A shrewd high school rendition of Shakespeare play

By Tam Notosusanto

JAKARTA (JP): Teen flicks are hot property these days. Whether it's teen horror movies, in which adolescents literally get butchered, or teen comedies, whose plots are mainly about them planning hot dates, Hollywood has got them all. And for the past year alone, teen flicks have come in droves.

Which makes it unsurprising if the genre starts to venture out of science-fiction, horror or coming-of-age territory. How's "teen flicks that want to make Shakespeare accessible to kids" sound? Nothing new, of course.

The 1996 movie William Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet gave us the zappy, MTV-packaged version of the classic tragedy with Leonardo Di Caprio (before he played another Romeo in that sinking ship movie) leading a pack of teenage actors in jazzy- colored contemporary costumes spewing out the iambic pentameter.

And that's exactly what the new movie 10 Things I Hate About You sets out to do: familiarize today's kids with the work of the deceased, 16th century British playwright. The movie is adapted from the familiar bard's earliest comedy, The Taming of the Shrew, retaining only the plot and characters and not the Elizabethan setting and dialog. Which is fine, because the chances are kids would only frown at the mention of lines such as "How tame, when men and women are alone/A meacock wretch can make the curstest shrew," and may doze through the entire proceeding.

And so screenwriters Karen McCullah Lutz and Kirsten Smith had some great renovation work to do. Fair Padua, Italy moves to Padua High, a cool school located in castles at the edge of a panoramic cliff in the suburbs of Seattle. Petruchio, Katherina, Lucentio and Bianca underwent makeovers to become high school students Patrick, Kat, Cameron and Bianca (some names apparently need not be reworked). Certain locales become some characters' last names (thus Patrick Verona and Kat Stratford.)

The plot of a father who would not give away his youngest daughter before his eldest -- a wild, disagreeable woman -- marry first is certainly too bizarre for a contemporary setting. And the concepts of "wedding" and "marriage" surely would not work as well as "dating" and "making out" in a teen comedy.

Thus, 10 Things has obstetrician Walter Stratford (Larry Miller), who is anal about allowing his daughter Bianca (Larisa Oleynik) go out with boys for fear of teen pregnancy. For that end he makes a cunning pact with his daughters: Bianca can only date if her older sister Kat (Julia Stiles) does.

That makes the situation impossible for Bianca, because Kat seems to have given up on boys. "I don't intend to date anybody," she declares to her younger sister, "Have you seen the unwashed miscreants at school?"

Kat herself is quite a personality: she is a highly intelligent girl who reads Sylvia Plath and Betty Friedan, and considers no guy good enough for her.

And so taming this shrew becomes a mission for some guys who are after Bianca. Joey (Andrew Keegan), the school's dandy dunce goes as far as paying Patrick (Heath Ledger), a towering hunk, to win Kat over. And Cameron (Joseph Gordon-Levitt), the new kid at school, who tutors Bianca on French to be close to her, gets firsthand information on Kat's favorite stuff to feed Patrick with.

Padua High becomes the terrain for intrigue, conspiracies, double-crossing and backroom dealings as kids make friends and fall in love. Predictably, Patrick and Kat become smitten with each other, while Cameron manages to swipe Bianca from Joey's hold in the traditional moral of good and modesty winning over evil and snobbery.

Predictabilities aside, it's exciting to see the gradual process of two people initially disinterested in each other become an inseparable couple, and the two leads deliver it very well.

Ledger, the 20-year-old Australian muscleman who stars opposite Mel Gibson in the upcoming movie Patriot, brings the "half-lunatic, mad-cap ruffian" Petruchio to his role of Patrick, mixing roughness and charm to great effect.

And 18-year-old Stiles, star of the TV series The 60's, and reportedly a straight-A student herself, is wonderful as Kat, undertaking the daunting role of an obstinate, advanced young woman subdued by gentle kindness, a part not often superbly interpreted by performers of the original play. Those who haven't had enough of Stiles may wait in great anticipation for her next starring roles in two upcoming cinematic adaptations of Shakespeare: O (from Othello) and Hamlet.

Great supporting turns are given by perky Oleynik (The Secret World of Alex Mack) and sad-eyed Gordon-Levitt (The Juror, the TV series 3rd Rock from the Sun), while marvelous comic reliefs are provided by David Krumholtz (Addams Family Values) as the school nerd Michael, and Miller's erratic dad, who sees Armageddon in his daughters' dating.

Director Gil Junger, who directed some episodes of the sitcom Ellen (including the coming-out episode), did a laudable job in turning a Shakespeare play controversial for its antifeminist message into an inoffensive, winsome comedy. The big question is why the filmmakers don't even mention the bard in the credits, thus giving the audience scant signals that they're dealing with great stuff here. How do you expect to access Shakespeare to kids if the kids don't even know it's Shakespeare? Hello? Perhaps this is where film reviewers come in, to straighten the whole thing out.