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Friday, April 25, 2008

We watched Romeo and Juliet, the one with Leonardo DiCaprio and Claire Danes, today in English. It was more like a farce than an interpretation which made it incredibly entertaining and funny. Yeah, it was a funny tragedy. I need to put my comments somewhere, so here are 10 things that bothered me about R and J.

1. Speaking "Shakespearian" in modern-day California? It doesn't fit. They should have adapted the dialogue as well.
2. Capulet was portrayed as a do-as-I-say-or-else father instead of just one who wanted the best for his daughter.
3. The clothes were goofy.
4. The Friar Lawrence mail thing. I mean, just hours before Juliet wakes up, he decides to write Romeo another letter.
5. Friar Lawrence didn't show up in the tomb after Romeo died like he did in the play.
6. When Romeo goes to her room on their wedding night after the fight with Tybalt, Juliet takes off his shirt, sees the huge gashes in his side and arm, and doesn't ask what happened. She doesn't even look concerned. She knew Romeo killed Tybalt but she didn't know anything else about the fight. You'd think she'd want an explanation as to why her husband was bleeding, but instead, she's just like "okay, let's do this."
7. Juliet watches Romeo die and doesn't do anything, then she looks confused for a minute before she realizes he's dead.
8. Romeo doesn't notice that supposedly dead Juliet is awake and moving her hand toward his face. Uh, he was hugging her when she woke up and he didn't notice.
9. Romeo barely drinks the poison. He just kind of drops it and, what, does it splash into his mouth or something?
10. The ending doesn't show their parents "burying their strife" like the prologue promises. It just shows them putting R and J, who are definitely dead, in an ambulance. I don't think a hospital has any magical reviving potions, so what's an ambulance going to do?

This movie messed up a lot of stuff, but made the death story of R and J really funny, so I liked it. Mercutio as a drag queen was brilliant and for some reason everyone kept tripping over random objects and knocking things over, which was funny, too.

Here's the "balcony scene" or "the pool scene" in the movie. Romeo follows Juliet around the patio 3 inches away from her as she says her "Wherefore art thou Romeo?" speech and she doesn't notice. Then when he talks, she screams and pulls them both into the pool.



Then when the security guard came out, he didn't find it suspicious that Juliet was swimming in the pool by herself in the middle of the night in her party dress. Uh huh. The person who posted this on You Tube called it "touchingly romantic," but I thought it was funny, the first half at least. The making out in the pool thing was cute though.

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