Just a couple. Oh come on, I’ve been a good girl! ;) I have not seen most of these movies. In fact I have only seen Bed Of Roses and Young Guns. So it’ll be fun. And they were all less than $10AUS.
You may have noticed, we also have a new graphic for the header. It’s sequins. I took the pic myself. I know how to get those little stars now, I learnt the trick recently. I’ll put a post on the photo blog about how to do it.. :)
A lot of people who have reviewed William Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet (especially critics) did not really *get* it. People went on about them speaking with American accents and action scenes and a whole load of tripe really. So rather than try to combat that, I’m just going to tell you a few of the reasons why I love this film. ;) With my own screenshots. ;) Be sure to let me know what you think.
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 be a drag queen – wearing silver high heels and even dance in them. When you see the dancing scene, Mercutio’s high kick is one of the best I’ve ever seen, and I’ve seen a few. But he is not just a great drag queen, his acting is excellent. His death scene is heart-breakingly heartbreaking.
Also 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.
And the fishtank sequence is breath-taking – extremely lovely. The fishtank scenes add 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 intarweb, 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 how the dying scenes have been changed in this instance are a great improvement, I think. 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. If you watch it you’ll get what I mean..
I have seen this film a *zillion* times, I used to have it playing in front of me at work all day long, 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. But I think this version of it tells the story in a way that will inspire kids who really have no interest in Shakespeare to get an interest. This, along with Shakespeare in Love, are two of my favourite tellings of this tragic tale.
Let me know if you’ve seen this film, if you have not and have decided to because of this review, or your general thoughts on this review and my screenshots ;)
Of course, Claire Danes is now starring as Carrie in Homeland. I prefer her in this movie to be honest. Less crazy eyes, less nuttiness.
If you enjoyed this review, you might also enjoy these other reviews.
Pump Up The Volume
William Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet
The Pirate Movie
Chocolat
Shakespeare In Love
Dead Poets Society
Today I watched the first of my recently bought movies, Memoirs of a Geisha. It was actually hard to pick which one to watch. I have been wanting to see this movie for a long time but kept putting it off for many reasons.
When I first read the book, I did not actually know it was fiction. Someone had bought it for me, and I thought it was an actual Memoirs of a Geisha. The book was so beautifully written. To get to the end of the book and find out not only was it fiction but it was written by a man was quite a shock.
I was looking forward to seeing what the movie makers did with it – the first thing I’ll say, the movie is very long but compared to the book it is actually short. Much more happened in the book. But the thing the movie had that the book did not was the beauty of Geisha and the beauty of Japan though from the looks of things little of it was filmed there.
It was lovely. I’m not sure what I was expecting but I don’t think that was it. I do think the movie could have used more of the writing from the book as narration. I think I might have to watch it a couple more times to really absorb it. But if you get a chance, see it yourself. ;) It reminds me very much of Oshin in some ways, the young life of the girl was somewhat similar though Oshin did not become a Geisha.
The other half has a product night tonight and won’t be home for a little while so I might go watch Charlie and the Chocolate Factory with commentary. I am really interested in this one. ;)
I posted this over here if you’re looking for something to read.. :)
So the weekend was fairly busy, driving here there and everywhere. Last night we were supposed to go to the Chinese but The Other Half was not feeling too well so we ended up staying home. He cooked me something in the microwave and I went out to the lounge to eat it, and I was flicking around on the TV and I found Charlie And The Chocolate Factory – which I had not actually seen yet, the one with Johnny Depp. I had been looking forward to seeing it and it did *not* disappoint, I loved it. I’m assuming you’ve all seen it. I’ll try not to spoil it for those who haven’t, but it’ll be hard, maybe go see it and then come back and read this! ;) What I loved most –
I loved it so much, I bought it today when I went to JB Hifi, again. :) As well as Ed Wood and another movie I can’t remember the name of right now. I’ll let you know what it was tomorrow. So I got a lot of stuff to watch this week.. ;) I might not be around as much as I thought I would be.. hehe
A JB Hifi store has opened up less than half an hours drive from this house! So many DVD’s, so little time. I bought 5 today and most were $12.98. YAY! Plus, I got Elizabeth, a DVD I have been looking to get for a while now just nowhere stocks it and Pump Up The Volume which I am very glad to own on DVD but it didn’t seem to have any extras, sadly. I also got Memoirs of a Geisha, The Green Mile, and Goodfellas – yes TT I bought it because you recommended it.
