This is a theme that crops up time and again in romantic comedies, often being used as the excuse to get our two overly glamourous leads to end up together when the plot can't do it on its own. The central theme in Get Over It is that the person that you love now isn't necessarily the person that you're meant to be with. Tommy O'Haver isn't a brilliant director, but he does replicate the deliberate artificiality of the play-within-the-play it's not as easy as it sounds to get a good actor to play someone who can't act. While this is pretty common in teen dramas, the relationships between the actors in the film are reflected in their characters on stage in a way which is believable and amusing. Most obviously, it retains the structural device of the play-within-a-play, or in this case play-within-a-film. Taking the first approach, the film retains some key elements of the 'Dream which are played up to varying extents. To put it another way, we have a choice between attempting to justify it in the company of many more consciously high-brow efforts, or to defend it as a surprisingly good offering in a genre sadly associated with all that is low-brow, clichéd and disappointing. One is to judge it in terms of its fidelity to Shakespeare's play, and the other is to judge it according to our expectations of teen comedies. There are two angles from which we can approach Get Over It. While being far from perfect as either a Shakespeare adaptation or a teen comedy, it's not without its charms. Alongside more famous teen offerings like Romeo Must Die and 10 Things I Hate About You, we find Get Over It, a loose reworking of A Midsummer Night's Dream with a bright, shiny colour palette and a pre-Spider-Man Kirsten Dunst.
If we remove this distinction, however, we broaden the landscape of films which attempt to bring Shakespeare to a more modern, often younger audience. While there are many so-called vernacular adaptations that I admire in some way, I felt that disposing of the language somehow made these versions less faithful: losing the unique speech pattern of Shakespeare robs many of his greatest lines of their power and meaning. Reducing over 100 years of cinema down to a top ten is no easy task, so to make it easier I restricted my list to adaptations which retained Shakespeare's dialogue. Last November, I wrote an article for WhatCulture! in which I cited my ten favourite film adaptations of William Shakespeare plays.
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