10 Things I Hate About You

There's nothing like a movie based on a Shakespearean play to get the teenage hormones firing. Well, perhaps not in their original form, but take out all of those "thees" and "thous" and you've got yourself the basis of a juicy, teen-friendly blockbuster hit. The real key is to trick kids into thinking that what they're watching is in no way tied to anything remotely educational or character-building, and leave them to be midguidedly amused upon reading the original and finding that the main characters share names with some of their favorite teen movie roles.

In the 90s, Shakespeare was actually pretty standard cinema fare, though 10 Things I Hate About You was most apt at repackaging the original concept. There was Baz Luhrman's iconic Romeo and Juliet, A Midsummer Night's Dream with Michelle Pfiffer and Calista Flockhart, reincarnations of both Hamlet and The Twelfth Night, and even the semi-autobiographical Shakespeare in Love featuring Gwenyth Paltrow. Someone out there must have seen the rise in Shakespeare's 90s cinema stock and thought to themselves, "Now how I can I make this appealing to teenagers who consistently fall asleep while reading their 10th-grade English class copies of Macbeth?"

Indeed, moviemakers were up to the challenge, releasing 10 Things I Hate About You in 1999, a clever rethinking of Shakespeare's The Taming of the Shrew. See how much it helps to change the name? I'm not a hundred percent certain I could even recognize a shrew in a forest ranger lineup of woodland creatures, and I can't imagine delighting in the fact that the term was meant to describe the lowly and second-rate social status of women. A squirrel maybe, but a shrew? Really? They're not even industrious or cuddly. How insulting.

Lucky for us the new teen version respun the tale to include a mild dose of feminist manifesto, thus canceling out the play's original message of female subordination to their obviously superior male counterparts. In short, we were given an upbeat and more enlightened retelling of the original Shakespeare tale, though at least the initial setup of the storyline remained relatively intact. Cast any film with good looking, well-dressed teenagers and we'll all quickly forget that it's somehow laced into the rich heritage of significant 26th century literary tradition.



Even from the trailer alone it's easy to see all of the wonderful 90s teen movie cliches that so defined this iconic genre. Teen comedies were all the range, though 10 Things proved to be a bit smarter than its peers. For instance, it refused to employ the cheap trick of giving our supposed outcast glasses, which is essentially the equivalent of having a character cough to indicate future terminal illness. Instead, 10 Things gives us a sassy, independent-thinking social deviant who is cool in her own right, even if she doesn't abide by the same rigid standards of mainstream high school coolness as her sister. For a teen movie, that's a pretty lofty feat.

It's true to its Shakespearean roots in its utterly complicated and twisted plot. We open on Cameron's (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) first day of school as his nerdy escort Michael gives him the grand tour complete with requisite clique overview. In the midst of his orientation, Cameron spots the beautiful and popular Bianca (Larissa Oleynik, who I still generally refer to as Alex Mack for mental cataloging purposes) and is immediately taken in by her physical charms. Michael wisely tries to dissuade his delusional companion, but he's too far gone to be swayed by logic. Instead, he signs on as Bianca's French tutor, ignoring the fact that he himself does not speak French.



Meanwhile, Bianca is smitten with tube sock model and toolbox extraordinaire Joey (Andrew Keegan), who while admittedly a dreamboat in the looks department is less than brimming with sparkling wit and conversational skills. Unless the conversation is about him, of course. Bianca's joyride is outed by bitter sister Kat (Julia Stiles), forcing their single father to reconsider his ironclad anti-dating policy. The new policy turns out to be Bianca can date when Kat chooses to date, creating a sticky and notably uncomfortable situation for all. Strategic parenting at its finest.

Cameron starts on as Bianca's French tutor, during which time he learns about Bianca's newly enforced dating restriction. Cameron and Michael hatch a scheming plan to find a suitable suitor for surly sister Kat. He approaches Patrick (the late great Heath Ledger), an Aussie loner with a reputation for dangerous behavior. After failing to convince Patrick themselves, Cameron and Michael consider a new strategy and enlist the help of BMOC Joey Donner. They broker a deal for Joey to pay Patrick in exchange for his Kat-wooing services, unaware of his role as middleman to Cameron.

