Rules of Attraction (USA. 2002)

Writer/Director Roger Avary never gets a break. He co-writes Pulp Fiction and Tarantino steals all the credit, his first film as writer/director “Killing Zoe” is labelled as nothing more then a Tarantino wanabee and his script for Silent Hill is critically molested and its corpse is left to rot in a ditch on the high way (So I’ve heard)

Good thing he has Rules of Attraction to fall back on…Oh…That’s hated too?

(From DVDTALK.com)

Set at the fictional Camden College, the film starts off at an "End of the World" party, where we're introduced to low-level drug dealer Sean Bateman (James Van Der Beek), who is attracted to Lauren (Shannyn Sossamon), who he thinks is sending him secret letters proclaiming her attraction. Victor (Kip Pardue) is Lauren's boyfriend, but he's in Europe. There's also Paul (Ian Somerhalder), who used to date Lauren, but now is interested in Sean. Add to this several more supporting characters, more bouncing around in time and pretty much about everything you'd expect from material by Ellis.


Rules of Attraction is a stylistic cocktail with a lemon flavoured poison center. Every trick in the film-school book is thrown at the viewers face as Avary jams it down you’re throat and screams “You think you’re choking now? YOU AIN’T SEEN NOTHING YET!”. Fast Forward, Reverse, Split-Screens, Blow Out Colors, Voice-Over, Multi- Person Perspective…all of it dances on screen till it can dance no more. The first time I saw ROA I was more enthralled with all the tricks on screen then the actual content. The despicable characters and story (What story?) were nothing but blips on my peripheral vision. I wanted to see that Split-Screen backwards slow motion shot that morphs into one single frame!

The main problem here is the subject matter. James Van Der Beek as our main man Sean Bateman (Brother of Serial Killer Patrick in the Ellis penned “American Psycho”) is scum on two legs. He has absolutely no redeeming values of any kind. Everyone else on screen is also self-absorbed, spoiled and pretty despicable in every sense of the word. It’s only a emotio plucking final act that a little bit of humanity starts to bleed onto the audience, but for many, by that time it’s too late. Avary was a smart man to use so much style to keep you watching for so long but it’s a shame he couldn’t keep us more invested in the film on other leves other then the “Golly Wow! Did you SEE that?” level. Seek it out, watch it, and prepared to be impressed but not blown away.

DVD:

Six Audio Commentaries (With One by CARROT TOP!?) come packaged with the disk but they all have too many huge gaps of silence or good commentator/bad commentator mixed in to make it worth your time to shuffle through all of them. The Avary/Vanderbeek track is nowhere to be seen but can be found on the UNCUT (22 EXTRA seconds! Yay?) version that was released in the UK and France. There’s also a made for tv Sundance channel doc that skims the surface of the film and concentrates on the impressive split screen into one shot that everyone keeps talking about.