Franco Zeffirelli and Baz Luhrmann's Romeo and Juliet

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Franco Zeffirelli and Baz Luhrmann's Romeo and Juliet

Sex, drugs, and violence are usually a potent combination, and only

William Shakespeare could develop them into a masterful, poetic, and elegant

story. In the play, "The Tragedy of Romeo and Juliet," all these aspects of

teenage life absorb the reader or watcher. It is understood that Hollywood

would try to imitate this masterpiece on screen, and it has done so in two

films: Franco Zeffirelli's 1968 "Romeo and Juliet" and Baz Luhrmann's 1996

"William Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet." The updated Luhrmann picture best

captures the essence of Shakespeare for the present-day viewer. Through the

ingenious use of modernization and location, while preserving Shakespearean

language, the spirit of Shakespeare emerges to captivate a large audience.

Shakespeare's plays were designed to adapt to any audience: with this in

mind, Baz Luhrmann created a film that applies to the modern audience through

this updating. Luhrmann modernizes "Romeo and Juliet," through constant

alterations of the props, which entice the audience into genuinely feeling the

spirit of Shakespeare. First, the movie starts with an prologue masked as a

news broadcast on television. This sets the scene of the play by illustrating

the violence occurring between the two wealthy families, the Montagues and the

Capulets. In Zeffirelli's film of "Romeo and Juliet," the prologue takes the

form of a dry narrator relating the story of the Montagues and Capulets over a

backdrop of an Italian city. For most modern viewers (especially teenagers),

the Luhrmann picture is fast-paced, keeping the spectator intrigued, while the

Zeffirelli picture is dreary and dull, an endless maze of long and boring

conversations, foreshadowed by the prologue. In Luhrmann's film, the actors,

instead of carrying swords with them, hide guns in their shirts and wield them

expertly. The death of Romeo and Juliet is (as always) blamed on the post

office, for not delivering the letter properly. And, to be politically correct,

Mercutio appears at the Capulets' ball dressed as a large woman. The actors in

Zeffirelli's version of Shakespeare wear colored tights and bulging blouses;

thus they appear more comical because they are outdated. By modernizing these

aspects of the play, and reconstructing the prologue, Luhrmann creates a movie

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