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Culture > Entertainment

Fans Weighed In On Why ’10 Things I Hate About You’ Is The Perfect Movie & It’s Just Too Good To Be True

Kait Wilbur

I love high school romantic comedies, and I miss them with every fiber of my being. John Hughes left a legacy with movies like The Breakfast Club and Sixteen Candles in the ’80s—and there was a resurgence in the ’90s with films like She’s All That. We even had Mean Girls in the early 2000s.

But it seems I’m not alone in having this hole in my heart. Over the weekend, writer Alanna Bennett started a discussion, down to the details, about why the perfect example of the genre, 10 Things I Hate About You, is such a truly good movie.

10 Things I Hate About You, an adaptation of Shakespeare’s play The Taming of the Shrew, came out in 1999. It stars an adorable young Joseph Gordon-Levitt as a high school boy trying to get the father of Bianca (Larisa Oleynik), a girl he likes, to relax his rules on his daughters dating. He attempts this by convincing a bad boy (Heath Ledger) to pursue Bianca’s uber-feminist older sister, Kat (Julia Stiles). (If you haven’t seen it, it’s really really good.)

Fans engaged with Bennett, talking about exactly which of the film’s elements combine to make it such an amazing experience. Some mentioned Kat’s ahead-of-her-time realness.

People shared lots of love for background characters, like teachers and the father of Kat and her sister Bianca.

Naturally, people were obsessing with Heath Ledger himself, and his perfect moment of sending the marching band to play Frankie Valli’s “Can’t Take My Eyes Off Of You” and serenade Kat during soccer practice.

The writers of the movie, Kirsten Smith and Karen McCullah, even saw the Twitter love-fest!

So I guess we don’t need new high school romantic comedies. We already have the perfect one. Case closed, heart full.

Kait Wilbur is an aggressively optimistic individual obsessed with sitcoms, indie music, and pop culture in general. She hails from Manito, a rural wasteland in Illinois so small and devoid of life that she took up writing to amuse herself. Kait goes to Butler University to prepare for a career in advertising, but all she really wants to do is talk about TV for a living. You can find her at any given moment with her earbuds in pretending to do homework but actually looking at surrealist memes.