Critical and Curious

In this season's penultimate episode, we discuss Carlo Carlei's Romeo & Juliet (2013) written by Julian Fellowes (Downton Abbey). Fashioned as the millennial Romeo and Juliet, it features teen stars Hailee Steinfeld, Kodi Smit-McPhee, and Ed Westwick alongside Damian Lewis and Paul Giamatti. Despite the A-list cast, the beautiful scenery, sets, and costumes, and some very striking photography, the film falls flat and often feels like a big budget high school performance instead of a major Hollywood movie.

Since its release in 2011, Gnomeo & Juliet has become a post-postmodern classic. This 3D computer-animated fantasy romantic comedy directed by Kelly Asbury and written by a team of ten writers, features an overwhelming mashup of Romeo & Juliet, Elton John songs, and pop culture references. However, the film's refreshing take on essential elements - the initial meeting, the balcony scene, the wedding scene - creates a Shakespeare appetizer for young viewers and almost makes up for its desperate hodgepodge.

In the pandemic, Bob and Charisse go back in time to discuss Shakespeare in Love, the 1998 Oscar Best Picture starring Gwyneth Paltrow and Joseph Fiennes, written by Marc Norman and Tom Stoppard. We originally thought it was a film built around Romeo & Juliet but not a true Romeo & Juliet story. We were wrong. The film is not only a retelling of our classic tale, it retells Shakespeare himself by literally pulling back the curtain, winking at Shakespearean scholars, and embracing early modern fan culture.

We discussed Jonathan Levine's Warm Bodies (2013) in March 2020, just as COVID began to ravage the US, but the conversation is just as relevant 8 months later. From playing with the traditional components of Romeo and Juliet to adding a common enemy, the film hilariously adapts the Bard and postulates how love is both comic and tragic even in the apocalypse. One of Bob Thompson's favorites, the film takes on new meaning in a world where we struggle to find human contact in the midst of a global pandemic.

Set in a military academy, Alan Brown's Private Romeo (2011) is a love story between two young men where Don't Ask Don't Tell is the ancient grudge forbidding this pairing, even though it is never mentioned. Brown liberates the text from its minimum daily requirements and embraces a brilliantly pedestrian approach - jumping between a high school class struggling with Romeo & Juliet to the struggles of love and hate in the hallways of an empty school - to juxtapose how we learn and how we live Shakespeare.

The 2008 independent film David & Fatima sets Romeo and Juliet in Jerusalem and frames the story as a microcosm of the longstanding religious and ethnic conflicts in the region. Producer Luigi (Kari) Bian and director Alain Zaloum's combination of history, social commentary, and romance swings between cliché and profund. However, the narrative decisions that openly defy the original text offer an interesting perspective on the Shakespearean philosophy of fate and the inevitability of star-crossed lovers.

Romeo Must Die (2000) is a hip hop martial arts mashup starring Aaliyah and Jet Li. Despite Bob's desire to detach this movie from the original text, Charisse insists that this reimagining complicates the rivalry by fleshing Ladies Montague (Kai) and Capulet (Mac) and sacrificing Po (Mercutio) and Colin (Tybalt) early on. We also read Aaliyah as a real-life Juliet, whose onscreen kiss with Jet Li did not test well with "urban audiences" despite her not-so-secret romance with R. Kelly just six years prior.

In this episode, we take a sharp detour away from Hollywood representations of traditional romance to discuss Tromeo and Juliet (1996), a grotesque RomCom by Troma Entertainment, an indie production company. If you can get past the dismemberment and incest, the film features a tongue-in-cheek read of the sexuality of secondary characters and a (T)Romeo and Juliet who take control of their lives in a new world (New Jersey), all while surrounded by the visceral aroma of meat. Watch, listen, and love; if you can stomach it.

Baz Lurhmann's 1996 Romeo + Juliet, starring Leonardo DiCaprio and Claire Daines, along with John Leguizamo, Paul Rudd, Pete Postlethwaite, Paul Sorvino, and Harold Perrineau, was one of the highest grossing adaptations of the story. We discuss Luhrmann's unique visual style and his unabashed hodgepodge of traditionalism, pop culture, and current events, from Mexican Catholicism to The Graduate to the unrest in Los Angeles in the early 1990s.

In the midst of the social unrest of 1968, Zeffereli's adaptation of Romeo and Juliet discards the social commentary established by West Side Story, and focuses instead on the simplicity of teenage lust. We discuss the embrace of the original text and Elizabethan style and the strategies of storytelling in what would come to be one of the most critically acclaimed versions of Romeo and Juliet.