If you were a fourteen year old boy...

Rating: 6/10 (14 November 1999)

My fourteen year old nephew saw this film and loved it! He bought the soundtrack albums, he bought the video cassette. He bought the play. He then rented the Zeffirelli version and rented West Side Story. He then rented a couple of other movies based on other Shakespearean plays. He is now reading Hamlet.
It is so easy to forget that the passions described by Shakespeare are those of teen-agers. It is perhaps equally easy to forget that this is a film adaptation, not the play.
Film has its own rules. The filmmaker has a responsibility not to Shakespeare purists (Orson Welles, Olivier and Kurosawa understood this perfectly) but to the medium and the emotions of the text.
Sure Baz Luhrman's version of this classic play is loud and often obnoxious. Certainly he uses effects that are considered ludicrous outside of a music video (and even then...)-pixilation, freeze frames, undercranking the camera, jump cuts that haven't been around since Jean-Luc Goddard was a young punk... But the point is exactly that! The kids love it! It is wild!

Before you knock it, remember that it can also be a door in to the world of literacy and culture.