Michael, angry for being chastised by his former group of nerdy preps, starts a rumor that classmate and rival Bogey Lowenstein's intimate get-together for his pre-WASPy friends is actually a party brimming with free beer and live music. All the while Kat is underwhelmed (maybe just whelmed?) by Patrick's attempts at romance




The whole school shows up at the Lowenstein residence, including Bianca and Kat after the former begged the latter to attend. Kat gets outstandingly drunk, dances on a table, and incurs a near-concussion as a result. Patrick is at her side the whole way, seemingly charmed by his former burden. Cameron learns that Bianca was actually playing him rather than the other way around, as she was using him as a pawn in her path to Joeydom. However, Cameron offers Bianca a ride home and is granted a kiss in return, refocusing his intentions.

After sobering up, Kat remains unimpressed by Patrick's attempts until he performs the ultimate grand gesture that left teen girls everywhere swooning:



There are some minor hiccups but Patrick manages to convince Kat that his intentions are true, which is actually pretty false and he's receiving $300 for his services. Granted, he seems to be into her, but I can't imagine I'd be pleased to find someone was being paid to date me. Bianca and Kat both end up at the prom on the respective arms of Cameron and Patrick, leaving Joey in the proverbial dust. Oh, and Bianca wears this godawful midriff baring two-piece number. Really, it's just completely hideous.

Joey spills the beans about the deal in a rage and justifiably, Kat's pretty pissed. Oh, and Bianca punches Joey and it's awesome. Almost makes up for the dress. But really, not quite.

Back at school, Kat reads her self-referential poem of the movie's namesake, "10 Things I Hate About You":




Everything and everyone comes to blows, but all seems well that ends well. Patrick buys Kat a guitar with his dirty bribe money, Kat's father permits her to go to her first-choice school Sarah Lawrence, and Bianca and Cameron are an item. Everything is fairly neatly tidied up for the ending as expected, but it's still sort of sweet.

It may not have been actual Shakespeare, but the movie did showcase a humor and wittiness that far outpaced its teen film genre competitors. Plus, it had a kickass soundtrack, or at least I perceived it to be back in junior high. Pretty much everyone left theaters humming Letters to Cleo's cover of "I Want You to Want Me", after all.

The movie relied on a lot of cliched teen movie tropes, but it turned some on their head as well. It was a better, smarter version of our stereotypical movie offerings, giving us a new teen world in which senior girls flash their soccer coaches as a diversion tactic and quirky school guidance counselors write smutty romances between sessions. What's not to like?

AOL and Chat Rooms

Once upon a time, our parents didn't have a clue what we were doing online. The internet was a new and exciting place, and it seemed like a safe and inpenetrable fortress of unsupervised mischief. Mind you, this was years before Chris Hansen was popping in to offer you a seat while the decoy internet teen went to go check on the hot tub. There was no catching of predators, no online policing, just pure, unadulterated dangerous fun.

If anything, our parents were more concerned with our tying up the phone lines than our online whereabouts. Sure, we may have been making under-the-table investments with Nigerian princes, but our parents were solely worried about the busy signal clogging our line. Back in the day, there was no wireless or high speed internet connections, there was a little phone jack that shared a common line with our home phones. In a time before universal cell phone ownership, this was a pretty serious inconvenience. Not to mention how annoying that modem sound was when you picked up the phone. Ouch.

When children of the 90s first got in-home internet access, it was a novel and exciting concept. Finally, a relatively captive audience with whom to share our innermost thoughts, dreams, and anonymous flirtations. Once we could actually forge a connection, that is. I'd sit for scores of minutes at a time, waiting impatiently for that little running AOL man to enter his successive phase of connectedness. Words like "modem failure" and "inability to connect" haunted us, forcing us to redial and redial until finally we could enter our glorious online community.




