Movie reviews: 10 Things I Hate About You, The King and I

Originally published April 30, 1999, in Comics Buyer’s Guide #1328

An earlier column discussed the endeavors by comic companies to try and attract new readers to old properties either by rebooting and/or retelling previously told stories with a new gloss added, or else exploring new formats that might be more “kid friendly.”

It’s interesting to note (well, interesting to me, in any event) that the phenomenon is not restricted to comics. In the movie theaters recently, I’ve come across two films that fit that particular bill perfectly. It’s a somewhat different set up, since in the comic book instances, corporations are trying to keep their existing properties afloat. In the film instance, we’re seeing rehashes of previous ideas that are intended to make a few bucks because, well… the movie makers might not have had better notions available to them.

The first film I went to was 10 Things I Hate About You. When the trailers for the film hit its target audience, that audience saw a promo for a movie about two daughters, one hip, vivacious and adored, the other stiff and holding the world in contempt. They probably thought, “Oh. It’s like Daria.” Actually, with a few tweaks, it really could have been Daria: The Live Action Film, now that I think about it. My reaction, naturally, was somewhat different: “Oh. They’re remaking Taming of the Shrew.”

Yes, that’s right, move over, Jane Austen. The Bard rules, with several more “updatings” of his plays on the way. And Jane Austen never even got to fall in love, much less win an Oscar for doing so. Of course, 10 Things does indeed model itself shamelessly upon Shrew. Since we’re dealing with high school age, naturally the dad in question (Larry Miller who, since his gloriously smarmy clothing store owner in Pretty Woman, has only gotten better with the passing years) isn’t concerned about his daughters getting married (as in Shrew). No, as an obstetrician who’s handled too many teen births, he’s worried about them getting pregnant. Me, being a father of the 90s, my fears lean more towards AIDS, but 10 Things is supposed to be a comedy, and I guess the father recounting pregnant teen stories is slightly more humorous than dying teen stories.

Being a paranoid dad for whatever reason, he doesn’t want to allow his vivacious daughter, Bianca (Larisa Oleynik) to date until his shrewish (i.e., bitchy) daughter, Kat (Julia Stiles) dates first. He makes the rule as a smug failsafe, certain that Bianca isn’t leaving the house anytime soon, because there’s no way Kat is going to go out: No one would ask her, and she wouldn’t want to go in any event. As a consequence, Bianca’s “suitors” are desperate, but desperation tends to be the mother of invention. And so, brushing up on their Shakespeare, they obtain the services of Petruchio… I’m sorry, Patrick (Heath Ledger… what a great name. Sounds like a Scots accounting firm) to woo (to wit) Kat so they can have a shot at the fair Bianca.

Updating Shrew into the cauldron of high school social politicking and calling it 10 Things I Hate About You might seem, to some, to be bereft of imagination. I, on the other hand, think it’s certainly as valid an idea as updating it into a musical about a feuding husband and wife acting team and calling it Kiss Me, Kate. Although it certainly would have been nice to see the source material mentioned somewhere in the damned credits. Shakespeare is a presence in the film via an English teacher (“Chill” Mitchell) teaching the kids about Shakespearian sonnets, but nonetheless, when you lift as much of a plot from the Bard as that, a “Based upon” credit certainly seems only appropriate.

What, did Shakespeare’s “people” need to get in touch with the producers and demand an acknowledgement in order to get such a thing done?

The main reason I would have liked to see such a notation there is that, remember, I’m not the target audience. Teens are. I wound up seeing the film in the first place only because my middle daughter, Gwen, was taking my youngest, Ariel, to see Doug’s 1st Movie. The girls, displaying independence, wanted to see it on their own, but I figured I should remain in the vicinity in case problems arose (no wonder I could sympathize with the Larry Miller character), and 10 Things was the only film playing in the multiplex where the times worked out roughly the same. It seemed like a decent date movie, so I brought Kathleen.

In point of fact, I thought the film was tremendously entertaining. The cast seemed to be having a ball, there was tremendous energy, 3rd Rock from the Sun‘s Joseph Gordon-Levitt was great fun as one of the suitors, and let’s face it, when you’re dealing with Shakespeare, it’s hard to go completely wrong (the MTV-styled Romeo and Juliet aside). But it would have been nice for the primarily teen audience to know that there was a play upon which the film was based. My guess is that the average teen filmgoer has no clue that Shrew is the source material, and there’s nothing in the film that indicates it. The film makers, granted, are under no obligation to educate the audience. But there’s no onus against it, either, and it would be damned nice if such films did everything they could to let the audience know just where the story was coming from.

