Benefit
Bluelighter
- Joined
- Sep 11, 2002
- Messages
- 5,193
This 1998 Best Picture winner is Shakespeare as seen through a postmodern lens with a generous dose of Hollywood cliché, some amusing tongue-in-cheek moments and very liberal handling of historical fact. The result is a moderately entertaining film that is in no way deserving of Best Picture honors. This film, although not bad, is certainly not better than Saving Private Ryan, American History X, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas or The Truman Show, which were all released in the same year.
It is the story of a young and as yet mostly unknown Will Shakespeare struggling to write Romeo and Juliet while searching for inspiration and navigating social barriers in the pursuit of love. There are lots of colourful characters (many of them based on actual people), lots of doubling, lots of chamber pots. It is very mainstream with a broad appeal, and a few in-jokes written in specifically for Shakespeare and historical buffs.
I really like how the movie makes Shakespeare accessible. I'm lukewarm when it comes to The Bard, but this movie made me want to dust off my Romeo and Juliet and revisit Hamlet. The acting is generally superb, though again I'm not sure Judi Dench deserved an Oscar for her 8 minutes of screen time. The play within a play and the self-reflexive threads running all over the place were well-done, but not extraordinary or anything.
The jokes lacked punch and some were just downright lame, like the therapist. I think this movie didn't really know what it wanted to be; clever parody, fictionalized historical dramedy, experimental? It was all over the place, and only succeeded some of the time.
The set design and costuming were also somewhat flat I thought. Don't get me wrong, recreating 16th century London was done pretty well... just not remarkably well, know what I mean? So what we end up with is a slightly above average film that, for me anyway, loses points because it garnered all these accolades despite not even being that good.
It is the story of a young and as yet mostly unknown Will Shakespeare struggling to write Romeo and Juliet while searching for inspiration and navigating social barriers in the pursuit of love. There are lots of colourful characters (many of them based on actual people), lots of doubling, lots of chamber pots. It is very mainstream with a broad appeal, and a few in-jokes written in specifically for Shakespeare and historical buffs.
I really like how the movie makes Shakespeare accessible. I'm lukewarm when it comes to The Bard, but this movie made me want to dust off my Romeo and Juliet and revisit Hamlet. The acting is generally superb, though again I'm not sure Judi Dench deserved an Oscar for her 8 minutes of screen time. The play within a play and the self-reflexive threads running all over the place were well-done, but not extraordinary or anything.
The jokes lacked punch and some were just downright lame, like the therapist. I think this movie didn't really know what it wanted to be; clever parody, fictionalized historical dramedy, experimental? It was all over the place, and only succeeded some of the time.
The set design and costuming were also somewhat flat I thought. Don't get me wrong, recreating 16th century London was done pretty well... just not remarkably well, know what I mean? So what we end up with is a slightly above average film that, for me anyway, loses points because it garnered all these accolades despite not even being that good.
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