HOLLYWOOD CENTURY, 1999: In which very old stories are given a very contemporary coat of paint, to the benefit of all

How does one try to summarise 1999 with one review of one movie? It was arguably (by which I mean "almost certainly, but let's not be smug know-it-all dicks about it") the single most transformative year of American filmmaking after the collapse of the New Hollywood Cinema. A stunning number of major filmmakers made some of their most important films that year: Stanley Kubrick, Paul Thomas Anderson, Michael Mann, David Fincher leap to mind, while Spike Jonze, Sam Mendes, the Wachowskis, Kimberly Peirce, Alexander Payne and M. Night Shyamalan all made their debuts or had their big breakthrough. Technology advanced by leaps and bounds, starting with the Wachowskis' The Matrix and continuing through the year's highest-grossing film, Star Wars: Episode I - The Phantom Menace, with its groundbreaking use of all-CGI characters and CGI-augmented sets. Animation had a banner year, as did horror. American Pie brought back sex comedy in a big way, and we've had a golden age of raunchy humor ever since.

It's simply not possible to grab all of those threads and collect them in one essay, so I didn't bother trying. Instead, I elect to focus on just one of the many cinematic trends that passed through the bottleneck of 1999, the fad that dominated the second half of the decade of adapting classic works of literature into the high-stakes world of American high school. I confess that my choice was aided by the years and years I've been told that I absolutely needed, just needed right the fuck now, to finally see 10 Things I Hate About You. This was serendipitous: while I can't swear to its timeless important in the development of cinema the way the way I might about Fight Club or The Sixth Sense or even something totally disreputable like The Mummy, I don't think I could have consciously come up with anything that more perfectly captured what the late '90s felt like if that had been my sole intention. Also, everyone who told me was right: I did, in fact, needed to see it right the fuck now, because on top of everything else, it's one of the absolute best teen-driven romantic comedies that I have ever seen.

So, about that perfect embodiment of 1999: herewith, a motion picture that stars Julia Stiles, whose name is featured drawn in bold, sketchy style in magic marker colors during the opening credits, while the Barenaked Ladies' "One Week" bounces its way across the soundtrack. The film at least has the forward-thinking wisdom to make this last detail a joke: the undying Ladies dominate the soundtrack until until we see Stiles herself pull up to a red light next to a bunch of giddy, pop-loving girls, blasting Joan Jett's "Bad Reputation" loud enough to drown them out. I cannot say whether the filmmakers planned for this to be a sign that her character, Kat Stratford, is completely awesome or a bitch; but it made me like her a lot, anyway.

The awesome/bitch divide is, in many ways, the heart and soul of 10 Things I Hate About You. For the film is a dressed-up retelling of The Taming of the Shrew, a late entry in the great explosion of William Shakespeare adaptations that flourished in the 1990s, on top of the "put it in high school" trend that had been purring along steadily since Clueless in 1995 (the Venn diagram combining these two trends also contains William Shakespeare's Romeo + Juliet and O, and I believe nothing else; though it wouldn't do to not at least mention the modern dress Hamlet with Ethan Hawke). And The Taming of the Shrew brings with it an amount of baggage like no other Shakespeare play outside of The Merchant of Venice. To wit, the play's sexual politics, which may or may not be as straightforward as they seem (the amount of irony to be read into the last scene is not, that I am aware, a settled matter), but they seem pretty damn toxic. And this makes any modern treatment of the play a project that needs to be handled with delicacy, especially a modern treatment set among teenagers.

