She’s the Man operates at a less literal level than such ’80s drag comedies as Soul Man and Just One of the Boys, and it’s not a sophisticated comedy-of-drag manners like Clare Peploe’s dazzling 2002 film of Marivaux’s The Triumph of Love. Instead, director Andy Fickman and a trio of screenwriters simplify Shakespeare’s plot to offer an innocuous, but buoyant, moral lesson. Avoiding the gender pathology of Boys Don’t Cry, they’ve done what most purveyors of pop culture don’t think to do: borrow from the past for edification. She’s the Man’s modest and, yes, corny use of Shakespeare offers contemporary filmgoers what Max Ophuls called The Memory of Justice.
Most purveyers of pop culture don't think to use the past for edification in film? Is he kidding me? The past ten to fifteen years of popular mainstream film have been nothing but homages to classic literature and theatre. Clueless was based on Jane Austen's Emma. She's All That was based on My Fair Lady, which was based on the Greek play Pygmalion. 10 Things I Hate About You was based on The Taming of the Shrew (which was also the inspiration for Kiss Me Kate.) And in the name of all that is holy, what was Baz Luhrmann's Romeo + Juliet, if not a pop culture opus edifying Shakespeare's love story? What was Moulin Rouge, if not a mingling of the past and present to create a portrait of universal themes that everyone, including Shakespeare, have dwelled on? For crying out lout, what was freaking Shakespeare in Love?
And those are just the ones I could think of in the past five minutes.
She's the Man may be a fine ol' time (preliminary reports indicate that it actually isn't horrible- see here and here for other reviews) but it certainly isn't the first of it's kind, or even the most striking. If anything, the old "borrowing from the past for edification" game is getting a little tired.
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