Romeo + Juliet (1996) review

The Bard gets "modernized" and transported to Miami, where nearly everyone is shirtless and love to wave around firearms: corporate titans the Capulets and Montagues have an "ancient rivalry" with each other that becomes complicated when Romeo Montague (Leonardo DiCaprio) and Juliet Capulet (Claire Danes) fall in love, bullets fly, both Tybalt (John Leguizamo) and Mercutio (Harold Perrineau) are killed, Romeo is "banish-ed," Juliet is forced to marry Paris (Paul Rudd), Father Laurence (Pete Postlethwaite) cooks up a wicked elixir and it concludes with a double suicide.  Luhrmann applies his usual glitzy, hyper-stylized aesthetic to the material (while retaining the language from the original text) and it certainly is a delight to look at - neon crosses, colorful beach shirts, a trailer park from Mars, Romeo sporting shining armor, Juliet wearing angelic wings - but in the process leaves behind the spirit of the play.  What's left is an extended music video (a children's choir covers Prince, "Lovefool" by the Cardigans is a potent earworm, Radiohead provides the closing song) presumably made for a Gen X audience who coasted through Freshman English in high school, didn't follow the assignments and considered themselves too "cool" for the 1968 Franco Zeffirelli adaptation ... that is, except for that "one scene" (involving a 17-year-old Olivia Hussey) teachers fast-forwarded past.