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Top Ten

10 Things I Love About 10 Things I Hate 

About You 

John Hughes dominated the teen comedy genre in the 1980s with a plethora of endearing, slightly crude films like The Breakfast Club, Ferris Bueller’s Day Off and Pretty In Pink. Teen comedies continued to enjoy success in the 1990s as the genre moved from sentimental to ironic. Films like Scream and Clueless took a very self-aware look at the teen genre, while other films like She’s All That kept the sentimentality, but lost the edge of Hughes’ work.

One secret gem of the 90s teen comedy genre is 10 Things I Hate About You, directed by Gil Junger and starring Julia Stiles and Heath Ledger as high school outcasts. 10 Things balances ironic comedy with just enough heart to produce a surprisingly satisfying teen romance. To celebrate this underrated film, here are the Ten Things I Love About 10 Things I Hate About You:

10. The Shakespeare References. The movie is loosely based on Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew and the film is littered with references to the Bard. The play’s two sisters, Bianca and Katherina Minola, become Bianca and Kat Stratford (ala Shakespeare’s birthplace Stratford-upon-Avon,) The students attend Padua High School (the city where the play is set). Heath Ledger plays Patrick Verona (who in the play is named Petruchio and comes from Verona). Characters frequently quote sonnets and even the song played at prom, “Cruel to Be Kind”, gets its title from a Hamlet line.  

9. The 90s Clothes. Midriff-baring prom dresses, platform shoes, crop tops and so much gauzy floral fabric. It’s a trip down memory lane to an era of fashion we’d all probably rather forget, but it’s still a little fun to remember.

8. Solid Adult Roles. Any teen comedy is bound to feature a few adults in relatively thankless supporting roles. 10 Things cast a game group of actors as the parents and teachers in the Stratford girls’ lives. Allison Janney (Ms. Perky), Daryl Mitchell (Mr. Morgan) and David Leisure (Coach Chapin) turn in goofy performances that go a long way to fleshing out the world of Padua High. Character actor Larry Miller threatens to steal the movie with a neurotic and, dare I say, nuanced portrayal of a single dad trying to raise two teenage daughters. 

7. The Music. I have to confess, I still have the 10 Things I Hate About You soundtrack on my iTunes. It’s a fun, eclectic mix of music (with a pinch of ska), and features tunes by Joan Armatrading, Sister Hazel, and Letters to Cleo. The music is mellow and perfectly compliments the film’s laid-back attitude.

6. The Blooper Reel. Are you the kind of person who turns off the TV as soon as the credits start to role? If so, than you may have missed out on this blooper reel which features the cast being both adorable and hilarious.

5. The Decent Script. Alright, it’s not Citizen Kane, but the script is frothy fun with a nice sense of self-awareness. The characters feel fleshed-out, the comedy is genuinely funny, and there are one or two rather poignant scenes that stay on the right side of saccharine.

4. The Solid Central Relationship. While a lot of teen comedies focus on romance, male bonding, and bitchy cliques, the real heart of 10 Things I Hate About You is the relationship between two sisters. Bianca and Kat’s bond feels appropriately antagonistic yet based in love. The girls’ mother is absent (I’ve gotten into arguments with friends about whether she walked out on the family or died, I firmly believe she left by choice) and there’s a nice sense of two teenage girls navigating a new relationship after a big change. There’s also a really lovely scene where Kat explains her descent from popular girl to outcast. It might not pass the Bechdel Test, but it’s nevertheless a nice piece of writing and acting that gives the film more weight than a lot of teen comedies.

3. That Poem. Like many rom coms, there’s not a ton of resolution once the drama is over and it’s time to get the main couple back together. After realizing her date was paid to take her out and ditching him at prom, Kat reads this pseudo-apologetic poem to her English class. It’s a simplistic resolution, but Stiles sells it so well that you almost (almost) don’t notice. Plus according to IMDb trivia: “The scene in which Kat reads the "10 Things" poem was the first and only take, according to the DVD extras. Kat's tears towards the end of the poem were not planned.” Good job Julia.

2. Heath Singing. Some people remember Heath for his intense dramatic work or jumpy personality, but I will always remember him as an adorable Australian serenading a girl’s soccer team.

1. Casting Legit Actors. The real unsung hero of this film is the casting director who had a sixth sense for casting future A-listers. Julia Stiles continued to find success in teen dramas and later onstage and can currently be seen in Silver Linings Playbook. Heath Ledger went on to star in Brokeback Mountain and won a posthumous Oscar for his performance as the Joker in The Dark Knight Rises.  Joseph Gordon-Levitt has become a beloved Hollywood presence since his big screen turn in 500 Days of Summer. Compare that resume to other 90s teen comedies like She’s All That or Drive Me Crazy and it’s easy to see what keeps 10 Things I Hate About You entertaining, fourteen years later.

