julia stiles

Wish You Were Here

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Charlotte and Adam

So you’re Julia Stiles and you decide to have a crack at directing a feature film. Wish You Were Here is the result, and, well well, if it isn’t a mash-up of precisely the sort of films Stiles used to star in when she was starting out, rom-com, girl-next-door, travails-of-the-teen-spirit-y kind of stuff – Ten Things I Hate about You most notably. She also wrote Wish You Were Here so this choice is clearly deliberate. Possibly Stiles is laying ghosts to rest or laughing at herself, it’s hard to say. What is clear is that her film is a mess until it properly works out which of the various early-Stiles-adjacent genres it really … Read more

The Omen

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Amy Huck as the nanny obeying Damien's orders in The Omen

Thirty years on, a pointless remake of the film that put quite a few bums on seats in 1976. Back then Gregory Peck was playing the American diplomat slowly realising he’s bringing up the spawn of Satan, and Lee Remick (an expert in lip-tightening panic) was the wife. This time Liev Schreiber and Julia Stiles have the dubious honour. In spite of the disaster movie craze and the example of the late career of Bette Davis, it was still quite unusual in the mid-1970s for a big star like Peck to appear in a horror movie – genre was for wimps. But the studios were realising that the likes of Jaws were changing … Read more

10 Things I Hate About You

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The Cast of 10 Things I Hate About You

Apparently if you’re drunk enough when you say the title of this film, it sounds like, “The Taming Of The Shrew”. Whatever. When it came out in 1999 it tapped into two of the big trends in the cinema of the time: the high-school drama (Cruel Intentions, Election, Rushmore) and adaptations of the Bard (Elizabeth, Shakespeare In Love). It’s a teen tangle in Shakespeare country that manages to be both reasonably faithful (depending on how you define “reasonably” and “faithful”) to Shakespeare’s original, but not so heavy-handedly that the average audience member will nod off. It also managed to cast two hot properties of the time – Julia Stiles, who at one point seemed … Read more