People reading this – if you could choose one movie for me to watch, what would it be? Leave a note in the comments..
We spent the day driving around looking at shops and sights and stuff, then my Uncle cooked us dinner. I really adore him but that man uses too many hot spices in his cooking. I feel this may come back to me as a surprise tomorrow.
Speaking of things coming to one as a surprise, in the back of my parents Voyager the music is a lot louder than anywhere else in the car. Last night I got stuck back there with Abba, which on some songs is absolutely no problem however the songs I don’t know I don’t like very much. Today I took the little car mp3 player with about 24 hours worth of the other half’s and my favourite music, and my Mum got stuck in the back with Nine Inch Nail’s Closer track. I think the lyrics may have come as a surprise, especially the “I want to fsck you like an animal” bit.. :)
Sephy, your latest played track listing hasn’t changed in a few days IIRC – are you listening to enough music right now?
Tomorrow we’re driving down the coast about 150kms or so.. and probably dropping in to the beach with the roos.. but I got to get some sleep I’m just exhausted.
Just a quick two ;)
Ones I have watched recently – I snuck in another viewing of Pretty Woman without commentary last night. I intended to follow it up with a viewing of Chocolat – Vivian and Vianne. I love both these characters. If you have not seen Chocolat, you should, it is just a gorgeous movie. But now I admit I am a little tempted by Shakespeare in Love again. Girl with a Pearl Earring was also just gorgeous.
But from this shelf my favourite movie and one that took me down a path I was not expecting was Dead Man Walking. After seeing that many years ago I found myself a pen pal on Death Row. He was somewhat unique among people on death row in that he admitted he was guilty. That was one reason I kept writing to him.
The second was, he was really interesting, and he didn’t want anything from me other than to receive letters from time to time. It didn’t matter what I wrote about and to be honest I don’t really remember what I wrote about. Mostly just about life in general, or funny jokes people had told me, or interesting news stories.
He really liked to hear about going places, like you could sit down and write about taking a plane trip and you could tell him every little detail, he found it fascinating, mostly I guess because he couldn’t do it himself. His letters to me always had little drawings on the envelopes, he was a fantastic artist. I’m not sure where I put them when we moved and I’m looking for a bunch of stuff that seems to have gone missing including my paint brushes and sequins but if I find them I will scan one. He was executed in 2001. Incidentally the day Elvis died.
The box sets shelf – Pacino, Titanic, Back to the Future, Xfiles season one, Yes Minister, The Mummy one and two , and Oliver’s Twist.
Two today to make up for yesterday –
some of the tv show dvd’s I have – I love Seinfeld, Felicity you can’t seem to get the second, third or fourth series out here which sucks. ER is now hugely cheaper than what I bought one and two for, so some day I will continue the collection of those. The Sopranos I tried but didn’t get into it as much as I expected.
Whoa there’s Degrassi Junior High, cool! ;) And a few of my personal favourites which are getting on in years now but I still love them.
I should explain the joke, for the non-scambaiters. Scammers often start their mails –
So we scambaiters find this line kind of funny. ;)
Anyway I got inspired today and created the sequin banner that you see above in photoshop. It was kinda fun ;) I might make more of them, and even take my own sequin pics to do it, we’ll see..
In the meantime, today’s DVD shelf –
This shelf contains a mixture – some with commentary, some without.
This is the shelf of DVD’s with commentaries I intend to watch over the next few weeks. I watched Independence Day tonight actually. Very interesting.. ;) Grease I have already watched but I ran out of room on the other shelves. A couple of these I have watched the commentaries before but need a refresher.