At our house, there were three potential modem phone numbers with which to reach the internet, and we'd frantically alternate between our options, forever seeking a signal. It's remarkable to think that just a decade earlier, we were content to wait five minutes to catch even the briefest glimpse of the internet. Nowadays, if a website takes more than three seconds to load we're all about one step away from tossing the laptop out the window. Back then, though, these were different times. More patient times. And of course, more salacious.

No sooner than we'd heard that familiar robotically enthusiastic declaration "You've Got Mail!", we'd be clamoring to reach our favorite chat rooms. As AOL was the premier internet service of the 90s, a good chunk of the online population could be found roaming these virtual spaces. It was a novel concept for the time: you could actually communicate with many people at once! People you didn't know! People who we should trust indefinitely to be telling the truth, the absolute truth, and nothing but the truth!


So help us God, this was probably not the case. Judging how things usually went our own end, it's doubtable that these new virtual pals were honest about any element of their existence other than that they were currently connected to the internet. The original chat rooms were popular online pickup scenes, the equivalent of an internet singles bar. Only, truth be told, all the people in those rooms were probably either under the age of 12 or over the age of 50.

While today a notion like that might raise a red flag or two, these things were chalked up to good, clean fun back then. Well, er, sort of clean. Children delighted in their ability to fool others, though looking back it's unlikely that my friends and I fooled anyone with our fifth grade writing skills and general misunderstanding of innuendos.

From the moment a person asked, "A/S/L", you knew it was on. That is, imploring his chatroommates to give their age, sex, and location. I don't know about you, but this was a great source of fun for my pals and I as children. In one room we could be exotic 18-year old Brazilian twins working to get our modeling careers off the ground while in the next we could easily slip into the guise of a mysterious lonelyhearts Spanish exchange student seeking a nice middle aged office drone to. The possibilities were truly endless.





Sometimes we may have outed ourselves as the 12/Fs we really were, but in general the idea was to fool others into believing the bull we were serving up. I imagine parents everywhere would have been pretty uneasy to find that their young children were being approached online with the request to "cyber", but again, these were different times. Very few people had considered the notion of troubling internet connections, we were too enthralled by its exciting possibilities to see any danger in letting children loose into chatrooms with a slew of card-carrying NAMBLA members and known sex offenders.

In our innocence, though, we were too giddy to be bothered by these facts. These were the days before MySpace, Facebook, or online dating, so people everywhere used this free market chatroom environment to make connections. Users formed full-fledged online relationships with people they had never even met. Sure, in real life you may have been a Dungeons and Dragons playing loner with duct-taped glasses, but online you could be the suave AOL romeo you'd always dreamed of being. Until your potential mate requested a picture, of course. Photographic evidence is a bitch.






The original AOL was a kid's paradise. It's going date us immensely when we someday tell our children of plugging a common search term in a search engine and having zero results, but we'll know that we were the true online pioneers. We knew the thrill of navigating the unknown wildernesses of the internet before firewalls and parental controls and the like neutralized the treacherous terrain. Sure, we may have talked to a pedophile or two, but we lived, dammit. We lived. Well, vicariously through our internet alteregos. But you know what I mean.

Gel Pens

If you have noticed, we over here at Children of the 90s have been pretty caught up in the back-to-school spirit. There's something about fall that brings all of us 90s nostalgianiks right back to our frantic scrambling office-supply store shopping trips. We would all try to use our intuition and summer-accumulated wisdom to buy the most coveted back-to-school items, but there was little way of knowing whether your choice was going to sink or swim in the classroom implement hierarchy. It's a cruel world, and we might as well have learned it at a young age. There's nothing quite like ridicule and public shaming over what we were toting in our pencil cases. It's probably what's turned us into the humble adults we are today.

The problem with school supply trends was that we could hardly look to fashion magazines for our social cues on what to buy. Instead, we had to simply hold our collective breath and hope that whatever we'd haplessly shoved into our OfficeMax carts was the wise choice. Would Yikes Pencils be in or out? Would Clueless's Cher's feather pen still be the highly coveted item of the back-to-school season, or were Troll pencil toppers the way to go? It was enough to etch premature wrinkles into our juvenile brows.

