"William Shakespeare's Romeo + Juliet" (12) Savoy, Virgin, Omniplex, UCIs, Dublin
Pulsating with raw energy, swooningly romantic and dazzling design, William Shakespeare's Romeo + Juliet, to give the movie its full title, is a radical reinvention of the great romantic tragedy by Baz Luhrmann, the imaginative Australian director whose only previous film was the exhilarating Strictly Ballroom. Luhrmann relocates the play to a contemporary American setting, the violent beachfront city of Verona Beach, where a deadly feud persists between the powerful dynasties of the Capulets and the Montagues.
Shot in and around Mexico City, Luhrmann's movie opens and closes with a television screen in the centre of the cinema screen, as a newscaster speaking in iambic pentameter introduces and concludes this story of "two households, both alike in dignity ... from forth the fatal loins of these two foes/A pair of star-crossed lovers take their lives.
Luhrmann's movie adapted from the play by himself and his Strictly Ballroom screenwriting collaborator, Craig Pearce - is at least as much a movie of and for its times as the exuberant Robert Wise/Jerome Robbins musical version of the same source material, West Side Story, was in 1961. As in that earlier movie, one of the rival families is white, the other Hispanic.
Purists may be scared off by the information, for example, that this time out Mercutio is a black drag queen, or by blandly dismissive reports that this is merely MTV Shakespeare. Yet one of the most striking achievements in this hugely confident reworking of the play involves all the characters speaking Shakespeare's original dialogue, and this is handled with an unshowy ease by the key actors. The language lives on, as rich and mellifluous as ever, and takes on a cutting edge in the movie's vividly realised contemporary context.
The film takes place in what Luhrmann describes as "a created world", a collage of modern and classic images drawn from religion, theatre, folklore, technology and pop culture. He employs helicopter shots, rapid zooms and razor-sharp editing to capture this picture of pure young love doomed by family history and cruel fate in a culture where designer guns are wielded with a thoughtless casualness.
The pivotal scene where Romeo Montague and Juliet Capulet fall in love, their eyes meeting from opposite sides of an aquarium, takes place against the backdrop of a masked ball held in the vast ballroom of the ostentatious Capulet mansion. Their final scene together takes place in a huge, gothic church festooned with lighting candles and neon crosses. Within these elaborately exotic settings, the intimacy of their love affair shines through in this bold and beautiful movie.
As in Strictly Ballroom Luhrmann's casting is impeccable, with two of America's most talented young actors, Leonardo DiCaprio and Claire Danes capturing a magnetic screen chemistry as the star-crossed lovers. Strutting his way through the movie with a dynamic screen presence, John Leguizamo is ideally cast as the fiery Tybalt Juliet's cousin and Romeo's sworn enemy. The players also notably include Brian Dennehy and Christina Pickles as Ted and Caroline Montague, Paul Sorvino and Diane Venora as Fulgencio and Gloria Capulet, Miriam Margoyles as Juliet's Nurse, and Pete Postlethwaite as a New Age Father Laurence.
The film reunites Luhrmann with his imaginative art director, costume designer and film editor from Strictly Ballroom - Catherine Martin, Kym Barrett and Jill Bilcock, respectively - and it is gleamingly photographed by the prolific Australian cinematographer Donald M. McAlpine. The punchy soundtrack alternates between Nellee Hooper's atmospheric original score and aptly-used tracks from Gavin Friday, Mundy, Des'ree, Butthole Surfers, Radiohead and the Cardigans.
"Dante's Peak" (12) Savoy, Virgin, Omniplex, UCIs, Dublin
A few years ago rival movies on Robin Hood and Christopher Columbus were competing for the attention of cinema audiences. Coming later this year are two movies based on events in the life of the Dalai Lama - Martin Scorsese's Kundun and Jean-Jacques Annaud's Seven Years in Tibet - along with two gorilla pictures and a pair of comet epics, and in development are two movies on Janis Joplin (one to star Melissa Etheridge the other with Lili Taylor) and two on Jimi Hendrix.
Opening today is the first of two rival lava dramas to reach our screens this year, Roger Donaldson's Dante's Peak, getting in ahead of Mick Jackson's imminent Volcano, which deals with a volcanic eruption in downtown Los Angeles and carries the publicity slogan, "The coast is toast". Donaldson's movie gets right down to business with a breathlessly-paced prologue set during a frantic evacuation in Colombia as lava bombs hurtle through the air. One of these fragments of molten rock hits the truck carrying US Geological Survey volcanologist Pierce Brosnan and kills his fiancee.
Cut to Pierce doing push-ups and a caption advising us that it's four years later. Pierce is about to start a vacation when, guess what, the phone rings and his services are required to investigate minor seismic activity in the small Pacific north-west mountain town of Dante's Peak. The town has just been voted second most desirable small town to live in in the US, and a money man is looking at investing there.
Echoing Jaws, the movie fries a pair of skinny-dippers as the first victims of the local lava, and there are more echoes of Jaws as the sheriff and business people try to play down the threat of an eruption in order not to scare off tourism and the aforementioned investment. Steel-jawed Pierce knows better, of course, and he manages to convince the mayor (Linda Hamilton), a coffee-shop owner deserted by her husband and living with her two children and their dog, all of whom are set up for crucial narrative involvement when the mountain blows its top.
Unwisely, director Donaldson laboriously pads out a humdrum hour of the cardboard characters talking to each other - and in the case of Brosnan and Hamilton, predictably falling in love - before the movie reverts to its raison d'etre and the rivers of fire flow. The special effects, when they eventually come, are impressive and the action is well staged but many viewers may be beyond caring by then, and it's unfortunate that the film-makers did not strive for further echoes of Jaws and its skillful development of accumulating tension.
. There are two treats from the past for Irish Film Centre audiences in Dublin over the holiday weekend. One of the highlights of the centre's excellent Howard Hawks season, the director's brilliant 1940 comedy, His Girl Friday, returns tomorrow for a three-day run. The second and much the best of the many screen versions of Charles MacArthur and Ben Hecht's play, The Front Page, Hawks's movie benefits immeasurably from the inspired device of turning the determined reporter, Hildy Johnson, into a woman.
She is played with panache by Rosalind Russell, and Cary Grant is on sparkling form as her editor and ex-husband, Walter Burns, who hopes to lure her away from the staid new man (Ralph Bellamy) in her life by putting her on the story of a man facing execution. The pacing is frenetic all the way through this gloriously hilarious farce which is arguably the best screen comedy ever made, no less, and one that ought to be seen in the shared experience of a cinema audience.
The other commendable reissue playing at the IFC from tomorrow is Jacques Demy's delightful 1964 musical, The Umbrellas Of Cherbourg, scored by Michel Legrand. As in Alan Parker's recent Evita, all of the dialogue is sung in Demy's film. The cast, whose singing voices are dubbed, features Catherine Deneuve as a young woman who works in her widowed mother's umbrella shop and discovers that she is pregnant by her garage mechanic boyfriend (Nino Castelnuovo) who has gone on military service. Showing in a restored 35mm print, it runs at the IFC until Thursday next.
