![]() ![]() ![]() So they hatch a plot to persuade Patrick ( Heath Ledger), the school outlaw, to ask her to the prom. But Katarina's father ( Larry Miller) has forbidden her to date until her older sister Kat starts going out. (When the English teacher asks his class for reactions to a Hemingway novel, she snaps, "Hemingway was an alcoholic who hung around Picasso, hoping to nail his leftovers.'') Two guys want to take Bianca to the prom. Her shrewish older sister Katarina ( Julia Stiles) is unpopular, never dates and is the class brain. Bianca Stratford ( Larisa Oleynik) is popular and wears a lot of red dresses. The story this time involves two Seattle sisters. I haven't seen that idea in almost two months, since "She's All That'' (boy makes bet he can turn plain wallflower into prom queen, and does, but falls in love with her, after which she discovers, etc., etc.). gee, the movie is charming, despite its exhausted wheeze of an ancient recycled plot idea (boy takes bribe to ask girl to prom, then discovers that he really likes her-but then she finds out about the bribe and hates him). There is even a scene where the shrew is assigned to rewrite a Shakespeare sonnet.Īnd yet. "10 Things I Hate About You'' is inspired, in a sortuva kinduva way, by Shakespeare's "The Taming of the Shrew,'' in the same sense that "Starship Troopers'' was inspired by "Titus Andronicus.'' It doesn't remake Shakespeare so much as evoke him as a talisman, by setting its story at Padua High School, naming its characters Stratford and Verona, making one of the heroines a shrew, etc. There's even "The Rage: Carrie 2''-a retread of "Carrie,'' a work that in my opinion ranks right up there with the best of Austen, Shaw and Shakespeare. To this list we might also add the film update of " Great Expectations" (1998), Cinderella's true story in "Ever After'' and "Romeo + Juliet,'' which was anything but. My colleague James Berardinelli made a list recently: "Clueless'' was based on Emma, "She's All That'' was inspired by "Pygmalion'' and "Cruel Intentions'' was recycled from "Les Liaisons Dangereuses'' (prompting Stanley Kauffmann to observe that it was better back in the days when high school students were allowed to take over city government for a day, instead of remaking French novels). The high school romance genre has become so popular that it's running out of new ideas and has taken to recycling classic literature. Even the next film I saw, "Never Been Kissed,'' ends with a prom. I'm trying to remember the last movie I saw that didn't end with a high school prom.
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