So while we are surely meant to recognise in Kat a certain stiffness and problematic standoffishness - there couldn't be a plot if she didn't have to be redeemed in some way - Karen McCullah & Kirsten Smith's screenplay also has to allow plenty of room for us to like her just the way she is, a blunt, tough-talking punk kid with an appealingly sharp tongue. To a certain degree, the writers game things by surrounding Kat with transparently unacceptable people: her sister, Bianca (Larisa Oleynik) is a shrill, bubble-headed twit (established early and firmly in a beautiful line of character-establishing dialogue: "I like my Skechers, but I love my Prada backpack"), and her father Walter (Larry Miller) is a deranged anti-sex lunatic, owing to his work with pregnant teens. It's impossible not to like the "bad girl" when the people she's being contrasted with are so immensely vacuous. And so we end up not with Kate the Shrew, but with something more complicated and ambivalent: Kat the Riot Grrrl but also Kat with the Self-Negating Priorities. The character is a bit artless, and Stiles's clipped performance in the film's early going doesn't do much to flesh out the humanity in a distinctly artificial part, but it's perhaps the best that could be done.

Anyway, the film mostly follows the story play quite closely, doing a decent job of finding analogues for things that need updating: the newcomer to Padua High is one Cameron James (Joseph Gordon-Levitt), who falls hard for Bianca on day 1, only to find that her father has forbidden both of his daughters to date before college. Except that he's just changed the rule a little bit, in a bit of nasty-minded sophistry worthy of Cinderella's stepmother: Bianca can date only when older sister Kat has a boyfriend. And since Kat has decided that she's better than every other person attending Padua and would rather die than touch any of them, this is as good as a chastity belt. Except, that Cameron and his friend/co-conspiracist Michael (David Krumholtz) come up with a plan: hint that his his rival for Bianca's hand, Joey (Andrew Keegan), should pay to hire somebody to ask Kat out. And the target is the sullen, alienated bad boy Patrick Verona (Heath Ledger), one of the only people at Padua who can go toe-to-toe with Kat on her snarling antisocial nastiness.

If 10 Things I Hate About You ends up falling into a lot of the narrative rhythms of any old romcom, this is at least partially because Shakespeare's plays did a lot to invent those rhythms: not the grimly de rigueur bit where the third act needs to be ushered in by the discovery of a terrible secret taken somewhat out of context, and the lovers have a fake fight (something that wasn't as ossified in 1999 as it is now; I think 2003's How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days is what carved it into stone). I expect that nobody could be genuinely surprised by the direction the plot headed, even if they hadn't read the play, but formulas do not need to aplogise for themselves when they're executed well; this is a lesson that the works of Shakespeare teach us if they can teach us anything (after all, all but three of his plays were remakes). And in 10 Things I Hate About You, the formulas work splendidly, thanks largely to the energy with which McCullah & Smith draw their characters, and the way Gil Junger directs his awfully solid cast into a breezy, bantery register of dancing at each other with salty quips. It proves once again something that should have been obvious since the 1930s, but never seems to stick for very long these days: romantic comedies are best when they play as a series of verbal battles of bright, staccato dialogue, and then that dialogue is as filthy as the circumstances will allow. In the screwball era, that meant high-concept innuendo. In the case of the PG-13 10 Things I Hate About You, that means a lot of surprisingly bold chatter about sex that avoids feeling raunchy solely because the actors always speak their lines like they're trying to score points against a debate opponent, rather than because they actually seem to be thinking much about sex. Which I mean as a compliment.

There's too much naturalism in the film, particularly in the form of Ledger's bracingly caustic performance (it was the film that put him on the map, and while it's not at all one of his best performances, it's obvious throughout that he's got some real acting chops, far beyond the usual teenybopper pretty guy), for it to feel like a long-lost '30s film made about '90s teens, though honestly, the pacing of it is much closer to that than to the logy romcoms of the modern era. For all that the hook and the soundtrack make it sound like a generic teen-audience cash-in, the film is shockingly committed to functioning as a character-driven comedy, and when Stiles starts to loosen up as her character gets more flexible, it turns out to be a pretty delightful one.

