Teenage kicks back

Ten Things I Hate About You (12)

THE teen movie has never been the most challenging of film genres. John Hughes cemented the format back in the '80s with a slew of Brat Pack soap operas (The Breakfast Club, Pretty in Pink, Some Kind of Wonderful) that introduced such "where are they now?" candidates as Molly Ringwald, Judd Nelson and Andrew McCarthy. The setting was the socially regimented world of the all-American high school, where jocks, geeks and princesses lived autonomous but separate lives, only coming together on Prom night for a long clinch and a slow fade. The plots were predictable and the only question was how many times Hughes could draw from the same well.

Clueless was the catalyst to the genre finding a brain in its head. By grafting Jane Austen's Emma onto the Hughes model, Amy Heckerling's 1995 film not only resuscitated the form; it also alerted Hollywood to the untapped potential of classic literature as a goldmine of malleable storylines. So far this year we've seen She's All That, a high school retread of Pygmalion, and Cruel Intentions, a hip update of Les Liasons Dangereuses set in contemporary New York. Sex, intrigue, romance and comedy - and all of it available free of charge from the nearest library. Shakespeare's infinite variety has already been well illustrated by the box office success of Baz Luhrmann's Romeo and Juliet, so it was only a matter of time before he turned up in an American classroom: not as part of the curriculum, you understand, but as the latest long-dead author to be repackaged for mass consumption. The result is 10 Things I Hate About You, a snappy reworking of The Taming of The Shrew that isn't afraid to wear its heritage on its sleeve. Shakespeare's Padua has become Padua High, the focal point of the Seattle suburb where squabbling sibs Bianca and Katarina Stratford live with their divorced obstetrician father. Sixteen-year-old Bianca (Larisa Oleynik) wants to start dating, but dad (Larry Miller) has decreed she can't have a boyfriend unless her sister, two years her senior, has one too. Fat chance of that; for Kat (Julia Stiles) is a self-styled ''heinous bitch" who would sooner run a boy over than be seen enjoying his company. A convoluted solution presents itself with the arrival of leather-clad rebel Patrick Verona (Heath Ledger), who is hired by one of Bianca's suitors (Joseph-Gordon Levitt), using money he obtained from another (Andrew Keegan), to sweep Kat off her feet. Patrick accepts the assignment, but - wouldn't you know it - starts to fall for her for real. Things come to a head at an Elizabethan-themed dance and a morning-after tutorial where Kat reads Pat a Shakespearean sonnet she's translated into Riot Grrrl prose - the "10 Things" of the title. According to the school's rapping English teacher, Shakespeare is "a dead white guy who knows his shit". But apart from the jokey character names and the isolated quotations that crop up amidst the sassy teen speak, 10 Things I Hate About You has as much to do with the Bard of Avon as fly-fishing has with rocket science. But it's great fun all the same, with an appealingly fresh-faced cast (gleaned from American TV brain-candy like Party of Five and Third Rock from The Sun) and enough sly humour to excuse the schmaltz. But where director Gil Junger scores highest is by giving her adult players the same amount of comedic leverage as their younger co-stars. Miller is a gas as the stuffy pop with an ear for yoof slang, and Allison Janney has a priceless cameo as a guidance counsellor who spends her days writing steamy bodice-rippers and asking her bemused students if they can think of another word for "engorged". Try finding her in the Complete Works. Neil Smith

Copyright 1999
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