2 Actors I Love About You

10 Things I Hate About You is Shakespeare appopriated into today. Heath Ledger, the Petruchio of the film, plays scary, witty, and romantic perfectly. And Julia Stiles, the infamous shrew Heath Ledger's Patrick Verona falls in love with, plays cutthroat, funny, and sexy perfectly. Together, these two are a great match and it is fun to watch these two go at it.

When we first see Katarina, we look at her and think, “Emo loner.” Not the kind of person that one would want to spend time with. A sociopath to the nth degree. A perfect substitution for a shrew from Elizabethan England. A woman who doesn’t want anything to do with any man and never wants to date is perfect perfect modern substitution. And Julia Stiles plays it perfectly: a cutthroat woman with all of hell’s fury behind her. Every scene before she becomes “tamed” is fun to watch; you enjoy watching her but you don’t want to spend time with her, except for maybe the party scene where she has too much to drink and jumps on a table and starts to dance seductively.

Then there is Heath Ledger. When we first meet him, he is scary. He is one of those people that you don’t want to be around him or even talk to him because you have no idea what he would do to you. Everything you say needs to be carefully thought out. And seeing the transformation that he has in the film from a stone wall to a heartless romantic is great. Not at all like how Petruchio was in the play. He didn’t have much of a transformation at all. It was all about Katherine changing her ways, not both of them changing.

This film is funny and these two lead actors are great, but how well does it stack up to the play text of Taming of the Shrew? Not very well. Because it is so modern, it is not possible for everything to translate. Those who call Shakespeare universal might mean that the themes are universal, but that can be said about anyone. The plots for his plays cannot transcend every generation, our generation for one, or at least, not all of his plays can be.

One other point is that it does work very well with the audience that it intends to reach. It is not meant for Shakespeare aficionados to enjoy, but for the average American teenage movie goer to have a laugh or go on a date with.

All in all, this works very well for what it is supposed to do: it has great acting and reaches his audience perfectly. The problem is that it takes way too many liberties with the playtext and even though the acting is great, there are a few problems with a few other elements of the filmmaking.
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