"10 Things I Hate About You," a movie almost as warm and witty as its title suggests, is the latest attempt to dress up Shakespeare in hip garb. Taking its inspiration from "Taming of the Shrew," "10 Things" also throws in some slightly more contemporary ingredients - 1980s New Wave hits, 1990s sexual frankness, etc. - and whips them into a bland concoction that's a lot closer to sludge than it is to froth. The result seems to go on for weeks rather than hours; suffice it to say there are a lot more than 10 things wrong with this film.
There's also one thing very right about it, the casting of Julia Stiles as Kat Stratford, a high school student who drives around listening to Joan Jett's "Bad Reputation" and who is denounced by her classmates as a "bitter, self-righteous hag," even though she's quite lovely in the rare moments when she's smiling instead of snarling. Kat prefers reading Sylvia Plath and mailing out college applications to socializing with the gang at Padua High, much to the dismay of her younger, peppier and far more popular sister Bianca (Larisa Oleynik), who prowls the campus in sundresses she apparently has been sewn into.
That makes Bianca prime date-bait, but Dad (Larry Miller), an obstetrician who spends his days "up to my elbows in placenta" thanks to teen pregnancies, has forbidden Bianca to go out until Kat finds a guy, something that seems about as likely as Puff Daddy writing one of his own songs. It's up to Cameron (Joseph Gordon-Levitt), Bianca's would-be beau, to contrive a solution that will get Kat out of the house and put Bianca by his side.
The pleasingly acerbic Stiles, one of the few redeeming factors about the recent mini-series "The '60s," gives it her all, and if the script of "10 Things" had had one-tenth the zest of the now-classic "AtomicShakespeare" episode of the TV series "Moonlighting" (which also used "Shrew" as its springboard) she might have managed to make something of the vehicle. Unfortunately, as "10 Things" turns into another guy-makes-bet-about-girl story, it ends up covering much of the same territory as "She's All That," and with much less charm and wit.
The dialogue is resolutely flat - "where did you come from? The planet Loser?" Bianca asks Kat in one typical crack -and by the time screenwriters Karen McCullah Lutz and Kirsten Smith drop in the inevitable "you're sooo not who I thought you were" scene, the film is a lost cause.
It is worth mentioning, however, that Lutz and Smith are kind enough to put in some bits that the Bard forgot to write, such as a rollicking teen beer bash and a finale set at a prom that features not one, but two second-rate bands. So much for the evolution of art in the last 400-odd years.
James Sanford
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