10 Comments
Oct 27, 2021Liked by John McGee, PhD

I read Romeo and Juliet in school and remember enjoying it. So when the move came out years later I was very keen to see it. But when I did a lot of the original text I had forgotten. As such the move rewrote the book in my mind. Such a pleasure to read this and remind me how much more depth and intrigue the original script had. I just picked up a copy and started reading the original again. Thanks for the inspiration.

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Oct 27, 2021Liked by John McGee, PhD

I guess any Shakespeare is better than no Shakespeare. Who knows, it might get kids interested enough to dig deeper. I wouldn't generally expect Hollywood to follow the script too closely at the best of times, and this DeCaprio vehicle made me feel like it was really written by a quorum of media trend analysts. Who knows? If I was going to recommend a recent teen-Shakespeare flick, I'd say "10 things I Hate About You."

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Oct 26, 2021Liked by John McGee, PhD

I agree. Terrible film and wouldn’t show this to my students.

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Excellent. I came to teaching just a few years ago after a lifetime of wanting to teach this play. I've made it a point that in addition to reading plays they should also see them performed, as they were meant to be experienced. Without exception, my millennial and Gen Z students HATE this film. However one wants to interpret this play, and I'm with you on your previous posts, Shakespeare's play has a literary coherence. Within its own constructed reality, everything makes sense. This film is an incoherent mess.

Don't get me started on what this hack did to Gatsby.

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How tragic is it that the lessons of Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet - how NOT to be in relationship, and how improper relations lead to the worst kind of death - has been undermined by scholars and modern film such as Lurmann's. This twisted interpretation flips the intent of Shakespeare on it's head, leading to the replacement of the understanding that 'love' should elevate, purify, and lead to an expansion of the good, true and beautiful personally and in the culture, to an understanding of love as a selfish turning away from life and the living, towards self-centered lust and ultimately to death, a death glorified, a death cult, and a death culture. A terrible example has been set, for generations of those feeding on the undermining of original texts such as this one. The idea that 'any' Shakespeare is better than no Shakespeare is a farce. It matters! Look around...

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