Guest, now, no need to get condescending. um, wasn't that Romeo and Juliet a schlock hollywood thing? As with Moulin Rouge and most of the Shakespeare done here at Actors Theatre, I have trouble with all that surface-dressing-post-modern illustrational anachronism. One of the worst things I've ever seen was a Bedouin King Lear-ance of Arabia fiasco. Another was the Ethan Hawke Hamlet. See? Hamlet was a grunge dude? Get it? It's facile, pedestrian, condescendingly explanatory to the audience, it intrudes, calls attention to how clever the director thinks he or she is. I can't grant it, somehow. How do you deal with it?

A friend of mine who loved Moulin Rouge could always one-up my complaints though. I said I didn't think they had saturday night specials or smith-coronas back then, and he said no, and they didn't have Elton John either. But I've done a little research, and it turns out they did.

The Zefferelli picture was the first time it occurred to me what a director was, when I was a kid, watching the Tibalt Mercutio scene, and how the sense of it was more than what the lines said. Great stuff.

I feel defensive--Martin Guerre was a french thing, remade into hollywood's Sommersby. Camille Claudel also french, (also with that Gerard guy, as Rodin)and the only credible artist-bio-pic I've ever seen. Strictly Ballroom is Australian. The Dutch The Vanishing was remade into "the vanishing" around the same time as sommersby--hollywood was making all my favorite foreign things into their versions, and the videos had this crawl on them:

The following motion picture has been altered from its original version. It has been formatted to fit your little pea-brain.

Sadly, I haven't thought a lot of American-Indie-n films were very good, so I don't recomend them, though I do enjoy that they're a bit different.

What's the sexiest movie (jiggles thread? Or maybe just a Who cares thread, now), funniest movie, saddest movie? is a fun survey. Maybe I'll post it elsewhere.