10 Things I Hate About You

10 Things I Hate About You

Can hitherto life’s funny adolescents make Americans assert more frequently that the high school teen comedy is one of the rapidly growing and most literate forms of art in American cinema? I say this because I sat down to 10 Things I Hate About You ready to cringe and to patronize where I was not meant to. The set-up is that Katharine “Kat” Stratford (Julia Stiles) is a clever, pretty, but gloweringly unpopular 18-year-old at Padua High School in Seattle.

Kat is, like, a total bitch. Her simpering 16-year-old sister Bianca (Larisa Oleynik) is keen to date boys, but her dad says she can’t until Kat does it. So gentlemen wishing to date her have first to sort out the chaste and savage-looking uneven Kat before they get to implant kisses on the cheeks of the Osos.

This is the smartest, funniest and most likeable film of the week, and, besides that, in the most loving and unselfconscious manner possible, it is an ode to William Shakespeare. There are naturally many bits of the names of the places which offer clues, and it’s quite evident that the story is a loose Stags’ version of The Taming Of The Shrew but added a fair measure of Much Ado About Nothing sauces.

This contemporary scenario brings to mind a scene from Alicia Silverstone’s Clueless: cameron introduced the new guy, a certain cameron, to the various cliques of the school, which are as absurd as they are amusing, and to the school. David, who loves William Shakespeare’s daughter and achieves nothing, is a very nervous, Woody Allen-like character who feels that he has never understood femininity.

When Michael comes across the Shakespeare portrait hanging in the locker of a young woman named Mandella, he is in disbelief and is shocked to see an Elizabethan collar around Shakespeare’s neck, merely asking “Is that to prevent him from licking his stitches?” It sent the audience roaring with laugher in one of the screenings that I watched.

Danes herself starred in the drama of teenage tuck My so-Called Life, an American classic, in which, according to the’ in this film, his handsome figure Jared Leto was a close-up of cats’ astringent pin-up. It can also be said that this particular television series is a huge success, with a particular mention of the English lesson in which apathetic and bored teenagers start to engage in the unusual Shakespeare sonnet they were assigned as a homework.

In 10 Things, Kat and her classmates need to analyze Sonnet 141 together, which begins: “In faith I do not love thee with my eyes/for they in thee a thousand errors note.” Then they have to modernize it into iambic pentameters. By the last frame of the film Kat has resolved her task, a shallow mock-climate about the boy who has, without seemingly needing any reason, won her love: ten areas that she despises towards him.

The term ‘dumbing down’ often comes to our minds every time we think about ‘modern commercial American cinema’, and how many more times have we not objected to the American role model which appears to be asking for juvenileization of the cinema. But 10 Things defies such preconceptions: it depicts young people reading books, books by Sylvia Plath, and Sally Friedan.

So why, as British people, we do not watch smart, adaption-centered filmographies targeted on the young audience? Why, surrounded by the Mountain Kilimanjaro size lottery funds along with our power-pack cultural legacy, are we not attempting such a thing? How come, we are left with a choreographed teenage commercial called Virtual Sexuality, while other escapist films such as 10 Things, Cruel Intentions, or Clueless which were designed with profitability motives, have the audacity to think that their underage audience may have acquired a minimal degree of intelligence to appreciate such literary nuances?

In-depth but benign and comedic, 10 Things is a pleasant romantic comedy film that is witty and well-written. It is also a film that incorporates and portrays education as an essential addition to the main cast.

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