{"id":12835,"date":"2010-03-02T10:46:33","date_gmt":"2010-03-02T18:46:33","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.kith.org\/journals\/jed\/2010\/03\/02\/12835.html"},"modified":"2010-03-02T10:46:33","modified_gmt":"2010-03-02T18:46:33","slug":"review-shes-the-man","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/2010\/03\/02\/review-shes-the-man\/","title":{"rendered":"Review: She’s the Man"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Kam and I watched She's the Man<\/cite> last night.<\/p>\n

And loved it.<\/p>\n

For those who haven't heard of it (as I hadn't until recently), this is a 2006 movie that reworks Twelfth Night<\/cite> and transplants it to a modern American high school.<\/p>\n

We were a little nervous at first, given that the previews included on the DVD were mostly for movies that looked terrible; we had the usual \"If these previews indicate the target audience for the movie, we're in trouble\" kind of reaction.<\/p>\n

But we needn't have worried. The movie itself started us laughing (in a good way) in the first few minutes, and kept us laughing most of the way through to the end.<\/p>\n

Turns out the original script involved a girl dressing as a boy in order to be allowed to play the lead in a school production of Hamlet<\/cite>. Which, in addition to being a little too close to part of the plot of Shakespeare in Love<\/cite>, I think just wouldn't have worked nearly as well.<\/p>\n

Fortunately, the writers of Ten Things I Hate About You<\/cite> came in and worked on the script. It's unclear to me how much reworking they did, but the resulting movie has soccer in place of Shakespeare—which normally might not be a good trade, but I suspect it's a significantly better movie than the original script would've resulted in. Seeing a girl successfully competing with boys at sports is more compelling for me than seeing a girl successfully compete with boys at acting; the idea of a girl playing Hamlet (in the modern US), while a fine idea, just isn't that cutting-edge these days.<\/p>\n

Anyway, the movie is a good, albeit necessarily loose, adaptation of the original play. The plot of Twelfth Night<\/cite> is simplified, a couple of characters are condensed into one, and most of the play's language is tossed out. But the movie's director does like the play, and there are a bunch of cute little nods to it, including a few that I missed entirely; most especially, I wish I had noticed that at one point the Malvolio equivalent wears yellow diamond-patterned socks.<\/p>\n

A lot of the charm of the movie comes from Amanda Bynes as Viola\/Sebastian (she takes on the name Sebastian rather than Cesario). I don't think I was aware of her before, but she was great in this; among other things, she does a bunch of great and funny facial expressions. And apparently she did most of her own soccer-playing.<\/p>\n

The movie shies away from anything queer or trans in the main relationships; it doesn't mess with gender or same-sex attraction as much as some productions of Twelfth Night<\/cite> do. But there is an understated but delightful probably-gay secondary character.<\/p>\n

Anyway. Totally charming movie, very much worth seeing.<\/p>\n

And it would probably make a good double feature with Bend It Like Beckham<\/cite> (for the girls playing soccer) or with Ten Things I Hate About You<\/cite> and\/or Clueless<\/cite> (for the high school adaptation of classics).<\/p>\n

Thanks to KH for indirectly pointing me to it!<\/p>\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Kam and I watched She’s the Man last night. And loved it. For those who haven’t heard of it (as…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[44,43],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-12835","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-movies","category-reviews"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12835","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=12835"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12835\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=12835"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=12835"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=12835"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}