Review

Love, Wedding, Marriage

Released: 2011

Director: Dermot Mulroney

Starring: Mandy Moore & Kellan Lutz

Grade: F

After finishing Love, Wedding, Marriage I had the desire to retroactively raise the grades of all my previous reviews. This movie is so bad every other crappy rom com seems better by comparison. Love, Wedding, Marriage is directed by long-time rom com veteran actor Dermot Mulroney. Mulroney is suave enough as the romantic lead in films like My Best Friend’s Wedding and The Wedding Date, but his wedding-themed directorial debut trips down the aisle before face planting into a chuppah of horrible.

The film stars Mandy Moore as Ava, a successful marriage counselor who returns from her honeymoon to discover that her parents are getting a divorce, weeks before their 30^th anniversary. Ava decides to use all the tricks in her psychologist handbook to get them back together. It’s like The Parent Trap except instead of two adorably precocious twins, it’s a shrill twenty-seven-year-old doing the scheming. As Ava focuses her energies on forcing her parents back together, she loses sight of her own marriage to pretty-boy Kellan Lutz (best known for a very minor role in the Twilight series). In the great tradition of ridiculous movie-careers, Lutz manages a winery. Highlights of said career include a blonde assistant bursting into the room to announce, “Your interview with Wine Magazine is confirmed for one o’clock,” and later, “It’s your conference call to discuss the new chardonnay. They’re on line two.” The wine business can be so demanding.

Rather than focus on character development, Mulroney just tries to cram as many visual gags into the movie as possible. Here’s an old guy taking a body shot! Here’s a fat lady doing a trust fall! Scenes alternate between unfunny and painfully unfunny. And to top it all off there’s a bizarre cameo by Christopher Lloyd as a hippy-dippy marriage counselor.

There’s not a strong performance among the bunch. As Ava’s mom, Jane Seymour's biggest achievement seems to be remembering her lines. James Brolin, as Ava’s father, is trying a bit harder, but the poor guy just has nothing to work with. His biggest dramatic plot involves deciding to become an observant Jew, a thread that is neither enlightening nor funny. Jessica Szohr (Gossip Girl’s infamous Vanessa!) is fine as the slutty little sister, but she looks so unlike Moore it’s hard to understand why she was cast in the first place. Lutz is there to take his shirt off (which he does quite often) and Moore, who I like in other films, is just dreadfully whiny, manipulative and naive. To be fair, I’m not sure even an all-star cast could have made something coherent out of this script.

The writers, Anouska Chydzik and Caprice Crane, have only a handful of minor credits to their name (including a few episodes of the new 90201 and the MTV Movie Awards) and their first big-screen endeavor probably won’t have studios scrambling to greenlight their future projects. Characters say exactly what they’re feeling and continue to have the same arguments over and over again throughout the film’s painful 90 minute run time. There’s nothing logical to anyone’s behavior. Ava, a licensed marriage counselor, makes her own decisions based on horoscopes (a trait which is promptly dropped about halfway through the film). She also finds it incredibly romantic that one of her friends gets married to a hot Polish woman after a drunken encounter at a bar. This is a woman who fixes other people’s relationships? I can’t imagine her functioning at the grocery store, let alone as a psychologist.

The movie pulls deep from the well of rom com clichés- karaoke, couples classes, speed dating, depressed women eating ice cream out of the carton. In what I can only imagine was a desperate attempt to inject some energy into the script, there are one or two big “twists.” Not only are they unsurprising, they’re not even interesting. By the end of the movie I disliked Ava so much I was actively rooting for her marriage to fail. Don’t get me wrong, I had fun trying to figure out how many ways she could end up sad and alone, but I hardly think that was the intention of the screenwriters. The look of the movie is bland in a Pottery-Barn-catalogue kind of way, and it’s hard to get too worked up about two people whose reunion comes as they speed towards each other in his-and-hers convertibles.

The idea of focusing a rom com on a couple already in love (rather than one falling in love) is not a bad one. Unfortunately Love, Wedding, Marriage has nothing going for it beyond a semi-interesting premise and an attractive cast. I have a high tolerance for bad movies, but even I could barely stomach this one. Movies are meant to entertain, to provoke thought and to arouse emotion. Love, Wedding, Marriage fails on all three accounts and does so in such a shrill way, it’s not even fun to watch it crash and burn.

Reality factor: Ridiculously young, wealthy, beautiful people who meddle in each other’s problems instead of going to work. Thankfully the over-the-top physical comedy was kept to a minimum or I may have just turned it off. [2 out of 5]

Eye-candy factor: There are plenty of scenes where Kellan Lutz takes his shirt off, but not even a million shirtless Lutzs could improve this film. [3 out of 5]

Aww factor: Nope. [0 out of 5]