A Comedy With Errors

Rating: 6/10 (18 July 2019)

The second film, alphabetically on Sky Movies is 1999's "10 Things I hate About You" and adaptation of Shakespeare's "The Taming Of The Shrew" set in present day (well... present day at the time) Seattle.
Desperate to date Bianca (Larisa Oleynik) Cameron (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) is thwarted by her father's rule that Bianca can only date when her sister Katrina (Julie Styles) does. This seems unlikely as Katrina is forthright and opinionated to the point of alienating almost all her school. But Cameron hatches a plan, he encourages the schools rebel, Patrick (Heath Ledger) to approach Katrina, hoping that if successful, his path to Bianca has been cleared.
Time has not been kind to "10 Things". One aspect of that is not in the least related to the film itself. The untimely passing of its leading man casts a shadow over watching any of this films. There's a melancholy to seeing him, knowing that this is one of the few movies he made. Away from that, the film has aged badly, the visuals for the opening credits look awful, musically (though there's the odd good song ) it is mostly terrible, even the film stock (of the version I saw) looked like it had seen better days.
Which is not to say that the film is awful, the performances are nice and the script raises a smile from time to time, there's a definite wit to it. The story perhaps is less solid, there could have done with a few more story beats to convince me that there is actually something to the relationship between. . . well, actually either of the principle pairings. It also unravels pretty quickly if you start to apply any logic to the situation. The dad has a "no dating until college" rule in force when the film starts, why does he open up the loophole of dating when her sister does, what actually constitutes "dating" anyway. Bianca is alone with Cameron, away from school grounds on a couple of occasions.
Whilst I appreciate that some people love this film, looking at it constructively, 20 years later (how old is J G-L anyway he looks the same!) it's a decent, if slight film with a couple of classic moments, but a few bizarre ones. Far from essential.