K-SCORE: 70
Director: Gil Junger
Writers: Karen McCullah Lutz, Kirsten Smith
Starring: Julia Stiles, Heath Ledger, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Larisa Oleynik, Larry Miller
Spoiler Level: Minor
“written by someone who took the story seriously, and directed by someone who thought it was a giant joke”
Huh. I never realized this film is great. You just need to ignore the over-arching plot (it’s the same as any other teen film) and focus on the background. Any decision nonessential to the story was made by a genius.
10 Things I Hate About You seems to have been written by someone who took the story seriously, and directed by someone who thought it was a giant joke. The film fades from a satire to an actual rom-com over time. You have a plot whereby cliche high school characters are making bets and arrangements based on coolness, age, and crushes. It has the same inevitable scenes: class project, out on the football field, prom… you know the drill. And yet within those scenes, some truly amazing choices are made.
Twice, while under classmen are trying to convince Patrick(Heath Ledger) to take out Cat (Julia Stiles), he’s busy burning something. Once he appears to be roasting the end of a lead pipe. Another time he’s running his fingers through a Bunsen burner. Later he appears to be arranging triangles of glass on a pedestal. The scenes are not given context; no teachers are present. At one point Cameron (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) and his vaguely Italian friend Michael walk into a biker bar where I guess Patrick frequents in his off hours. There they come across a game of pool being played by two tough guys, one of whom is shooting on an 8-ball right next to a corner pocket. Michael inexplicably picks the 8-ball up, tosses it and catches it, and then rolls it to the other end of the table. The other biker guy quickly collects a pile of money at the edge of the table. No dialogue. I mean - that’s just brilliant work.
I got more. Bianca shoots her gym teacher in the ass with an arrow and it’s never talked about. Two guys at the party in the mansion are wearing matching felt hats, bopping their heads as if to some uptempo beat, only no music is playing. The high school itself is something between an upscale castle and a resort fortress. I think the football stadium seats 25,000. Despite the area dripping with obvious wealth, Patrick agrees to take Cat out for the mind-blowing figure of $75. Cat, an oft-described nonconformist feminist social pariah who doesn’t like to get drunk and have fun like her sister, is classically attractive, doesn’t seem to ever wear bras or shirts that cover her navel, at one point performs a provocative solo dance on a kitchen table and at another point flashes the teacher monitoring detention with about thirty other students watching.
10 Things I Hate About You is undeniably enjoyable, even if you’re never really sure if you’re supposed to be laughing at it or with it. That 99 minutes can be pillaged for hilarious content repeatedly, so long as you can stomach the central conflict. The actual list - the ten she hates about him - is a rhyming poem so egregiously awful it rivals Bill Pullman’s Independence Day speech. I think I could come up with something more substantial in ninety seconds. Maybe the next time I watch this film, I’ll get drunk on dark beer, grab a stopwatch, and give it a try.