10 Things I Hate About You (1999)

VERDICT:
4/10 Angsty Soliloquies

A poor man’s Clueless.

10 Things I Hate About You is the story of a High School boy who falls for a High School girl but can’t date her because her uptight dad will only allow it if her ice cold, seemingly undateable older sister has someone to go out with, too. So the kid comes up with a plan to get the most popular guy in school – who’s also got a jones for the younger sister – to pay the sketchy rebel to take out the psycho sister in a convoluted win-win scheme that I’m only now realizing is a hell of a lot harder to describe than I thought it would be.

It’s a re-imagining of Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew, so if you’re into that stuff or were forced to read it all throughout High School and college like I was, then hopefully you’ll get the gist better than I can give it to you. Or you could just Wikipedia it, that always works.

Anyway, I remember liking this when it first came out, but after watching it again the other night, something had changed. One of those refresher courses that ended up being so different than what I thought it would be that I couldn’t help but feel kind of sad at how disappointed I was. Maybe I’m giving this thing more credit than it deserved to begin with, but either way, it sucks when that happens.

So, yeah, this was a pretty frustrating movie to sit through. I’m all for these hip reboots of Shakespeare snoozefests that all the kids are talking about nowadays – hence the Clueless reference up there, even though it’s Jane Austen – but this is one of the rare instances where I actually found myself preferring the source material. But that’s what happens when you riddle your script with gags and one-liners that never land and dialogue that no teenager would ever speak. Absolutely. Infuriating. 

I’d say roughly 90% of this movie is just flat out annoying to watch and annoying listen to, like nails on a chalkboard. It wasn’t until the very end when things started to look up for the characters and Julia Stiles stopped being such an unrealistically snooty beotch that I finally started to smile. Man, having to listen to unlikable kids who all have an awful sense of humor isn’t my idea of two hours well spent.

Geez, I need to tone this down, I’m writing this like I had a gun in my mouth from the second I hit “PLAY”. There are some redeeming qualities, like Heath for instance as the mysterious Australian bad boy, Patrick Verona. It’s bittersweet and all, but he carries the movie and has the most interesting character to boot.

Also fun to see Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Julia Stiles and Laris Oleynik (aka: Alex Mack) back in the day when I was still staying up “late” to watch All That. 

And Allison Janney has a pretty amusing bit role. She’s awesome.

Other than that, I don’t know, drawing a blank. Not sure how everyone else feels about this movie, ’cause there was a time in my life where I dug it and I like to think that I wasn’t that easy to please in Middle School, but this kind of thing has happened before (eg: The Mask). 

Man, sorry to be such a Debbie Downer on a Friday of all things, but hey, it’s the most recent movie I’ve seen, I’ve got a system going on here. 10 Things I Hate About You has one really crappy script and the cast can’t really salvage it, but it’s got enough little moments to at least make me smile a decent amount for the last half hour. Liked how the title plays into the movie though, that was good, too. There, didn’t completely shit all over this movie.