Teens tame shrew
10 Things I Hate About You A Film Review By Michael Redman Copyright 1999 By Michael Redman
**1/2 (Out of ****)
Love and lust, however they might be combined, are probably the most fascinating of human endeavors. People will do the strangest things when obsessed with either. A combination of the two emotions is almost deadly. With the stars in the eyes, rational thought goes out the window and a beautiful delirium takes over.
Lovers will reveal their innermost selves to each other and often it's a person that the outside world never sees. The hard-edged and cruel can turn into puppy dogs. On the other hand, the nicest person in the world might become a maelstrom. It's a fascinating thing to watch from the outside and an alternate dimension from the inside.
Kat Stratford (Julia Stiles) and Heath Ledger (Patrick Verona) are seemingly a couple made in hell. She's an hot blooded opinionated ill-tempered high school beauty who has sworn off men. He's the local bad boy, drilling holes in text books during shop class.
Kat's younger sister Bianca (Larisa Oleynik) is the opposite of her sibling. She desperately wants to be popular and has her sights set on pretty boy male model Joey Donner (Andrew Keegan). Her problem is that her dad won't let her date until Kat does. Kat has no intentions of hanging out with the local male riff-raff.
Nerdish Cameron James (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) is smitten with Bianca and hatches a plot to toss Kat into the dating pool. He schemes with Joey and they approach Heath with an offer he can't refuse. They offer him money to take out the unapproachable Kat.
Loosely based on Shakespeare's "The Taming Of The Shrew", this is a notch above current teen films. The characters are lively without being unbelievable; humorous, but not remarkably stupid. There's a definite chemistry between Stiles and Verona and both could become box office draws.
An aberration for high school films, the adults also have decent roles. Daryl "Chill" Mitchell has a small but entertaining part as a literature teacher. ("I know Shakespeare is a dead white guy, but he knows his shit.") Larry Miller is great as the girls' father. Unfortunately he is saddled with lame dialog.
There are other problems with the film. In any good story, the characters eventually go through changes. Here they appear to transform instantaneously. Bianca is shallow and self-centered and suddenly she's not. Heath is the school bully but after 30 seconds with Kat, it turns out he's really an angel.
The biggest flaw is a plot device that must have been old even in the Bard's time. After being paid to date Kat, Heath falls for her. It doesn't take an olde English scholar to know that she's going to find out about the conspiracy and break up with him.
This isn't a perfect film, but after the recent horrendous movies aimed at the younger market, it's a tiny ray of hope.
(Michael Redman has written this column for over 575 fortnights and decided that he'd write another one even though the perfect light-hearted film remains elusive. Email tales of love and lust to Redman@indepen.com.)
[This appeared in the 4/15/99 "Bloomington Independent", Bloomington, Indiana. Michael Redman can be contacted at Redman@indepen.com.] -- mailto:redman@indepen.com This week's film review: http://www.indepen.com/ Film reviews archive: http://us.imdb.com/M/reviews_by?Michael%20Redman Y2K articles: http://www.indepen.com/
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