10 Things I Hate About You
for crude sex-related humor and dialogue, alcohol and drug-related scenes, all involving teens.
Reviewed by: Dave Rettig
CONTRIBUTOR
| Moral Rating: | Very Offensive |
| Moviemaking Quality: |
|
| Primary Audience: | Adults Older Teens |
| Genre: | Romance Comedy |
| Length: | 1 hr. 37 min. |
| Year of Release: | 1999 |
| USA Release: |
| Featuring | Heath Ledger, Julia Stiles, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Gabrielle Union, Larisa Oleynik, David Krumholtz, Andrew Keegan, Susan May Pratt |
| Director |
Gil Junger |
| Producer | |
| Distributor | Buena Vista Pictures |
“How do I loathe thee? Let me count the ways.”
The Stratford girl’s are as different as night and day. Bianca (Larisa Oleynik), sweet, simple, popular and desperate to date; Kat (Julia Stiles), antisocial, antiestablishment, antiauthoritarian, and determined to avoid the opposite sex. Dr. Stratford (Larry Miller) is positively opposed to either girls' participation in the prom and comes up with a solution for Bianca’s problem and his… Bianca can date when Kat does! Enter Patrick Verona (Heath Ledger), Cameron James (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) and crew with a devious plan to capture the heart of a shrew.
A clever update of Shakespeare’s “The Taming of the Shrew,” “10 Things I Hate About You” combines subtle allusions to the Bard in a modern medium. I love the occassional dialogue throw backs to the original “Shrew” (“I burn, I pine, I perish”). I was pleased with the sharp performances of the young actors and actresses, who handled the complexity of characters in Shakespeare’s plot with amazing ease. A well done film.
“Ten Things I Hate About You” is rated PG-13 for crude sex related humor and dialogue and alcohol and drug related scenes. Rightly so. There is quite a bit of inuendo throughout the movie, most of which a Christian audience will find unnecessary. Although no racier than Shakespeare’s original (albeit a bit more blatant), “Ten Things” does have enough sexual content to justify a warning. Parents with teenagers could use Kat’s comments about her sexual experiences being a negative result of peer pressure as a launching point to discuss a difficult topic.
Furthermore, Dr. Stratford’s ignorance is bliss; yet, still ignorance and, as Christian parents, we cannot ignore the fact that teenage pregnancy is virtually the same in the Church as in the world. This movie also touches the hard topic of teenage alcohol and drug abuse. Although treated lightly in the film, Christian parents can use this to talk with the young people God has put in your life about the perils of drugs and alcohol.
All said, well done. If you take a teen to this movie, the negatives should be thoroughly discussed from a biblical viewpoint and not ignored or avoided. These are real issues in the real world! And maybe you can hook your kids (or yourself) on the works of the Bard! Shakespeare can be fun!
First of all, it was much cruder than I expected. Just near the beginning, the guidance counselor (played by Allison Janney, who never fails to steal every scene she is in) is shown writing an erotic novel, and the sentences we hear/see are so pornographic I can’t believe the film got a PG-13 rating. It must be because there are only a few sentences, but trust me, they are disgusting! After this, she shamelessly tells a new student that the other students there are s**t-brained ***holes… or something like that. These issues are never dealt with.
Shortly after this, another scene shows one student drawing a penis/testicles near another student’s mouth, about as graphically as dry erase marker can do it. And in a later scene, a student flashes her breasts at a teacher to distract him and suggests that they use this same technique to distract their opposing sports team. She walks right out of the room without getting in trouble, too. Setting this plot in a high school setting makes for a very questionable movie.
The teenage romantic relationships are unrestrained, including LOTS of kissing. Yes, this is something that appears in a lot of high school dramas, but this movie is ALL ABOUT it. And in all honesty, I don’t know what else people expect from a Shakespeare-based story. While Shakespeare’s stories were never in high school setting, they still displayed the same Godlessness in romance.
The only thing that kind of impressed me about this film was that there wasn’t very much language. I’ve let movies with equally offensive content get by with a moral rating of just “Offensive,” instead of “Very Offensive,” because of their positive messages. But I can’t do that for this one. The positive messages here are much too underwhelming. I do not recommend this film to anyone.
Moral rating: Very Offensive / Moviemaking quality: 3
At one point in the movie a young man drew a picture of the male private area on anothers head. I don’t see how this is funny. What kind of fashion trends are this movie trying to set. How are we as Christians supposed to carry ourselves with dignity if he have picture of private areas on our foreheads. Is this the mark of the beast? You decide for yourself.
1) A shot up a girl’s (Bianca) dress as she gets into a car. 2) A penis drawn on the face of a boy by another student and after a few minutes of close-ups he finally says “I have a d*ck on my face don’t I” 3) A guidance counselor who is writing a trashy love novel while all but ignoring here students' problems. She does however call Kat a “heinous b*ch.” And the words of wisdom for a boy who exposes himself are keep it in your pants. 4) A teacher who warns one of his students that if he doesn’t watch himself he may get “b*ch slapped.” 5) A student’s statement that a sheep would make a better date than Kat and that seemed to be his preference anyway.
I took this reviewer’s recommendation and took two of my daughters to this movie or should I say the first 10 minutes or so. I have very little free time with them and thought introducing them to Shakespeare’s work set in there own time would be a delightful treat. What I treated them to was a movie that scraped the bottom of the entertainment gutter. The language was atrocious and the constant fixation with sex was pathetic. This movie had little redeeming entertainment value. This is a movie that should be avoided at all cost. If you think I am being a little hard on this movie the Movie Guide rated it as BAD and had this to say, “TEN THINGS I HATE ABOUT YOU can only have a detrimental influence on teenagers.”