The Movie: Baz Luhrmann's 1996 adaptation of Romeo + Juliet is quite brilliant if you ask me. Using mostly the original text, the setting has been changed to a highly stylized, but modern day world. According to Baz, it was the only way to portray Shakespeare the way it was portrayed back in his day -- as Shakespeare was cutting edge back then, using contemporary music and settings. To use period settings and music would seem archaic to us today.

As is with most Shakespeare, it takes a few minutes to get used to the language, but once you're used to it, the story flows well. To aid in the interpretation of the archaic language, the director chose to use some visual cues that would not be possible in the live theatre... only in film. Some of them (such as calling the guns "swords") were contrived, but others were quite brilliant.

I also loved the Shakespearean references in all of the billboards and other advertisements used throughout the film. Overall, I think this is a great interpretation of Romeo and Juliet. Of course, the story itself is one of it's strong points -- after 500 years, it's still a poignant story! And the modern presentation only makes it that much more relevant to today's world.

The DVD: This is the newly released 2002 Special Edition. There also was a previous version of this film released on DVD. The anamorphic video transfer on this disc is quite good... clear, with good blacks and only a little noise, though there are some instances of dust and scratches, and in some areas worse than others. The audio however, was quite spectacular, with excellent use of the surround channels, with very detailed surround placement.

Special features, although, were something of a mixed bag. The audio commentary is pretty revealing -- there is also a large collection of short (i.e. 2 or 3 minutes) segments dealing with the director's view, the cinematographer's view, and the designers view. For each, there are maybe 7 or 8 different shorts, and really, I wish they were combined into one long making-of featurette, because although the content is good, it's kind of annoying to have to revert to the menu every 2 or 3 minutes. There are also sections dealing with the artwork used in the film -- the ads, the guns, etc... and those were annoying because they were of the slideshow variety, but you could not control it, and I feel that each item was not shown for a long enough period of time. It would have been way better if you could look at things as long as you wanted. There are also some music videos on this disc.

Another rather annoying thing about the special features was the inconsistency between anamorphic and letterboxed widescreen formats... and in fact, in part of the "director's gallery" there actually was anamorphic video that was encoded as letterboxed video. WTF? And finally, God dammit, do all Fox DVD's have 10 minutes of junk before you can play the movie!?!?!?