Like many students, I was assigned to read Tom Stoppard’s existential classic Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead during my junior year of high school. I’ve always hated reading plays – in my opinion the only people who should be reading a play are the actors and the scarf-wearing, latte-sipping, pretentious jerk that is directing it (I’m kidding, of course). The magic of a good play is in its performance, not its text. But something about the conceit of taking two minor characters from Shakespeare’s masterpiece Hamlet and giving them their own story to tell really struck a chord with me, and I enjoyed it immensely. To a certain degree, Gus Van Sant’s 1991 film My Own Private Idaho follows the same path.

The Film: My Own Private Idaho

The Song: “The Old Main Drag”

The Artist: The Pogues

Countless adaptations of William Shakespeare’s stories have been turned into teenage dramas and committed to the screen. 10 Things I Hate About You (1999) took The Taming of the Shrew and brought it to Seattle, featuring a ruggedly charming Heath Ledger as Petruchio and a young Julia Stiles as Katherine. “O” (filmed in 1999 but not released until 2001 due to similarities between events in the film and the Columbine massacre) was based on Othello but set at a private school in South Carolina, featuring Mekhi Phifer as Othello and a slightly older Julia Stiles as Desdemona. And Scotland, PA(2001) took the story of Macbeth and moved it to rural Pennsylvania, using James LeGros and Julia Stiles as Joe and Pat McBeth, and substituting a fast food restaurant called Duncan’s Café for Dunsinane Castle. (more…)