Word: juliets
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Hollywood has flirted with the poet since its infancy; this week the American Film Institute is showing the 1912 The Life and Death of King Richard III, the oldest surviving U.S. feature film. For MGM in 1936, Leslie Howard (then 43) and Norma Shearer (36) played Romeo and Juliet. The movies have put Shakespeare in gangland (Joe Macbeth) and outer space (Forbidden Planet, from The Tempest...
...getting a plethora of iambic pentameter. Last Christmas saw a stolid Othello (with Branagh and Laurence Fishburne) and the brutal, enthralling Richard III (Ian McKellen). This week three Shakespeare films will be on view: Romeo and Juliet, Al Pacino's Looking for Richard and the British Twelfth Night, or What You Will, directed by Trevor Nunn, the former Royal Shakespeare Company artistic director who has been named boss of the Royal National Theatre. Branagh has his four-hour Hamlet ready for Christmas. Filmmakers are trying every tactic--cultural intimidation, lavish spectacle, frenzied camerabatics and the casting of young stars...
Twelfth Night is a play transferred to film. Romeo and Juliet is, defiantly, a movie--an assault on Hollywood's conservative film language that might have come from a more playful Oliver Stone; call it Natural Born Lovers. Director Baz Luhrmann envelops Romeo and his goodfellas in portentous slo-mo for the shoot-outs, giddy fast-mo for comedy scenes. The camera literally runs circles around the lovers. When Romeo sees Juliet, his eye explodes in fireworks. The sound track pulses with rap and rock and sound effects that you'd expect in a Hong Kong melodrama; they shoot forth...
...played the angelic sister, Beth, in Little Women, and in her most widely known role to date, on the TV show My So-Called Life, she was an angst-ridden teen called Angela. Now, amid the racy urban grime of Baz Luhrmann's William Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet, she wears white, has a room full of china angels and dons wings for a party. But she insists, "I'm human. I think people see me as sweeter and softer than...
...innocent aura coexists, in person, with a more knowing and world-weary affect (after all, she was raised by artist parents in a loft in Manhattan's SoHo district and has been acting professionally since age 6). In one breath she confidently states a sophisticated opinion of Juliet ("more one-dimensional than people might expect") and in the next worries about how her looks are discussed in the press...