Word: luhrmann
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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...
...terms (and for a thrifty $16 million or so), the ploy works: it's the societal psychosis from which the lovers flee and to which they ultimately succumb. Luhrmann, an Australian who pretty much let his camera go nuts in the egregiously overrated Strictly Ballroom, here makes reasonable, imaginative decisions that are, arguably, true to Shakespeare. "His stories are full of sex, violence, tragedy, comedy because he was, first of all, a great entertainer," Luhrmann says. "His audience was 3,000 drunken, fighting people, bear baiters and prostitutes." Sounds like a Friday-night crowd at a big-city 'plex...
Danes and DiCaprio speak most eloquently with their faces (hers strong, his soft) and with the hurt and ardor that make this a Rebel Without a Cause for the '90s--1590s or 1990s. Sometimes it takes a radical like Luhrmann to get to the root of a natural-born screenwriter like Shakespeare...
...gigs, a music video for Soul Asylum. She 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...
...optimism; like a Stalinist nanny, they shout, "Feel good!" Such a one is STRICTLY BALLROOM, an audience hit at several festivals. In this Australian musical comedy, West Side Story meets Saturday Night Fever, and everyone -- especially the thoughtful moviegoer -- ends up exhausted. On a ballroom dance floor, director Baz Luhrmann sets in motion all manner of human and cinematic gargoyles. You've never seen so many fisheye close-ups of goofy faces caked with bad makeup. Watching the film is like being condemned to perform in a '30s dance marathon with a partner who just won't quit. They shoot...