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Lack of good storyline.

All of these films share one commonality, that being a kind of emotional center that humanizes a cast of monsters.

It is an exhilarating, distressing, funny and profound film, with one of the more memorable film scores in years,

A terrific literary drama and character piece that shows how the process of creating art can be seen differently by those doing it and those looking at it from the outside.

I saw this the other day on Showtime. It was entertaining and suspenseful . The ending was a surprise as well.

Not a good adaptation of "Othello" or a good movie, period. It's short at 90 minutes, but probably 30 mins is footage of mediocre high school basketball. Boring. The script is bad, although it is pretty funny to see a bunch of privileged white characters at a stuffy and prestigious prep school deliver their lines in awkward street slang. Worse, someone made the poor choice to explain away Iago's (renamed "Hugo" in this adaptation) motive for persecuting Othello (renamed "Odin") as simple jealously due to Hugo's father's preferential treatment of Odin. This is a major deviation from the spirit of the play, where Iago is certainly jealous of Othello but also has a deeper animus that he explicitly refuses to explain, arguably making him one of Shakespeare's most evil and enigmatic villains. The portrayals of O and Desdemona are OK, but they don't rescue this movie. Also, there is a very disturbing sex scene.

How sparkling this was, to claim it as an adaptation of Shakespeare's Othello, but turns out to be a banal movie with no nuances and full of preposterous, idiotic, teenage revenge plagued with unprofessional acting and choppy dialogues. There are no depth to each character. Either they are evil beyond belief or frustratingly naive. Quit halfway of movie. If in the end all these teenagers die, I had to admit that they deserve it for their stupidity. Very, very, poor acting. So basically, the main character just become frustrated with his girl because she lost some stupid handkerchief. Then the main protagonist says he can't live without a girl. Cliché indeed. How many times have we witness a movie where dumb teenagers only talk about relationship and how popular you are, and being all jealousy about each other... ha ha, and kill each other because of hackneyed matter. Tired indeed.

One of the wave of teen-Shakespeare adaptations of the late 1990s/early 2000s, "O" resets the story of "Othello" among basketball players at an elite South Carolina prep school. It follows the original story very closely, changing only a few incidents in order to fit with the idea that the characters are now teenagers. For instance, now Hugo (the Iago figure, played by Josh Hartnett) is jealous of Odin (the Othello figure, Mekhi Phifer) because Hugo's dad, the basketball coach (Martin Sheen) favors Odin and ignores his own son.Unfortunately, making the characters teenagers just points up the implausibility of the story. While you could say that the amount of bloodshed and death at the end of Shakespeare's play is also hard to believe, at least those characters are military men living in a violent and patriarchal culture. It's much less credible that a modern-day prep school student could be coaxed into killing his supposedly unfaithful girlfriend.Phifer has some good moments when he depicts Odin's anguish, but isn't able to convince us that his character would so quickly resort to murder. Julia Stiles, as girlfriend Desi, is mostly weak and whiny. Hartnett overuses his furrowed eyebrows and whisper-voice to signal Hugo's dark intentions--and while handsome, he lacks the diabolical charisma necessary for this role. Indeed, the movie makes him almost sympathetic, which is problematic because then Odin seems more like a villain, the stereotypical "angry black kid." The worst things about "O" are its heavy-handed symbolism involving birds (hawks and doves) and its laughably bad dialogue. Its strings of clichés and swear words, supposedly representing teen-speak, would be irritating in any movie, but it feels even worse since we know that "O" was adapted from Shakespeare. When the movie tries to rewrite Shakespeare's memorable lines, it's even more painful. Iago's famous speech denouncing the idea of "reputation" becomes Hugo saying "Reputation, who gives a f***?" So, while it was a worthy idea to try to adapt the Othello story to a contemporary setting, I doubt that the reputations of the actors, director and screenwriter have been enhanced by their participation in "O."