Genre will be what it will be, and there's nothing surprising in 10 Things I Hate About You at the level of writing, and nothing remotely inspired or memorable at the level of film craftsmanship: it has the stolidity of the modern romcom, cleanly lit and squarely focused. But it's got good bones: a sturdy structure on which well-built jokes are arrayed, delivered with in-character nuance by a relaxed, enjoyable cast (also appearing: a delightfully curt Allison Janney and a frightfully fresh-faced Gabrielle Union). Nothing world-changing, and in 1999, films that were content to be the best piece of finely-tuned entertainment they could be seemed about as unambitious as at any other time in history. But for all its period trappings in slang, in style, and in tone, the film has aged well: good meat-and-potatoes filmmaking is never easy, and it's certainly never disposable. 10 Things I Hate About You is low-key and has small goals, but the way in which it meets those goals is in line with the best tradition of audience-pleasing Hollywood craftsmanship all through the years.

Elsewhere in American cinema in 1999
-South Park: Bigger, Longer & Uncut becomes the highest-grossing adults-only animated film of all time
-Samuel L. Jackson makes a memorable exit from Deep Blue Sea
-Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me is one of the largest hits ever greenlit on the basis of its predecessor's cult success on home video

Elsewhere in world cinema in 1999
-Filthy-minded Spanish melodramatist Pedro Almodóvar suddenly has an enormous critical smash with the sublime All About My Mother
-Kang Je-gyu's Shiri is the first homegrown megablockbuster made in the rejuvenating South Korean film industry
-French madman Leos Carax makes certainly his hardest, and maybe his best film, Pola X

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CHICAGO INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL '13: H4 (PAUL QUINN, USA)

Screens at CIFF: 10/19 & 10/20
World premiere: 19 October, 2013, Chicago International Film Festival

I should open with the disclaimer that I'm not sure if the version of H4 screened at the Chicago International Film Festival, and thus the version that I'm reviewing, has been completed. There are places where the sound mix has a harsh tang that suggests it has one more sweetening session to go, and in at least two places there are mistakes in the editing that go beyond "this wasn't the right editorial choice" and into "this isn't final cut" - a few frames of timestamp visible in the corner, for example. This matters on an ethical level, to start with, but it's also possible, if the film hasn't completely wrapped up its post-production, that it hasn't gone through its final image correction either, and that could very well address one of my absolute biggest problems with the movie. As I hear more about this, I will change things here as appropriate.

In the meantime, the film: a passion project for executive producer and co-star Harry Lennix, financed on Kickstarter (a triumph for that service in a way that e.g. Spike Lee or Rob "Veronica Mars" aren't), in which William Shakespeare's two Henry IV plays are brought into contemporary Los Angeles and played out among the African-American community there. As I had not expected going into it, Shakespeare's language is left almost entirely intact, with place names changed to reflect the realities of the world it's depicting; Hal (Amad Jackson) is now the "Prince of Watts", and there is a contingent of warlike Jamaicans, for example. The first few times these changes make themselves felt, it's weird and distracting, but I quickly got used to it, and much prefer it to the more desperate approach of William Shakespeare's Romeo + Juliet, for example, which tries to argue that "Sword" is the name of a gun manufacturer.

We have, anyway, the familiar story of Henry IV (Lennix), who usurped the leadership of a people in the hopes that a strong hand could keep the peace in a difficult time, though of course the heirs to leadership with a better claim didn't agree. Henry's son Hal is too busy drinking and fooling around with the dissolute John Falstaff (Angus Macfadyen) to attend to matters of state, and the ruler pangs to have a son more honorable and concerned with political realities. To be more like Harry "Hotspur" Percy (Geno Monteiro), currently fighting under the command of Worcester (Keith David) to put Edmund Mortimer (Kevin Yarbrough) in power over Henry, and the fact that his ideal son is currently fighting against him causes Henry great consternation.

