Shifting Language

Rating: Null/10 (15 May 2006)

It may be that if you want to understand the evolution of how we reason about ourselves, how we form models and roles...
it may be that the richest place to look is the way teen movies have evolved. Kids are the most sophisticated modelers in society. They are also the audience most limited in concerns, which focuses the abstractions on matters of identity.
The form of the thing is different than the usual teen version of Shakespeare. Its spliced rather than transformed, which means you have two movies intertwined.
The first is the Shakespeare bit about cross-gender disguises and resulting confused attractions. The second is formulaic teen stuff formed out of the playdough of girls-in- sports (which today means soccer or skating) and ordinary filmteen coupling.
The reason Shakespeare chose the disguises was because it allowed him opportunity to build layers of meaning in his phrases, always with one bawdy thread. When you get an audience engaged in following the situation so they can decode the language to get the joke, you've accomplished your theatrical goal. After all, the main thing is about them tricking us into dissolving ourselves in the play.
Teens don't like clever language, not so far as actual words. What they like is nuance in pronouncing the couple hundred they use. See how writer Kirsten Smith  who has experience with this  shifts the comedic arcs from the phrase to how the phrase is delivered? It isn't always successful  meaning the audience doesn't always laugh. But the shift is as palpable as the multiple gender shifts managed here.
This part of the movie really is interesting. Kids manipulate themselves to make their lives simple and the means they use are sophisticated. Just following that is entertaining enough.
The other part, is almost necessarily banal. Has to be, just as the girlish cotillion in the plot is. Will our female soccer player play? Will the team win? Will all the honest souls find a mate? Guess.
Ted's Evaluation -- 2 of 3: Has some interesting elements.