Director: Gil Junger
Cast: Julia Stiles, Heath Ledger, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Larisa Oleynik
Have I Seen it Before: Yes. I’m struggling to remember if I saw it in the theater. I know being an adolescent in the early portions of the 21st century, I might have just absorbed the movie, but I want to say I actually went and saw it in the theater. It’s telling about me that I’m far more bothered by not remembering when I first saw this movie than I am by not remembering anything that actually happened to me before I turned age 18.
Did I Like It: There’s no denying that in the post-Hughes era of teen comedies, this one is—if not smarter—certainly the most literate entry. Orange County (2002) is perhaps more manically funny, Election (1999) is a little more relevant to our current rolling national nightmare, but this one’s based on a Shakespeare play, and the movie will not let fifteen minutes of screen time roll by without reminding us of that. It’s still something of a virtue.
The title is… fine. If it had nothing more to recommend it, I have a vision of it disappearing in the gust of wind that swept every last Blockbuster Video from the earth.
Its more tangible virtues lie in the sudden emergence of Heath Ledger as a verifiable movie star. He’s certainly the most interesting actor on first blush, but the fact that he seemed to arrive with all of his charisma in full on this, his first major release. Maybe his reputation as a latter-day James Dean only makes this debut more remarkable, but name for me the amount of verifiable film stars that arrived like this. Maybe the film around him could have been more memorable, but it could have also been a real shitshow.