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I really like the 90s Romeo and Juliet, set in present day with the lines unchanged (mostly). I'm alone in this, I think.
That was huge when it came out. Pretty much everyone I knew loved it. I think it only started getting shit on recently.
I got so much shit for liking it, maybe it was just my school though.
I remember someone saying it's like the Rockstar Games' version of Romeo & Juliet. I liked it in general, but that 90-second or so prologue always gives me goosebumps.
That's actually a great way to frame it
Alone with every single girl coming of age in the 90s who swooned over it cuz of Leo "Heartthrob" DiCaprio.
I skipped it back in the day but my gf made me watch it last year and I liked it. Very stylish.
He was actually annoying in it I felt.
Romeo is annoying as a character, in all fairness.
They're both annoying af I think that's half the joke. I'm a big fan of Shakespeare's sense of humor.
Weirdly, I think that is a strength of his performance. Romeo is a misunderstood character: people associate him with romance and chivalry when the Romeo from the play is obsessive, fickle, and impulsive. Kind of a dweeb, really. Juliet fails to see through his bullshit because she is so, so young.
It's sick.
"Fetch me my sword" grabs a gun named sword. Plus it has the best Mercutio.
It was alright but the fact that they didn't modernize the language is what ruined the film for me. Who the hell spoke like that in the 90s? It made no sense.
That's... that's the point. It's Shakespeare's words given modern visual elements to make it more comprehensible by a modern audience. It's the prose of Romeo And Juliet that make it Shakespeare, not the swords and doublets.
Yeah and as someone who hated Shakespeare back in my grade school days (and still does), I couldn't care less about that. I simply want to see a modern take on his plays with the script translated to a prose that I can actually understand.
As someone with ADHD, it's difficult enough as-is to focus on words on a page written in a modern dialect, let alone an ancient one! Canterbury Tales was an even worse time for me because of this. I have to be fully invested in the story, or I can't understand a damn thing in these old manuscripts because my brain refuses to pay attention to anything that isn't urgent, interesting, or novel to me.
Are you aware you're asking for something that cannot exist? If you don't have the Shakespearean prose, it's not Shakespeare. It's the identifying element of the thing. You can bend and stretch many aspects of a work, but you can't remove the identifying elements. For poets, like Shakespeare, their word choice is core to the identity of the work. The 'story' is almost meaningless.
e.g. Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening and Loveliest of Trees have the same 'story,' a man takes a moment to appreciate the aesthetic qualities of a treed landscape in winter, but one would never say they were the same thing.
Why not? If religious people can update the Bible translations to use modern English, why can't we do the same with non-religious texts?
Because the goals are different. They aren't trying to share the poetry of the various original authors of the bible. They are trying to share the stories of the christian mythos to enable/convince people to be christians. We can create things like a movie from a book or translate a book/movie and somewhat call it the same thing (though, even then, it also somewhat isn't) because the story/plot is the identity of the thing and word choice is considered secondary, but in poetry, so much of what makes a poem itself comes down to individual words and punctuation marks, changing one can be significant, let alone changing the entire text.