Rome & Juliet

What I see in this movie is some good acting efforts thrown at what is amounts to a piece of recent film formula. I won't give the long list of other films that are essentially the same but there is nothing original here. Within 10 minutes of the start you could see where the conflict points would be and it was just a matter of guessing which off-the-shelf scandals/life crises would be injected in to drive the story to an artificial level of greater suspense. In the end, they used a bunch of those like a scattergun. At that point, I lost any respect I might have had for the film-makers. With some more effective writing or more character depth, they wouldn't have had to resort to such a soap-opera style approach.

In fact, there is only one moment of genuine uncertainty and that is whether one or both of the protagonists would take the plunge of dedication to their new found love. The movie builds to that point and hinges on it. Once it is resolved, there is really nothing left to do except fire the above mentioned scatter-gun to sustain things for a while.

I can see that many people are in love with this movie. From the ratings to this point, you would think this is some kind of a classic. I think that people fell for the two attractive and effective actresses. The "jealousy" scene is quite cute. There is also some decent work from some supporting cast members but even those are strapped into very predictable and stereotyped roles with equally old hat dialogue. I cannot imagine that the directing, production and plot are enthralling.