Movie Review: Gnomeo and Juliet

As you can guess from the title, this film is based on Shakespeare's play Romeo and Juliet. In fact, the bard himself (voiced by Patrick Stewart) makes an appearance as a statue. The twist is that all of the characters are garden gnomes. There's even one hidden in the title of the movie.[1] In this scenario the garden gnomes are owned by Mrs. Montague and Mr. Capulet, who live in Stratford-Upon-Avon, one in apartment "2B" and the other in house "Not 2B", who have a long-standing feud. This feud is carried out in parallel by their garden gnomes. Mrs. Montague's gnomes are blue while Mr. Capulet's are red.

My verdict: This movie was, for the most part, a lot of fun. I particularly enjoyed the variety of garden gnomes. I also enjoyed the way Shakespeare's work was adapted to the story. My only real complaint was the soundtrack. The use of Elton John songs detracted from, rather than contributing to, the film. The new song "Hello, Hello" [2] which unites Elton John (homosexual) and Lady Gaga (bisexual) didn't really jive with the scene it's used in. When it was over I found myself humming the theme to the television show Cheers [3] and Leann had The Beatles' "Hello Goodbye" stuck in her head.[4]

---

Notes:

[1] See if you can find it.

[2] See http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r2whGNdxfpY.

[3] See http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xvRGh2NEjSU.

[4] See http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HBZ8ulc5NTg.

Image attributions:

German Garden Gnome is by Colibri1968, available at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:German garden gnome.jpg.