Entertainment Weekly Online, December 1998

It's got sex. It's got violence. It's got laughs. It's got true romance that crinkles the edges of the movie screen with its heat, and it's got celebrity nudity. In the words of one of its characters, it's got "love and a bit with a dog. That's what they want." It's "Shakespeare in Love," it's really good -- ENTERTAINING good -- and I bet it doesn't make a dime.

Why? That nasty S-word: Shakespeare. Previews with guys in codpieces. Dialogue that consists of more than a wink, a burp, and a cussword. Oh, also great reviews from the nation's critics. All of which spells GOOD FOR YOU in big letters across the theater marquee. Date movie? Forget it. Pointy-headed chick flick is what it sounds like. The only way you're going to go see this one is if your English teacher assigns it -- and, just to make sure you don't sneak into "The Waterboy" for the third time, makes you write an essay in the bargain.

Well, lucky you, then. The new movie stars Joseph Fiennes (Ralph's baby brother looking more like the love child of Robby Benson and Prince) as young Bill Shakespeare: layabout actor, burgeoning playwright, horndog with the wenches. Gwyneth Paltrow -- for once not playing a starchy pill -- is the upper-class maiden with a thing for the theater and a weakness for sonnetry. He's working on a new comedy called "Romeo and Ethel," but it's not going well until they meet at a dance and -- wait a second, wasn't that from "West Side Story"? No, wait, wasn't "West Side Story" based on "Romeo and Juliet"?

It's the way "Shakespeare in Love" plays with our knowledge of the Bard that gives it a playful, dreamlike spin. And it's not like you have to have taken a college course in the Tragedies or anything, since the movie takes off from all those aspects of Shakespeare that still permeate our popular, populist culture. When Paltrow's character reads a message from her lover that starts "Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?..." the sweet joke is that she's just received the greatest mash note ever written in the English language.

"Shakespeare in Love" is full of such audience-pleasing wonders that you feel compelled to spread the word about it with nearly pathetic urgency. Yeah, it's a costume piece. Okay, they fight with swords instead of shooting Glocks. Hey, did I tell you Ben Affleck's in it (marvelous as a ham-bone actor)? Oh. Okay. Let's go see "You've Got Mail."

I could tell you it's the "best movie of the year" or trot out some similarly useless critical sledgehammer. But I couldn't make you want to see it unless you really wanted to see it. And the sad thing is, I bet that just about everyone -- yep, even Adam Sandler freaks -- would want to see this. But they'd only know that after they'd seen it.

Tell me I'm wrong.