"Strangely enough, it all turns out well. How? I don't know. It's a mystery."

Rating: 8/10 (27 March 2020)

This much-maligned best picture winner really turned out to be quite good. I mean, there's no doubt there were many films in 1998 that were more worthy to win the award than this, but this by no means should have made people prejudiced against this film.
Anyway, what really strikes me about this film is how it brilliantly and wittily retold Romeo and Juliet within the story of the film, blending the play with an original fictional story that Shakespeare, as it's obvious, is its protagonist. The more the plot unravelled, the more impressed by the genius of the script I became. Moreover, there's a sustained self-awareness here which actually comes from being self-referential: the farcical approach to produce laughter; how the plot's structure feels, in a good way, "staged"; and so on.
However, I can't say that this film worked for me as a "romance" film at all. Oddly, the film feels soulless in this aspect in particular. I believe I felt emotional every time lines from the play were narrated more than any time there was a "romantic" scene. Also, as much as I really loved the humour in this film as I mentioned above, I think it made the tone slightly uneven when we look at the whole picture. I think this could've been easily avoided by setting an ominous atmosphere early on like the play itself. If anyone doubts this could work in a film as it works in a play, I would say Cameron's Titanic is a sufficient proof this could work, and also pretty well.
(8/10)