38 lines
2.3 KiB
Plaintext
38 lines
2.3 KiB
Plaintext
recently one night a young director named baz luhrmann couldn't sleep .
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he tumbled out of bed and moved over to the television where he watched mtv for an hour .
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then he moved to his kitchen where he spent the same amount of time eating spoiled food .
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then he took down a volume of shakespeare's work and read it cover to cover - never really paying attention to the words or plot .
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and then , as a climax , he took out his video camera and pressed the " on " button .
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the result ?
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william shakespeare's romeo + juliet - the worst film ever made and a complete failure .
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though , to be fair , an interesting complete failure .
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the idea at the film's core is to make shakespeare appealing to the crowds .
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this is done by moving the camera around at a rapid rate so that we can't see what is going on .
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and filming the dialogue in voice over .
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and shooting leonardo dicaprio like a calvin klein model .
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and making the frame go still while flashing the character's name at the bottom .
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and filming long tedious action sequences in slow motion .
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i mean , man , this is the 90s , dude .
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however i've seen terrible films that are fun to watch .
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( examples are batman and robin and the island of doctor moreau .
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) that rule doesn't apply here .
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this is a film that takes itself seriously .
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that is it's major fault .
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another problem was pointed out by my friend , alex ( who was singing songs by leonard bernstein throughout .
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) ; the original play is a powerful piece of work because the author remained neutral and didn't take sides .
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here it's clear that we are supposed to side with romeo .
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( just look at the way they film him .
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) from the begining he's our hero and this doesn't work .
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and dicaprio's awful performance doesn't help .
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luhrmann never decides if he wants to entertain us or enlighten us .
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the result is a mess .
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you can feel him striving to be something he isn't .
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he tries to pull of a mix in which drag queens are filmed from purposefully arty angles .
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he tries very hard .
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key word : tries .
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" oh look , he's filming above water action from below .
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pretty .
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what does it represent ? "
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why do people do ugly things ?
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i scrambled away from my tv set feeling guilty as if i could never read the play again and keep a straight face .
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