Where's the barf bags when you need them...

Rating: Null/10 (20 August 1999)

Trivial. Inane. Predictable. Unoriginal. Trite. Just few of many words for which I describe "Shakespeare In Love." This will not change the amount of Academy Awards it received. What's done is obviously done. But it will certainly stand as an embarrassment to society. How many Oscars did it actually receive? Do you remember the movie that sniped the "Best Picture" Oscar in 1997? See, even that is leaving our memory! We don't want to remember those shameful events in the history of our time: Slavery, the Holocaust, Nixon's stand on Vietnam. Yet they still existed, and will be remembered as the inhumanity and bastardness of mankind. Unfortunately, I have to compare that to the ignorance and selfishness of the Academy of Motion Pictures.
Gee, where do I start. How about where all the Oscars went. Judi Dench received a Best Supporting Actress Oscar for sitting on a chair and laughing, and as far as I could tell, for nothing much else. Gwyneth Paltrow won the Best Actress Oscar for reading her lines and flaunting her slender flat-chested body, and for a performance that makes Bo Derek look like Emma Thompson. The script, which suffered from emptyness and repetition (how many times did we have to hear the line "A plague on both our houses"?) got the screenplay Oscar, a travesty which could of been written by a hyperactive 4th grader. Lastly, (or at least to sum it up) the Best Picture Oscar was slapped down on a "romance film" which exposes playright William Shakespeare as being a plagiarist, and getting the idea of"Romeo and Juliet" from a love affair he supposedly had with Gwyneth Paltrow. Spare me.
I'm baffled that people say this is a good portrayal of 16th Century England. No tooth paste was around back then, and bathing wasn't too sophisticated either. Yet everyone in the movie looked so clean-cut; some even appeared as if they jumped right out of a GAP commercial. The sets were obviously Hollywood sets. Everyone was playing themselves. The romance between Fiennes and Paltrow had the same amount of chemistry as the gloomy days of Charles and Di, and all the scenes and continuity were predictable. I also never laughed, despite the promotion of this as being a "comedy". For instance, take the scene at the begining where Phillip Henslowe (Geoffrey Rush) has a debt to pay and a group of loan sharks threaten to burn his feet or cut his nose off. I didn't find any comic relief in this scene. Was I supposed to?
I have a confession to make. I only saw 30 minutes of this movie and I didn't rewind it when I returned it to the rental place. If you're wondering why I'm writing this review if I didn't watch the whole thing, it's because I knew what was going to happen for at least every 5 minutes. That's not entertaining; that's irratating. So, what's the point? The majority of the public wanted "Saving Private Ryan" to get the much deserved Best Picture Oscar. That sampling fell on deaf ears, and the AMP took it upon themselves to choose on their own. If I ever find out the group of personalities that made that decision, I'm never going to watch their movies (or anything affiliated with them) again. I mean, this is totally ridiculous! I've made the same pact about watching future televised Oscar ceremonies. There's really no point. They're going to pick a romance period movie with an anglo-saxon cast as the best picture. It's been working like this for over a half a decade now! Why, why bother? If a poorly written, cliched sappy romance is what qualifies as "best picture of the year", I've made up my mind. Three hours of television time could be used more wisely!
Don't make the same mistake I did by wasting time and money on this vile piece of donkey dung.