FT TOP 100 FILMS
14: 10 THINGS I HATE ABOUT YOU
“You could just like it becaue its a good movie,” my flatmate said when I mentioned the next film on the list that had taken me well over a week to get back to was 10 Things I Hate About You. She was right of course. I have always felt slightly embarressed about this being my favourite film of 1999, which is odd in as much as if I was truely embarressed I would not tell people. I suppose I have always dressed up a pseudo-intellectual reason why I think this movie is great.
THE PSUEDO-INTELLECTUAL REASON: It is better than Shakespeare’s The Taming Of The Shrew. This is not all that hard because
a) The Taming of The Shrew is pretty rubbish
b) They had a good four hundred years to work on the ending.
The problem with the Taming Of The Shrew is that Katherine, the titular shrew, is a much more interesting character than anyone else in play so it is a tragedy that she gets “tamed”. Not to mention the obvious gender politics involved in “taming” anyway. A slight that had been partially balanced by John Fletcher’s “The Tamer Tamed”, you were not going to se ea high school version where Heath Ledger slings Julia Stiles over his shoulder and takes her back for his rights. Instead it plays the problems of the play as strengths, making the male always weak and craven and in finding out that he likes the spiky Kat, much more interesting. Rather than being Tamed, she is accomodated. She no longer needs to be so spiky becuase she trusts someone, but she trusts someone who actually likes her spikiness. Job done.
THE REAL REASON: The unstoppable mixture of a snappy script, Julia Stiles and that incredible crane shot at the end of the film the reveals a band playing on the roof of the School. What a shot. Not only doe sthe film have a scene to challenge the Ferris Bueller “Twist And Shout” sequence in cutesy singalong fun, but it knows its own happy ending when it sees it, and celebrates it madly. A wonderful little thing, even if there is never a point in the film where someone lists 10 Things That They Hate About Someone Else in it.