And yes, I know, Shakespeare—presuming he did write the plays—cribbed from other people’s stories, too, and it only said “Shakespeare” on the byline. But I’m not concerned with Elizabethan hoi paloi right now, I’m only thinking about the current audiences who view Shakespeare purely as a dead English white guy who has no relevance whatsoever to their lives. Teaching Shakespeare has got to be an uphill battle for educators. Anything, anything that can be done to provide an incentive to teens to explore his works should be capitalized upon. When the film runs its course in theaters, maybe the filmmakers should make low-cost screener copies available to school systems so it can be used as a teaching aid to get students involved in the story. It’s so easy to get caught up in the complexity of the Shakespearian language that one tends to overlook the intriguing tales therein. And the end of Shrew remains one of the more debatable conclusions when Kate gives her lengthy speech about a woman’s responsibility to her husband. Has she really been totally brainwashed and beaten into submission by Petruchio? Or are Petruchio and Kate a couple whose relationship is entirely based upon weird mindgames, and the subtext of the speech is Kate saying, “You want to play games? I can play games too. We both know I don’t mean a word of this, but I’m making you look good to your pals, and you’re gonna owe me for this.”

Bottom line, 10 Things is a lot of fun. The scene where Patrick serenades Kat with the help of the high school marching band is alone worth the price of admission. I just wish Shakespeare’s name had been in the credits, and I was also waiting for Patrick to say, just once, “Kiss me, Kat.” And if anyone reading this column is still disinclined to sit down and read Shrew, then rent the wonderful BBC adaptation of the play featuring John Cleese as Petruchio. You can’t go wrong.

Where can you go wrong? Well, you can take a classic musical such as The King and I, and turn it into what is possibly the worst animated feature I’ve ever seen. Here is a film which is diligent in acknowledging the source material: The title is the same, the musical (and the book, I think) are both credited, the king is drawn to look like, and even voiced to sound like, Yul Brynner (somewhere the shade of Rex Harrison, who first played the role in the songless Anna and the King is breathing a sigh of relief and saying, “Better Yul than me”) and the estates of Rodgers and Hammerstein are thanked for their cooperation. Cooperation? Good lord, what did they do to cooperate? Not file a lawsuit trying to stop this thing from being made?

Ariel was dying to see this film. I have the original on laserdisk and my attitude was, “Watch the real film instead.” But she kept at me, and I thought, Well, maybe it won’t be as bad as all that. I was right. It wasn’t. It was worse.

How bad was it? The opening sequence features British widow schoolteacher Anna and her son, Louis, on a sea voyage to Siam so that she can take up her new post as teacher to the children of the king.

The ship encounters fearsome weather and a monstrous dragon, conjured up by the Prime Minister—recast in this film as an evil wizard, who stimulates his power by rubbing his forehead as if he’s got a migraine. Oddly, the film had me rubbing my head in the same way in no time, but the fact that the movie projector—despite my best efforts—didn’t explode would seem to indicate that I don’t have much sorcerous potential. In any event, there’s this gargantuan dragon, looming over the ship. Thunder blasting, lightning ripping.

And what does Anna do? She whistles.

That’s right. She whistles a happy tune, so nobody will know she’s afraid. And soon her son, Louis, is also whistling a happy tune. So is Louis’ annoying cute pet monkey. So is the whole crew. With death by dragon and storm moments away, they’re marching around the deck whistling a happy tune. And the dragon, appalled, vanishes, and they’re safe.

In retrospect, it wasn’t an unrealistic tactic. It almost got me to vanish from the theater.

What else. What else. Well, the tragic Tuptim has been changed from an unwilling concubine to an unwilling new slave.

Okay. Okay, I can handle that. You’re dealing with a kid audience, maybe you don’t want to have to explain concubines. (Indeed, the fact that the king has multiple wives at all is glossed over, and his brood has been reduced to a mere six-or-so kids… fewer than the average Broadway production, which just goes to show you how lazy the animators were. Unconstricted by casting difficulties, they could have had Anna trying to teach dozens of kids. If Disney could animate ninety nine Dalmatian puppies thirty years ago, couldn’t modern-day animators have managed more than a paltry half-dozen kids?)

But it’s not enough that Tuptim is a slave. She has to become involved with the crown prince, upgraded from about twelve years of age to an eighteen-ish hunk who also kickboxes. And there’s funny animals galore, and a daring balloon rescue, and a comic relief sidekick to the villain whose main shtick is that he keeps losing teeth, which is supposed to be funny but is just pathetic, and as I’m sure you can guess, the king doesn’t die at the end but instead lives to polka with Anna as “Shall We Dance” is moved to become the closing number. Oh, and the animation is awful. Stiff at best, and even herky jerky in a number of places. Miranda Richardson, whom I’ve loved in everything from Queen Elizabeth in Blackadder II to Queen Mab in Merlin is, to me, forever tarnished because she voiced Anna in this debacle.

But what about the target audience? What about Ariel? As the credits rolled, and I was wishing for a liposuction-esque operation that would allow surgeons to extract the brain cells I was forced to waste on remembering the film, I said to Ariel, “What did you think, honey?”

She loved it. Thought it was great.

I now have no choice but to do penance by watching the original film with her repeatedly until all memories of the animated version are expunged. That’s the problem when seeking new audiences by retooling classics. Sometimes the results are fun and sometimes they’re… well…

There’s only one positive note to come out of all this. Once upon a time, the dumbest idea anyone ever had in regards to The King and I was to turn it into a half hour sitcom. And they did. And Brynner even played the king. And it was awful.

But this idea was far, far worse. Shall we puke, one two three and…

(Peter David, writer of stuff, can be written to at Second Age, Inc., PO Box 239, Bayport, NY 11705.)