Pizza & a Movie #51: "10 Things I Hate About You"
How do I hate thee? Let me count the ways.
“10 Things I Hate About You”
1999 • 1hr 37mins • PG-13 • Stream on Disney+ • Watch trailer
💎 Streaming Gems: You’re paying for Disney+. But what’s good on there?
Tonight, it’s high school all over again. But this time Shakespeare’s calling the shots. As is his way, everyone gets what they want and a few get what they deserve. It’s 1999’s 10 Things I Hate About You.
Here’s the plot. “One Week”, which you still remember the lyrics to, plays as we meet the players. It’s the first day of school and Cameron (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) is new to Padua High. With AV club member Michael (David Krumholtz) as his guide, he meets Bianca (Larisa Oleynik), the good girl all the bad boys want. Her older sister, Kat (Julia Stiles), is so over high school and moves with all the social grace of liquified produce left in the crisper drawer a month too long. Here’s the dilemma. While there’s a line out the door for Bianca, she can’t start accepting suitors unless Kat does. Dad’s (Larry Miller) rule. Cameron, who’d like to cut to the head of the Bianca line, thinks fellow transfer student Patrick (Heath Ledger), an aloof Aussie-inflected riddle wrapped in a mystery, is the answer. Patrick agrees to the death-defying feat of dating Kat, but his help isn’t free. Cameron finds a financial backer in Joey (Andrew Keegan), a senior / tube sock model with more dollars than sense, who’s currently at the front of the Bianca line. Can Patrick run the con long enough for Cameron’s scheme to work? And what’s Kat’s backstory with Joey? And oh no what are Bogey’s parents going to say?
Character Cheat Sheet:
Joey wants what he can’t have.
Bianca is tired of being what no one can have.
Kat had it and doesn’t want it.
Their dad knows exactly what it is and wants no one to have it.
Cameron just wants to be wanted.
Patrick has allegedly wanted and had many things (unconfirmed).
It’s like the Bard said: You can’t always get what you want, but, if you try, sometimes you get what you need.
I have a big Patrick take. Ready? Patrick is 10 Things’s Manic Pixie Dream Girl. Does he have an inner life? Not that we know of. A job? You tell me. A reason for looking like a 25-year-old who still shows up for homeroom? Mystery for the ages. Why, you’d have to be some sort of Heath Ledger to turn what’s in this script into a character. Patrick has few lines, and what scraps of dialogue he does have are plot summaries and lessons. His screenplay utility lies in coaxing brooding Kat into her processing her trauma, not in his being a person. It’s perfect that Ledger has an accent because, though Cameron wants badly to belong to this world, Patrick is not of it. In fact, you can’t prove Patrick isn’t just a figment of Ms. Perky’s considerable imagination. Like Ralph Fiennes’s recent baddie turn in The Menu, Ledger’s vast reserves of charm spin Patrick alchemy-like into on-screen gold.
Other than Ledger, 10 Things’s best special effect is location, location, location. The fictional setting is Seattle, where middle-class suburbanites fly high above a normalized concept of “middle-class”. Filming used Tacoma, thirty miles north, as a stand-in. The star is, of course, the school itself. Hogwarts-esque Stadium High is a real school, though it began life in 1891 as a luxury hotel concept. Fire gutted it in 1898. The Tacoma School District bought the shell in 1904. School architect Frederick Heath masterminded the institutional transformation, including adding the titular stadium Patrick waltzes across. Production moved to actual Seattle to shoot prom because, I mean, you gotta.
What did movie-goers make of this? It opened on March 31, ’99, the same weekend as The Matrix. Ledger, Stiles and Gordon-Levitt became instant movie stars. Typical of flicks that are a bit better than they need to be, critics liked 10 Things but audiences loved it. If you want to make a movie that sticks, use the tropes but improve on all of them. 10 Things cost $13M to make but took in $60M, adding bankability to the stat sheet of all involved. Ledger would go on to use his boyish charm to command pop culture for another decade before his death a short nine years later. Gordon-Levitt would lower his voice to combat his animated mouse-sounding youthfulness.
Hope you liked this one! For me, it held up well. Fun to hear all those songs, see that millenium fashion, and take in one of Ledger’s great performances. Next week we sustain the high school vibe with an updated review of Ferris Bueller’s Day Off. In February we set sail for a Valentine’s two-parter I can’t wait to get to! Sssh, it’s a secret for now.
NOTES:
The same screenwriters also penned She’s the Man (2006), which I haven’t seen in 15 years. It’s another contemporary take on Shakespeare that has the distinction both of really getting Channing Tatum’s acting career going and starting a long rough patch for Amanda Bynes.
Other ’99 flicks: The Sixth Sense, Fight Club, Star Wars: Episode I, Eyes Wide Shut, The Iron Giant. What a year!
Stadium High’s stadium originally sat 32,000. Presidents Theodore Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, and Warren G. Harding spoke there.
Almost-Patricks: Josh Hartnett and Ashton Kutcher. Hartnett would have done a good job, I think, but can you imagine this with Kutcher?
Ten years later, ABC made a short-lived TV version of 10 Things. The only cast to return was Larry Miller, the original dad.
I hear Stiles turned in a really fun performance for Orphan: First Kill (2022).
I watched Krumholtz’s TV show Numb3rs religiously during its run. You may also know him as the head elf in The Santa Clause. He’ll be in Oppenheimer later this year.
Gordon-Levitt and Oleynik worked together on 3rd Rock from the Sun. ‘90s kids would know Oleynik for starring in The Secret World of Alex Mack, in which she can dissolve into a puddle at will.
While Stiles’s fictional character planned to go to Sarah Lawrence, Oleynik actually did.
This is based on Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew.