Romeo + Juliet
Romeo + Juliet (1996)
Summary: William Shakespeare's classic tale of star-crossed lovers whose families are enemies of each other. They meet, they fall in love, they marry. Romeo is banished from the city. Juliet doesn't want to marry Paris. Juliet fakes her death. Romeo, thinking she's really dead, poisons himself. Juliet awakes to find Romeo dead and kills herself. Tragedy. But Baz Luhrmann does his freaky thing and updates it to modern times.
Positives: It's a classic and tragic love story, one of the best. The movie, however... Leonardo DiCaprio and Claire Danes have good chemistry and their scenes are sweet and lovely. It's nice to bring the classic story to modern times. The end was beautiful in all its expected tragedy.
Negatives: This is one of the movies I bought but have not watched until now. I remember everyone loving it when it first came out. (But maybe that's just because everyone was in love with Leonardo DiCaprio?). I think it was on sale for dirt cheap, so I bought it. I knew it was a modern retelling of Romeo and Juliet. But I didn't realize that they stuck with the original script! It was really hard to decipher what everyone was saying - even with subtitles. Mercutio was very strange. I just found it hard to truly enjoy because of the script. And a lot of the Montague boys were annoying, stupid, and weird.
Keep or Toss: Sadly, probably toss. Leonardo DiCaprio & Claire Danes are great in the movie, but overall, I just didn't get it.
Rating: 2 out of 5 stars. I wish it had been made with modern language. And I just don't really understand Baz Luhrmann's films.