10 Things I Hate About You
Directed by Gil Junger
Written by Karan McCullah Lutz and Kirsten Smith
Based upon "The Taming of the Shrew" by William Shakespeare
Starring Heath Ledger, Julia Stiles, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, and Larisa Oleynik
As Reviewed by James Brundage
Coming out of the movie theatre I began my weekly ritutal about telling the staff of the cinema, including the cute new worker who keeps begging me to put her in one of my reviews, how good or bad the movie I just saw was. It is the equivilant of pointing the thumbs north or south. In the case of Ten Things I Hate about You, my comment was "No where near as dumb as I expected." Behind me a bunch of high school Freshmen were gabbing about how hot the guys looked or how sweet the story was while their very bored boyfriends did the thing that very bored boyfriends have learned to do very well. Nod and smile politely.
Seeing as the main word that kept coming up in their lemming-like consciousness was "hip", I decided to do what I do best: burst a bubble.
"I wonder if they know," I said loud enough that they could hear, "if the film they just liked so much was based on a William Shakespeare play."
"What?" came a nervous pipsqueak of a voice from behind me.
"Yeah," I turned. "It's based on 'The Taming of the Shrew'. They changed the place and the dialogue and some of the names around but the basic story is intact. You just watched Shakespeare."
An eerie silence came over the entorage. My only impression is that they felt guilty, almost dirty, about having liked something by the Immortal Bard that didn't star Leonardo DiCaprio and Claire Danes packing 9mm's.
This brings me to point number one of the "10 things I don't hate about 10 Things I Hate About You."
1. It's underhanded. It takes Shakespeare, the dread of high school students everywhere, and puts him in a teenage movie with a cool soundtrack. What's worse, it has very little Elizabethian dialouge, no big stars, and it actually makes them laugh.
2. It imports actors. Sure, we all love imported food and we really love imported cars (give me a BMW anyday), but do we like imported actors. No, we loathe them. That is, everyone who likes pulp movies loathes them (The Thunder from Down Under excluded). However, 10 Things... a pulp film to the core, has an imported lead.
3. It has a brain. No further explanation.
4. It has a comeback.
5. It doesn't get lost somewhere between the 17th century and the 20th century.
6. It has a guidance counselor who writes sex novels. So I'm human.
7. Feminist music plays a large part in the movie yet Gwen Stefani is nowhere to be found.
8. It has teenagers who know show tunes. Surreal, but very fun.
9. The unpopular character is the one you love the most.
10. For once, not everyone in the movie salivates over a model with no brain.
10 Things... is a movie that is blessed with a set of fine adaptors, a director that I will remember the name of for his/her next film, and performances by up and coming actors and actresses. Like She's all That, which had the audacity to make its satiric target its target audience, 10 Things... goes about in an underhanded way making the idiots laugh and the wise man laugh harder.
I honestly don't see how anyone under 25 could hate this film.
The review above was posted to the
rec.arts.movies.reviews newsgroup (de.rec.film.kritiken for German reviews).
The Internet Movie Database accepts no responsibility for the contents of the
review and has no editorial control. Unless stated otherwise, the copyright
belongs to the author.
Please direct comments/criticisms of the review to relevant newsgroups.
Broken URLs inthe reviews are the responsibility of the author.
The formatting of the review is likely to differ from the original due
to ASCII to HTML conversion.
Related links: index of all rec.arts.movies.reviews reviews