There are, however, some school supplies that spoke for themselves. When we saw them in the store, we simply knew we had to have them. They had a value all their own, not only because they were popular, but because they had real appeal. Not to mention we knew deep down, even from a young age, that if one of these babies would set our parents back $2 a pop versus the fifty cents or so they'd shell out for a regular pen they just had to be great. After all, the pricers wouldn't lie to us. They know real value, and we had to be prepared to pay for it.




Gel pens quickly became a veritable writing implement phenomenon, flooding into middle school desks everywhere with a barrage of metallic colors. These things were legitimately impressive, for school supplies. We had never seen this type of performance before in a pen, nor had we particularly cared when it came in the drab shades of blue and black favored by rival pen producers. Gelly Rolls, though, these things were impressive. Not only did they come in a vast spectrum of visually appealing shiny colors, but they could write on all sorts of surfaces! What more could you ask for?

Sure, our parents were probably less than pleased when we came home with homeroom-drawn gelly roll tattoos graffiti-ing our bodies, but at least it was still a step above opting for permanent ink. My mother unleashed upon me a slew of old-wives' tales of how the ink would permeate my skin and lead to all sorts of terrifying blood poisoning, but I saw right through it. Well, I did at first. My vision started to blur after the fourth or fifth day, now that I think about it. I'm sure it's just a coincidence.

Gel pens had pretty incredible powers, really. For one, they could write on black paper. I know, I know. Maybe I should give a minute to let that sink in. Black paper. Have you ever heard of such a thing? I know I hadn't, until I bought a colored multi-pack that came complete with a pad of black paper. I sat there staring at my new acquisition, thinking, Why, it just can't be. How can a pen write on a piece of black paper? I couldn't quite wrap my head around it, but suffice it to say I was sold. Yearbook signing would never be the same.

There were a few prototypes in particular that particularly astonished, amazed, and amused us. I wrote many an origami-folded note to my friends, imploring them "W/B/S" (write back soon) and declaring my feelings via LYLAS (love ya like a sister). Among the most popular on the market were:

Gelly Roll


These were truly the original impressive gel pen. They were so shiny. Really, just so so shiny. My mind is riddled with mental ADD at the mere thought of them, so just imagine the effect they had on real live kids attempting to take notes with their sparkly, sparkly ink. Ooh, sparkly. I'm sorry, what were we talking about here?



Milky


Though now the name sort of makes me want to vomit, in middle school we were completely enamored with these pastel-hued pens. These things drew on everything, leaving no drawable surface on my body, clothing, and schoolwork untouched by the magic of their soft hues.



Marble Ink


Described by their manufacturers as "a milkshake of colors", these pens were a teacher's worst nightmare. To receive a handwritten essay that gradually shifted from one end of the color spectrum to the next and back again was nothing short of a grading nightmare. Kids were certainly entertained by them, though, so it would take more than simple chastisements to stop us. We had pen rights, dammit, and we were prepared to exercise them, color-induced nausea aside.


Sure, there were a few kinks in the process. Namely, when the inkwell in the pen's core began to go dry, these things were nearly impossible to write with. You'd scratch through your paper just trying to get some color out of it. And don't even get me started on the moments of gel overload. Believe me, these splotches were not pretty. Okay, they were kind of pretty, but that's not the point. It's hard to take an algebra answer seriously when half of the equation is obscured by a giant shimmering pink blob you're forced to turn into a flower to make it less conspicuous.

Regardless of their minor flaws, these babies were golden. And silver. And bronze, and well, you get the idea. My technicolor-dreampen-case was brimming with shimmery, shiny colors and for a brief moment in time, it was enough to hold my attention and entertain me in class. If only I could get as worked up about office supplies now. It's hard to picture me hugging my stapler or spooning with the fax machine, but I'm willing to give it a try. What can I say? I'm a dreamer.