Matching up with this post of Sephy’s. ;)
When I was growing up, I watched a LOT of movies. My parents had one of the first video machines on the block. We were one of the first people to sign up at “Focus Video” i think it was called, and we usually between the four of us rented anywhere between 2-10 movies a week. So a lot of movies have influenced me over time. Every time I mention a movie to my good friend Sephiroth, most of the time he has never seen it. This is partly because he is a lot younger than me. Many of the movies I really loved were from the 80’s.
A fair while ago we decided the easiest thing to do was for him to just make a list of movies I thought he should at some point in his life see. I suggested he get Ferris Bueller’s Day Off a while back and when he said to me yesterday that he had it, I decided I would like to re-watch it myself. Of course I already had it here in my enormous DVD collection ;) hehe I must take pics and post them for you some time. But I watched it with the Director’s Commentary. John Hughes reminds me a lot of a guy we both know from baiting, Bandit. The way he talks is quite similar.
One of the lesser known facts about this movie was that Ferris was actually the first teenager chosen to go on the space shuttle. Just before before this film was released, the Challenger accident happened. So the film was edited to remove that bit of the storyline.
John Hughes talked quite a bit about the Institute of Art, and one thing he said was that he used to go there a lot when he was taking a day off from school. Long before I heard him say this, this movie inspired me and probably a whole generation of kids to do the same thing. My number one destination was always the Museum {the egypt room, does this come as a surprise to anyone? ;) but I also loved the rocks}, followed by the Art Gallery. There’s something about those places that make you forget all your troubles and just *be*. I would usually go to the art gallery once a week minimum.
I didn’t go to school for almost all of year 11 at school – the deputy principal died while scuba diving (an aneurysm – is that how you spell that?) about two months into the school year and I did not enjoy the way the other kids revelled in it. He was a good guy and we interacted a lot with each other the previous year because I got kicked out of art class – I can’t draw and I hated it and the Art Teacher was a nasty cow who liked to point out I couldn’t draw – and he was the teacher who ran the detention I got sent to instead of going to art class. I explained to him why I hated art class and he admitted to me that he never could draw either but he loved to take coloured pencils and just make little colored squares with them. I had a huge pencil case full of great pencils and the two of us often spent an hour sharing a desk and pencils, just coloring in squares and enjoying the colors and talking about all kinds of stuff.
He inspired me to take a few different classes the next year when I didn’t have to take art, one of them being Latin with a really good teacher friend of his (and the dead poets society had something to do with that too, seen that one Sephy?) but the other kids thought it was great that he died because he was the real disciplinarian. So there I was, probably one of the only people in the school who was upset about this and I really missed him – typing about it opens up a big hole I had forgotten about, too. A couple of days after it happened some kids got real rowdy laughing and joking about it and I took one look and thought, it’s going to be like this for the rest of the year. I don’t need this. These people suck, bigtime. So each day my Mum would drop me off at school, I would go and sign in at home room, then I would walk down to the train station and catch a train into the city. I’d go wherever I felt like going. If I had enough money I might go to the movies but usually I had to look for stuff that was free and save any money I had for buying lunch.
The other thing I really loved about this movie was the idea of life moving pretty fast so you have to stop to take a look around once in a while. I firmly believe in that to this day. You have to have me time, every now and then. I had a lot of me time when I was in year 11 and this was one of the things that taught me to really love my own company. I couldn’t often talk anyone into taking even one day off school with me. They were all worried about getting caught.
The irony of this is, I never did get caught. I actually passed all my classes. I even passed exams I did not show up for. There were almost 500 kids in my year level of school, 5 year levels in total and most of them had over 500 too. My maths class had 60 kids in it. So one kid was not missed. Nobody ever said anything to me about it. At the end of the school year I was dreading getting my school report but when I did get it and I found I had mostly got b’s, I suggested to my Mum that it might be time to look at changing schools.
Wow, that blog kinda went off track a little there. ;) Sorry about that.. ;)