The film is a noble experiment entirely, though I'm not absolutely sure that applying the dramatic situation of 15th Century English dynastic politics to the daily life of L.A. African-Americans does a whole lot to elucidate the experiences of the latter group. And I'm entirely certain that it doesn't do all that much to elucidate Shakespeare, though that has more to do with the choices of compression made by the writers, more than anything to do with the setting - in order to fit two plays into less than two hours, most of the material not directly concerning the politics have to be carved out, which means less Falstaff, which makes all of us unhappy, but it also means less Hal, which makes the drama less interesting (it also means more Henry IV, which is actually to the film's benefit, given that Lennix is giving the very best performance of the whole cast, moody and tormented and regal in all the right ways). Also, the film accentuates just how much the plays are separate, and how they can't be stuck together in one package without the climax feeling misapplied badly - the Henry IV, Part 1 material ends about 90 minutes in, and the rest of the film feels bulky and padded.

The worse problem is that it looks a little funky: for no reason that is ever clear to me, Henry's court is literally inside a theater, and half the time it feels like we're meant to understand that the characters are play-acting, not going through the literal reality of their story, except that much of the film takes place in actual Los Angeles, clearly melding Shakespeare and this time & place to much better effect than the theater scenes do. It's also been weirdly shot, with uneven lighting and a sense of cheapness that undercuts the seriousness of the drama.

Even with all of that being true - and it is not little stuff - I thoroughly enjoyed the thing. For one, there's the novelty of transporting Shakespeare to a bold new setting, and even if the adaptation focuses on elements I shouldn't have done myself, it's still 1 Henry IV, one of the playwright's best works, and seeing it rejuvenated like this is terrifically appealing. Especially since most of the performances are very good (only Lennix and David rise to great), with just a couple of actors who clearly don't understand the nuances of what their lines mean or what their function in the drama is meant to be. Certainly the Hal/Henry relationship, which is this adaptation's primary concern, comes through beautifully here, with all of Jackson's best work coming in his scenes with Lennix (in contrast, he plays the Falstaff scenes almost entirely as foil to Macfadyen, whose Falstaff is suitably comic but not very humane - but then, he's been stripped of some of his most humanising moments).

The thing might be best thought of as a visually uncertain recording of several engaging performances - a staged reading, basically. Probably not the ideal way to handle the project, and I'd love to see the concept get a more thorough workout with more budget and resources to flesh it out, but even in this form, H4 is a damn unique thing, and entirely worth the enthusiasm its makers felt for it. It might be compromised, but it still ends up in a worthy, honorable place.

7/10

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FOR WHICH OF MY BAD PARTS DIDST THOU FIRST FALL IN LOVE WITH ME?

It's an open question whether Joss Whedon's Much Ado About Nothing really deserves to exist at all. Made during post-production on the writer-director's mammoth effects extravaganza The Avengers, and specifically intended to clear his head and wash the taste of green screens and Disney/Marvel's omnipresence out of his mouth, the film is populated with a host of actors from his various TV projects, all goofing around in Whedon's huge (and honestly, sort of fussy) Santa Monica house and yard. Apparently, "let's do a Shakespeare reading!" parties have been a fixture of the Whedon home for some time now, and for once, he decided to fully stage and film it. So what we've basically got here is a home movie of a bunch of friends and colleagues putting on a show, and as sweet as it is, it never quite shakes off the feeling that the world would not be manifestly worse off if Whedon just made a present of it to all the collaborators, never to share it with any outsider, as when Steven Soderbergh made a private gift of The Last Time I Saw Michael Gregg to its cast, the ensemble of a stage play he was directing at the time.

All of this is moot, of course. We do have the Whedon Much Ado out in the world for ever and always, and as much as it's a visibly rough, DIY sort of thing, it's not at all without its charms; indeed, the DIY quality is very much part of what makes it charming, and makes it possible to agree to overlook some of the dodgier missteps of acting or staging (there are surprisingly few of the latter, perhaps because the director knew the location as intimately as one conceivably could). It is, for better or worse, a film that is plainly not taking itself at all seriously in any regard, which discourages us from taking it seriously either. If the result is less tony, polished, conceptually sound, and admirable than the 1993 Much Ado spearheaded by Kenneth Branagh (still the best filmed adaptation of a Shakespeare comedy, which is admittedly not a terribly competitive achievement), it makes up for it by being funnier, and given the imposing cultural barriers involved, making a filmed Shakespearean comedy consistently and genuinely funny is certainly no mean feat.

