Movie Review – Romeo + Juliet
William Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet is one of my favourite movies. The film is directed by Baz Luhrman who is an Australian director and also responsible for Strictly Ballroom, Moulin Rouge, and the recent film Australia.
I’m just going to tell you a few of the reasons why I love this film – and I did all the screenshots myself, so enjoy. 
Leonardo’s hair. Boy, that were no cheap haircut. Seriously, a hairdresser knew what they were doing there. The color is one of the best pieces of work I’ve seen, ever. See how the light catches the streaks? Lovely!
Mercutio. Harold Perrineau to be precise. It is extremely brave to take on this role in this movie because Mercutio was to attend a party as a drag queen – wearing silver high heels and even dance in them. When you see the dancing scene, Mercutio’s high kick is simply stunning.
John Leguizamo plays a wonderful Tybalt and as you see, many of the costumes in the movie involve one of my favourite things – sparkly stuff.
The fishtank scenes. Adding to the color and beauty of this film overall, and really cool to have fish swimming between the actor and the camera. Pretty!
The pool grotto – very beautiful!
The overall colorfulness of this movie is one of the things that makes it a success in my opinion. The beauty of the cast, the locations, the language, it’s all great. When the beach scenes of Mercutio’s death were shot, there was actually a huge storm blowing in – what is happening to those trees is completely natural. The actors made it through even though they were being completely sand blasted.
If you go and read reviews for this movie on the interwebs, you’ll hear all these comparisions to some previous version of Romeo and Juliet done by Zafarelli or some such name back in the 60′s. This is ridiculous. Why compare two versions of something to each other? Clearly Baz Lurhman was not trying to *replicate* the previous version. Nobody would bother to do that.
I have not seen the other version and I have no real desire to. I’m fairly happy with this version of it. And to be honest, so are *millions* of school kids who have seen this movie as part of their traditional Shakespeare lessons instead of some old and dodgy version which would not grab their imaginations the way this movie does, or contain music which is interesting, or use color in such incredible ways as this movie does..
But the ending is the real triumph of this film, in my opinion. Of course I’m not going to spoil it by telling you they both die, that’s a pretty well known thing, but there have been changes made to the death scenes which improve **hugely** on the story. Not to mention the fact that the scenes are visually beautiful (love the blue neon crosses) and Leo’s emotion is heartbreakingly lovely, if that’s possible.
I have seen this film a *zillion* times, and yet every time I see it I somehow hope the ending will magically change and Romeo will take his Juliet off to Mantua and they will live happily ever after.
For never was a story of more woe than this of Juliet and her Romeo. I think this colorful and artistic version tells the centuries old story in a way that will inspire students who really have no interest in Shakespeare to get interested, the way that Dead Poets Society gave students like me who had no interest in poetry a love for poetry.
Over to you!
Have you seen this film? Will you seek it out now after reading this review? Do you love Leonardo DiCaprio? Claire Danes? John Leguizamo? Harold Perrineau? Have you seen any of the other Baz Luhrman films? What did you think of them?
If you have a favourite film that you would like to review here on the blog, you can guest post – click here to find out how. And let us know in the comments if there are any films you would like us to review here on the blog.
