Luhrmann's 1996 version

Either you love it or you hate it. There seems to be no middle ground with this version. While Zeffirelli's has by now become enshrined in high schools across America as the "official" version of the play, Luhrmann's was seen by more teens willingly. While I don't like DiCaprio's delivery of the lines, DiCaprio wasn't cast with me in mind.

• The film is relentless in its desire to "translate" aspects of the play into literal representations–from Montague's rifle engraved "Longsword" to Juliet's angel wings to represent Romeo's "bright angel." Do you think the Luhrmann film overdoes this literal translation? [discussion: RJ7]

• Check out the official web site of the film. One critic points out that the "site's epigraph image – Romeo and Juliet kissing, framed by boys with guns, all pointing at the couple – perfectly condenses one of the film's central tropes: the desire for a private, utopian space within a threatening social world" (Hodgdon). This author develops the notion that the choice of DiCaprio, with his "pale, androgynous beauty," makes him equally attractive to young women and to gay and straight men because DiCaprio "straddles several cultural masculinities. On the one hand, he figures the vulnerable 'new man' (romancing Juliet and spending the last half of the film in tears); on the other, by gunning down Tybalt, he conforms to contemporary fictions of violent masculinity and subscribes to its homosocial honour codes." To what degree does the Luhrmann film succeed for you in exploring the twin challenges of being a man and becoming an adult? [Discussion RJ8]

• For music, Shakespeare had only a lute and a flute in a little nest above the balcony. This film employs a full CD of musical allusions, including Garbage, Everclear, One Inch Punch, Butthole Surfers, The Wannadies. What does the musical soundtrack of Luhrmann's film bring to your experience of the film? [Discussion: RJ9]

• The setting, no longer beautiful Verona, Italy, is a harsh, commercialized nowhere landscape suggesting some border between Anglo and Hispanic enclaves. The alienated location offers no harbor for Romeo and Juliet's love, adding to their isolation. To what degree does the extreme isolation of the Luhrmann setting make Romeo and Juliet's experience in the film despairing rather than tragic? [Discussion: RJ10]