Three reasons for naming a blog.
Romeo Must Die
“If hope dies.” (Pregnant pause. People are diving out of high-rise windows and kicking over flaming braziers). “If love dies.” (It’s a portentous male voice saying these lines. Images: a girl is crying. An elderly Asian man looks grim. Someone spins in mid-air, post-Matrix wire-work fashion, and punches someone else in the head). “If honour dies.” (Did I mention the choir? There’s a choir. They’re singing something soaring and impassioned, such as Bach might have written if he’d been told, “Think Old Testament, think angry Jehovah, think bad shit, Johann. Heavy on the sopranos.” People are charging forward holding riot shields; someone’s running up a wall; something explodes). “Romeo must die.”
Ring any bells? I’m guessing not. That’s about 15 seconds from the theatrical trailer for Romeo Must Die, a Jet Li martial arts thriller that opened here in May 2000, and closed again very soon afterwards, by which time perhaps a dozen people had seen it. I was one of them. Partly because Jet Li can fight, and partly because the title’s Shakespearean misquote annoyed me. It’s riffing on the moment in Romeo and Juliet where Juliet’s mother fronts up to the Prince of Verona and tells him Romeo has to die; except that she doesn’t tell him that. The Prince has forbidden any further fighting between the young lovers’ families, conveniently enough for their chances of staying lovers, you’d think, but no: Juliet’s cousin Tybalt promptly kills Romeo’s friend Mercutio, and Romeo kills Tybalt in revenge. Lady Capulet:
“I beg for justice, which thou, Prince, must give.
Romeo slew Tybalt. Romeo must not live”.
Romeo must die. Romeo must not live. A difference worth grinding your teeth over? Surely a rose by any other name would smell as sweet? Please. I have three reasons for naming this all-things-film blog Romeo Must Not Live, and one of them is to put a ring around the idea that even in a throw-away martial arts flick, getting the details right is how you get everything else right. Shakespeare doesn’t have Lady Capulet say “Romeo must not live” just because it gives him a rhyming couplet. Say the line aloud. No, go on, say it. It’s implacable. It’s cold. It has a dead-eyed power. I’ve seen a couple of productions of the play which managed to hint that Lady Capulet was maybe a bit fonder of dear cousin Tybalt than she should have been, an interpretation which sits nicely both with the iron self-control implicit in the line’s rhythm – it takes time to say, you can’t just blurt it out – and with the passion of the sentiment. You can imagine her saying it purely because the arithmetic of family honour demands it be said. You can also imagine her standing there in front of the Prince, shoulder to shoulder with her much older, dangerously capricious husband, vibrating with the desire to find Romeo and flense him with her nails and teeth, because her gorgeous young man is dead: and she can’t let it show. “Romeo must die”, on the other hand, is a rent-a-thug line.
And Romeo Must Die is a rent-a-thug film. If I tell you that director Andrzej Bartkowiak went on to helm Doom, you can probably imagine the general feel pretty accurately: there are intense, inventive, not especially interesting but very carefully conceived fight scenes with lots of wild special effects – key blows are signalled through x-ray negative shots of bones cracking inside limbs – and there’s a story. Sometimes the fight scenes and the story bump shoulders, and look embarrassed to be seen together, like two former friends meeting accidentally in the street after one of them has struck it rich. The story – being the stayed-in-the-old-neighbourhood, did-some-time, gone-straight-now friend who knows the fight scenes have no idea what to say to him – does feature a wan romance between the virtuous white sheep son of The Crime Family & the good-girl daughter of The Other Crime Family, but there’s no spark to it. Yet at some point, someone involved with the thing must have perked up and said, “Hey, instead of calling it Hip-Hop Ninja Killzone, what if we went with the star-crossed lovers angle? You know, like, we could call it, Romeo Slew Tybalt.” And someone else must have replied, “Are you out of your skull? … but I guess we could call it Romeo Kicks Ass, that’s kinda classy.”
And back and forth they went until they hit on the even more classy Romeo Must Die, a title so at odds with what the film looks to be about from the trailer, which is indeed precisely what it’s about, that it motivated me to pay for a ticket. Which I suppose means that in some sense the title did its job. But imagine if they’d made a film good enough that the weak Shakespearean echo would have had useful resonance. In fact, imagine if they’d made a film that deserved to be called Romeo Must Not Live: a glorious bit of insane pop culture fun, the kind of film where the fight scenes and the story are so glad to see each other again after all these years that they go off to the local bar and catch up, and the hours fly by, and when they go their separate ways they both feel that the world is a wonderful place. One of those shouldn’t-have-worked, bit-off-the-wall-but-don’t-miss-it films. With extra x-ray violence! (Or just a good solid B-movie, that would have been nice. Never under-value a decent B-movie.)
I do imagine it. Because truthfully, there are no throw-away martial arts flicks. Every time I walk into a Romeo Must Die, I’m hoping for a Romeo Must Not Live. It’s a bouncy, what-will-we-get-this-time sort of hope, by-and-large. Sometimes it sags into a slightly desperate, please-not-another-Bruno sort of hope. My deal with myself – every reviewer’s deal with themselves, I think – is that if my primary pre-film emotion ever stops being excited hope for Romeo Must Not Live and starts being weary dread of Romeo Must Die, I’ll sigh, hang up a “burned out, gone fishing” sign, and quit. I want that day never to dawn. That would be the second reason for this blog’s name.
Third reason: I just like the sound of it, which you may consider fair warning. I’ll be writing things here on the basis that I just feel like writing them. Essays, rants, pleas for feedback. (“Am I the only one who thinks this?”) Plus brief reviews of some of the things we can’t review in the magazine, because the magazine has only so many pages, and, for a variety of reasons, we don’t always get shown films in time to make the print deadline. As I write this, it’s early morning, Sunday, April 3. Daylight saving has just ended, and I have three film previews to go to. Romeo, Romeo … what kind of Romeo are you going to be?
I’m just going to make myself some coffee.
Then on with the show.