For reference for those not in the know and to give an idea how exactly this works: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SEzskNtFnIY
I genuinely think it was a unique/interesting idea, and am glad it exists. Kinda wish we had seen other movies like it for Macbeth, Hamlet, etc.
I actually watched this at school for Drama, and we did a bunch of Shakespeare stuff afterwards. Looking back it feels like half the cast are doing funny voices, and going by how some of the lines are delivered I wonder if those actors even knew all of what they were supposed to be saying.
Still, a strangely compelling film.
I genuinely love it.
It works the best out of all of Baz Luhrmann‘s “frame period pieces in current iconography so people understand the context” films
I wish younger, more up to date creators were doing similar. But the mono-culture is so fractured in 2021 compared to 1996.
Baz also picked people on their way up as well.
The visuals of the movie are just so good. The costumes and sets feel like what games like Final Fantasy 15 wanted to do - a story set in a modern world, but one that isn't our World. Or like how Bright tried to be, but failed because it had to be Los Angeles and not Verona, a city that is dripping with catholic and cartel imagry, mixed with floral print shirts in a way that never happened but maybe could have.
Seriously, just go watch parts of it, it's got a whole LOOK that really fits the dialog, as if people are doing to wordplay in iambic pentameter, they are going to be dressed in Iambic Pentameter, and the whole damn world is going to be like that too.
Anyhow, none of his other films had the same hyperclear vision, as the rest tried to be in the past but talk like the present.
motherfucker this is my second favorite adaptation
shit is fucking fantastic and i shall beat the fools who denigrate it
What the fuck that rocks. I've never seen this but it seems to drive the point home that everyone at the time was wondering around ready to kill really well actually.
I lost it every time it pans to a gun and it has like, dagger or something written on it.
I have mixed feelings on this one. Loved it in high school. And I'll give Baz credit for doing something different, for sure. But there's just... SO MUCH SHOUTING! Seriously take it down a few notches and I think it would be pretty great.
Check out Coriolanus
Same idea, Shakespeare in the modern day but still keeps the language of the original. Ralph Fiennes directed it and it’s pretty fantastic.
Richard III staring Ian McKellen is also fun. Script taken directly from the play, but unfortunately pieces of it were cut out to make it shorter. Also 2009s Hamlet with David Tennant, although that is more of a filmed theater play than a movie.
Changing the costumes up for Shakespeare is pretty common. Remember a couple years ago when that troupe did Julius Caesar where Caesar was Trump? People do that with old plays, it makes for an interesting twist that still mostly respects the old plays.
I caught a remake of Lohengrin themed as though it took place on the eve of WW1 and... wow. Let me tell you. It absolutely radiated a reactionary vibe.
Like, anyone who went in wondering how Wagner could have inspired fascism was completely demystified by the time the curtain dropped.
This movie is the very definition of a fever dream. Every now and again I remember shit about it and can't imagine it comes from the same movie.
It's one of my favourite Leo movies. Just pure naive sugar like cotton candy in movie form
It was weird which was cool I guess. I didn't really go for it personally but I never really liked Shakespeare. The worst part was when they'd have us go around in class reading it, and everyone was too busy stumbling over their words to be able to emphasize the right parts or anything and it was impossible to follow. I think I remembered preferring West Side Story, personally.
I got to visit Shakespeare's Globe in London when I was younger, and they did this lecture on the ins and outs of the play. How various actors didn't actually know their co-stars' lines until the night of the performance and much of the dialogue was informative ("What light through yonder window breaks? It is Juliet!" is Juliet's queue to step onto the balcony, for instance). How Shakespeare was constantly tweaking the writing (the guy who played Mercutio was such a scene-stealer that Shakespeare decided to deliberately killed him off halfway through the play after a few performances). How you had all this choreography, lighting, costume, and accompaniment that isn't properly documented in a high school reading of the play, and a great deal of how you deliver that is left to the producers.
Like, these are rarely ever good reads. They're functionally screenplays. Going through Shakespeare as written is like picking up a line-reading of Love Actually or Diehard, then trying to make sense of it without having ever seen Bruce Willis or Hugh Grant, knowing what New York or London look like, or having any idea how a 90s-era Westerner might behave.
You really do need to see these performed to appreciate them. And that, I think, is what makes a movie like this so good.
There was the awful 2006 emo-gangster Macbeth with Sam Worthington.
