Tag Archives: 10 Things I Hate About You

Movie Review – Ten Reasons Why I Love 10 Things I Hate About You

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TL;DR – A joy to watch from start to finish   

Score – 4.5 out of 5 stars

Post-Credit Scene – There is a mid-credit scene

10 Things I Hate About You. Image Credit: Disney.

Review –

A while ago when I was writing my Top 10 Films of All Time, I mentioned that one of the contenders for the list was 10 Things I Hate About You. To this day, I keep going back and forth on that list and how that would probably be one of the changes I would make. With this in mind, and because I was feeling a bit glum, today I cracked open the TV put out a cheese platter and dived back into this seminal film from my youth, and boy does it still hold up.

So to set the scene, we open in on Cameron James (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) a new student at Padua High School as he is shown around all the groups and hierarchies by Michael Eckman (David Krumholtz). It is here where he spies the enchanting Bianca Stratford (Larisa Oleynik) and is immediately entranced. The one small catch (other she has no idea who he is) is that it is widely known that the Stratford sisters can’t date. Well, all that changes when Walter Stratford (Larry Miller), Bianca’s dad changes the rule, Bianca can date when her sister Kat (Julia Stiles) dates. This sets off a chain reaction that involves bad boy Patrick Verona (Heath Ledger), local cashed-up rich boy Joey Donner (Andrew Keegan) and a school formal that goes disastrously wrong.      

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TV Review – Sex Education: Season 2

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TL;DR – This is a show that deals with sex and sexuality in a very frank and refreshing way which you will find endlessly engaging or very off-putting

Score – 4 out of 5 stars

Sex Education: Season 2. Image Credit: Netflix.

Review –

There are some shows that are irreverent for no reason other than the fact that cheap humour gets looks, so pitching your show at the lowest common denominator is a good business model. The crassness has no reason to be there bar being a punchline for people to awkwardly laugh about. However, once in a while you get a show that goes through all the different sex jokes you can have, and indeed it starts with a montage about someone discovering masturbation, however, not once is it about playing it low but instead, it finds a voice for those who don’t quite know how to express each other.

So to set the scene, at the end of last season everything at Moordale Secondary School was in a state of flux with Adam (Connor Swindells) being sent away to military school, Maeve (Emma Mackey) has been expelled, and while Otis (Asa Butterfield) final finds someone to love him back with Ola (Patricia Allison) but it comes at the expense of his one true love Maeve. In the time since Otis has discovered how to achieve release, Maeve has started work in a local mall to get by, Eric (Ncuti Gatwa) has developed a crush on the new kid Rahim (Sami Outalbali), and Otis’ mum Jean (Gillian Anderson) is still seeing Ola’s father Jakob (Mikael Persbrandt) even though they had told their kids that they had broken up. Which is the perfect storm for a chlamydia outbreak to cause the school to fall into a state of chaos. Now we will be looking at the season as a whole, so there may be some [SPOILERS] ahead.

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TV Review – Sex Education: Season One

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TL;DR – It a show where sex is very much front and centre, however, it is actually the relationships that actually shine through.

Score – 4 out of 5 stars

Sex Education. Image Credit: Netflix.

Review –

There are some people who would like a do over, go back in time and do high school all over again, or indeed there are those people who never left. I would never go back to that hellscape of hormones, and finding yourself while the world gets ripped out from underneath you. Well today we look at a series that explores that very time period in all its uncomfortableness.

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Countdown – My Personal Top 10 Films of All Time List

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TL;DR – Today we countdown my Top 10 films of all time; from towns where there are a lot of ‘accidents’, to all forms of Sci-Fi, to do you know the man with six fingers on his right hand, and everything in between.

Countdown –

Recently I watched the CineFix crew countdown their Top 10 films, and it had me thinking what are mine? Now it was at this point where I of course naturally spiralled as how can you reduce thousands of films that you have seen into only a Top 10. Just before I threw my hands up in resignation and chucked in the towel I happened to catch an episode of Movies with Mikey on how he determined the best sequel. With this in mind I wondered if there was a set of criteria that I could use to categorise the films into a list that I would be happy with, and after some work, I came up with the following criteria that work for me.

  • Films that are beautifully constructed
  • Films that mean something to me
  • Films that are always re-watchable
  • Films that have added to my love of the craft of cinema

With this criterion in mind I went through all the likely candidates and with a bit of a struggle I think I have been able to come to a final list, well at least until I change my mind next week, which is always a chance.

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Movie Review – To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before

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TL;DR – It looks at the complicated emotions of love and how we respond to it.

Score – 3.5 out of 5 stars

Post-Credit Scene – There is a mid-credit scene

To All the Boys I've Loved Before. Image Credit: Netflix

Review –

The teen romance is a genre that use to be very popular but you don’t see it as much anymore in recent times. Part of the reason is that quite often these were the mid-tier films falling between Indy and Blockbusters that got squeezed out of oblivion in the rush for everyone to make their tent pole crossover franchises. Also the genre has gone through some shifts in the wake of works like John Green’s The Fault In Our Stars. However, as people realise that the big multi-film franchise can’t happen all the time, we have started to see the resurgence of these mid-tier budget films and all of this brings us to today’s film To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before a Young Adult/Coming of Age film about love and loss and the need to hide your letters better from well-meaning but potentially destructive siblings.

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Movie Review – Spy

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TL;DR – It is a film that does not know if it wants to be a PG family action film, or an R raunchy exercise, and ends up being neither

Score – 2 out 5 Stars

Spy. Image Credit: 20th Century Fox.

Review –

In the end, my feeling on this film are quite mixed, some aspects of it really worked and others just really didn’t. I would describe this movie as a collage, where the writer/director Paul Feig has taken ideas from a number of movies and melded it all together into this film, and not always successfully. To explain what I mean, I going to break down the different components of the film, and yes this is about to get spoilery (You have been warned).

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