Bumping the material up to the present day, Whedon's thoroughly faithful realization of the text is not particularly thought-through - why do all these people meandering around in what could not be any other place than Southern California keep using Italian place-names? - and besides "because the director had easy access to it, and it is ludicrously photogenic", there's never an entirely satisfactory answer to why this story has to take place in this setting (it becomes especially weird when the action shifts to a child's bedroom, demanding that we confront who among any of the characters onscreen could possibly have children).

But again, a certain shagginess isn't just built in to this adaptation, it's driving it, and what simply dropping Much Ado into the 2010s without self-consciously showing us how he's worked through all of the details, as in William Shakespeare's Romeo + Juliet, Whedon manages to knock quite a lot of fustiness out of the film, thus staying clear of one of the biggest traps that every Shakespeare movie has to be aware of. "Just enjoy the ride", implies the occasionally off-kilter staging, and boy, if the rest of the film isn't dedicated to making that possible: the breezy line deliveries that do their damnedest to bury the metrical rhythms of the writing, the coolly jazzy score (composed by Whedon himself), the too-sharp, fashion-magazine glossy black and white cinematography by Jay Hunter.

It's a relentelessly casual, modern Shakespearean comedy, then, one buoyed up some terrific physical comedy in the staging (and Whedon is fantastic at coaxing goofy reaction shots out of his actors), and served fairly well by a cast that treats it all as so much screwball sex farce banter. And that's kind of the problem as well: Much Ado '12 Edition is fizzy and shallow by design, and it glosses over all the sharp edges and insights that make the play work (though at the same time, rendering this play, with its central bickering lovers, as a conventional romantic comedy pays off better than the same approach would with the more complex Twelfth Night or As You Like It). The cast is uniformly better than I'd expected, though the only generally flawless performance is Clark Gregg's Leonato; outside of him (and Nathan Fillion as Dogberry, a one-note comic figure that the actor plays with unmodulated gusto), not a single major player escapes from the movie without a few lines where it's clear that they don't quite have a handle on what the words they're saying mean, with Alexis Denisof in particular, as Benedick, appearing to never have quite managed to convince himself that using archaic language in the context of Whedon's palatial home is a defensible idea.

But some infelicities of language aside, the actors have pretty solid chemistry, and Amy Acker's Beatrice is an effectively sardonic, modern-tastes expansion of a character who is, outside of AYLI's Rosalind, already the most contemporary-feeling woman in a Shakespearean comedy (weirdly, the lines that give Acker the most trouble aren't the most obscure ones; I get the impression that iambic pentameter was a bigger stumbling block for her than Elizabethan syntax). Like the rest of the movie, she trades in shadings of character for momentary effect: the underlying bitterness that can (but doesn't have to be) a component of Beatrice's personality is present but awfully muted, and she's too willing to play the part on the surface; but that's what fits the performances around her, and the movie itself.

The whole thing is a trifle, pretty clearly, and on that level it works. Much Ado requires less work than many of Shakespeare's plays to begin with, even among the comedies, and by transmitting it more or less directly as a stylish but simple comedy of sophisticated people spouting witty imprecations at each other, Whedon humanises the material and situates it in an easy-to-watch register. There are moments of cleverness (the climactic use of a smart phone is one of the best modern-day Shakespeare touches I've ever seen), and moments of inspired comic staging, and very little probing insight, either cinematic or literary. But it proves better than any other modernised adaptions of Shakespeare that I can name that there's a way to freshen up the feeling of the plays without attempting to subvert them in any way, making an overfamiliar classic seem bright and fresh. One for the groundlings, perhaps; but they were always the biggest part of Shakespeare's audience.

7/10

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