I had wanted to see Rules of Attraction for a good long while after seeing the trailer in 2002 but I just never got around to it. I finally saw the movie and I almost drove it back to the library as soon as I finished because I didn’t want it in my house anymore.
But I think my hatred of the movie is really driven home by it’s treatment of the “innocent” characters:
Lauren is held up as the paragon of purity and innocence even though she:
Is constantly drunk
Gives her professor a blow job after she asks him “Do you want to fuck me?” and he refuses
Does more blow than Tony Montana
Just because she’s never had a dick inside her, she’s still a rotten person.
And then there’s “The Ugly Duckling” who writes Dawson love letters and eventually kills herself:
A wallflower such as herself would never go to a school like Camden
I highly doubt she’d commit herself solely to an asshole like Dawson without even speaking to him
And even if she did want all those things, just being at a school that is a constant orgy should give her plenty of options after Dawson doesn’t ask her out even though she’s never spoken to him and he doesn’t know she’s writing the letters. God, how obvious do you have to be sometimes? He should just fucking know…
But to top it all off you lose all your credibility as an “ugly duckling” when during your only scene in the movie you get naked and there’s a close up of your near perfect body. And then the fact that the ugly duckling’s only other job before Rules of Attraction were modeling gigs. It is impossible for anyone to believe a model is an “ugly duckling.”
I simply enjoyed watching James van der Beek do his best Christian Bale-from-American Psycho impression. Fitting, since…
the character, Sean Bateman, is supposed to be the younger brother of Patrick Bateman from that film. Very nice, subtle reveal when the gay guy calls, and he calls him “Patrick?”
I think the movie stands pretty well on its own, even if it doesn’t exactly conform to what you want it to be. It’s an adaptation of a Bret Easton Ellis book by Roger Avary, for God’s sake – you can’t possibly think it was going to be uplifting or anything.
It is what it is, I suppose. I liked it, but I knew what I was getting myself into.
Eh, I liked the movie for the most part. Enough to buy it, in fact, which doesn’t happen very often and which I freely admit was largely because of the fact that Ian Sommerhander is both gorgeous and featured prominenty in boxer briefs.
I feel like most of your criticisms were kind of just… the point of the movie. These people are the most self-centered, spoiled, petty, and vapid people on the face of the planet. So of course Sean would still find a cokehead like Lauren “pure”, and of course the ugly duckling would kill herself over something as stupid as being turned down by a guy she never even talked to.
Although if anyone could explain to me the scene where Paul and a couple of his friends take the freshman to the hospital, it would be appreciated. It’s kind of funny, but I have absolutely no idea what’s going on.
Paul saw that the frosh and his friends were freaking out but it was nothing of consequence. All the doctor did at the hospital was messing with them.
As for the movie, it was interesting to see how Sean could have done what he did. It seems like at the end of the movie, rather than bedding the surfer chick from Blue Crush, he rode off on his motorcycle and thought about
[QUOTE=shy guy]
Eh, I liked the movie for the most part. Enough to buy it, in fact, which doesn’t happen very often and which I freely admit was largely because of the fact that Ian Sommerhander is both gorgeous and featured prominenty in boxer briefs.
[quote]
Yes, he’s quite something is Mr. Sommerhalder.
For me the whole point of the movie was that those characters who realized how pointless their lives were, Lauren and Pau, survived, while those characters like Sean who didn’t were punished.
I think I would have liked the book. I really disliked the movie because of what seemed to be all the pointless rewind/fast-forward foofarrah, conspicuous camera tricks, and out-of-time storytelling. Also, Jessica Biel seemes to me a heroic character for sleeping with James van der Beek, because she did it to protect Lauren who, unlike her, wasn’t emotionally able to have meaningless sex and would have ended up falling in love with him, total bastard that he was. But then when he punched her out (hitting a woman – unforgiveable sin) it was played for laughs.
Probably the worst movie I’ve seen in a long time. Another reason not to trust online/geek movie critics (boobies = good movie).
It did contain one pretty nifty sequence – the one where the guy describes his Europe vacation in a series of quickly edited flashbacks, which in the middle of this piece of vapid, super-glossy, nonsense came as a complete surprise. My guess – second unit director.
Oh yes, the Europe sequence was great because it was so realistic. He was equally interested in getting drunk, getting laid, and getting educated, which is exactly what college kids are like.