friar Laurence. The film is successful in spots, but overall its fever-dream game plan is difficult to ride out. --Tom Keogh

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