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Underground > Film, TV & Theatre >

The rules of attraction

my cockroach Gonzalez

22:39 / 04.04.03

keep seeing posters for this on the tube - based of a book by the brett easton ellis who wrote american psycho.

i've seen the film of american psycho, but is this any good? what about the books?

not an author i've read before so i'm interested to hear what people think?

Tryphena Absent

18:57 / 05.04.03

This is probably in the wrong place but... whatever.

I went to see Rules of Attraction the other day. It was OK, a bit 1997 you know, boring old camera tricks but fun all the same. Liked the end credits because they made me laugh and the wardrobe people did a Mega Tokyo Fantastimo job on Sossawotsit (you know, the main actress, I can never remember her name) who I hate with passion because she can wear everything I can't. Dammit- fucking walking clothes horse.

The poster with its lurid colours and slight diagonal people positioning pretty much sums up the movie. It's a very good pre-representation. Basically if you want to fill time then you might as well go and watch it but I really didn't think it was all that striking. Oh and I prefer James Van Der Beek as a slightly crazy kid as opposed to Dawson.

20:27 / 05.04.03

James Van Der Beek is insufferable. I've not seen the film. He's just insufferable. Purely because of Dawson.

Harm him. Harm him with big sticks.

20:34 / 05.04.03

Ahem. I think Cholister would call that a big staff.

20:43 / 05.04.03

No, use a cudgel. Its like a cross between a cuddle and a huggle but with never ending pain!

20:57 / 05.04.03

I thought the film was fantastic, purely because we get to see James van der Beek cumming, jerking off, shitting and getting beaten up.

He destroyed hs Dawson image with gusto.

23:12 / 05.04.03

Dawson, you haunt my dreams!! ...ahem

23:25 / 05.04.03

shouted from a distance in style of hong kong kung fu movie

01:51 / 06.04.03

This movie is just incredible... that opening scene, where tha fille get's thrown up on durning the date rape... god, I know I'm going staight to hell for laughing at that, but damn it was funny. One of Van Der Beek's best performances by far. And yeah, he's insufferable, but only if you didn't like Tha Creek. I'm torn on that one....

14:28 / 18.04.03

I've yet to see the film, but may get a chance to view it at a friend's over the weekend. He thought it was quite good. He also mentioned to me that the movie makes reference to Patrick from American Psycho (phone call with the caller for Pat Bateman). Up until that point, I hadn't realized that Ellis' novels deal with the happenings of the same family. Kind of interesting...

23:39 / 22.04.03

I liked it...

21:41 / 24.04.03

a) Dawson, you haunt my dreams. No irony, just passion!
b) Has anyone heard anything about a second/special ed. DVD? Haven't bought it but need my fix.

00:54 / 27.04.03

Maybe it's because I hate pretentious directors that think by using every single camera trick they learned in college it's "artistic" or maybe it's because Bret Easton Ellis is a shit writer ... point is, I hated this film. At least American Psycho was funny in it's own stupid way, this wasn't. At all. Dumb, dull, pretentious and worst of all, James Dawson's Creek. Blech.

Oh, my advice -- Don't! Watch! It!

07:05 / 16.08.03

yeah, well I have just seen it, it wasn't that horrible like she said but uh it does suck. it is a bad adaptation from the novel, which I thought was very cool. oh yeah and it wasn't the same patrick bateman from american psycho, in the novel they have a chapter that is narrated by patrick(the novel is narrated by about twelve different folk, which was a lot of fun) and no its not the same character, same name but not the same character.
in the novel, the two characters sean and lauren do get together, so when lauren tells sean that it is over between them it actually makes sense, unlike in the movie where they don't ever become a couple and she tells him its over.
the best part of the film is the split screen where sean and lauren meet.
and her name is shannyn sossamon I think, and couldn't act her way out of paper bag.

22:39 / 16.08.03

I thought this film was awful, but I was strangely attracted to it after watching it. Is that the definition of a guilty pleasure? I could not believe the bathtub suicide scene. It is several minutes of watching a girl bleed to death in a bathtub with that horrendous "Can't Live" song slowly getting quiter and more muffled as the life drains out of this character, who I guess was more significant to the film than anyone suspects. It is quite hypnotic watching someone die slowly. Who knew?

01:54 / 17.08.03

I didn't understand the split screen part where lauren picks her up out of the blood filled tub, is that what she was thinking? and if so why?

02:45 / 17.08.03

wait, are you sure it's not the same bateman? because in Glamorama, bateman shows up, and the characters -- including Lauren -- know him from the college. the characters are continuous from one ellis book to another, aren't they?

04:24 / 17.08.03

well, I have yet to have read glamorama and american psycho completely, but the patrick chapter has the patrick sounding I think very different from patrick bateman from american psycho. Ellis probably uses the same names but they're not same characters, sort of like how chuck palahniuk uses the same sort of characters but with different names.

14:57 / 21.08.03

i did *not* enjoy this film overall. way too trying-to-be stylish for its own good. the kids from tv were trying to shake their good-kid images too hard (james and what's-her-name). especially james. if you know one thing about acting, know that you don't *play* evil. even evil people don't think they're evil. of course, given the crappy script, what could he really do.
my favorite part was the entire europe story/montage. esp. when he says that rome was 'like l.a., but w/ruins.' terrif.

15:08 / 21.08.03

yeah the euro montage was fantastic... that's the character who is the protagonist of Glamorama and the actor will be returning for that film...

20:42 / 21.08.03

the montage was cool but ran on a little long they should have put one part near the beginning then the other half at the end. and I really was bored by that whole "define crazy" part. also the rewinding then playing the movie didn't work at all.

01:49 / 19.05.04

C'mon guys! I've quickly became a big BEE fan & think his style is so whacky & different its pretty addicting. So far, I've read RULES OF ATTRACTION, GLAMORAMA, THE INFORMERS. The boyfriend is reading AMERICAN PSYCHO. Heard it was banned in the UK.

--The thing about his novels is they are about the same people over and over again. Patrick Bateman does have his own narrative in RoA, but its nothing like the totally psychotic mindfuck of a read that AP is. Lauren cameos in Glamorama & has a mild thing w/ Victor. The "dude from LA" appears frequently in RoA--He's some guy from the Informers. Paul Denton from RoA cameos in AP as knowing one of Patricks associates, too. Camden itself is in The Informers, but I still can't figure out why this chick goes there & who she is & how she is related to the novel.

--I don't care if James VanDerBeek used to play in Dawson's Creek--even though I personally hated the show. The whole point of being an actor is to go from one project to another & broadening what characters you can play. That and being paid ridiculous amounts of $$ to do so. I think him being Sean Bateman was perfect. Reading the book after seeing the movie, I feel that VanDerBeek played Sean to the T. The movie, of course, doesn't do the novel any justice, what with time restrictions & everything.

--What's the deal w/ people saying that Shannon Sossamon can't act? Can I hear why, please, like a good reason? I'm never one to idolize actors or musicians, but I think she's a bit of alright.

12:32 / 19.05.04

The novel American Psycho was definitely not banned in the UK. I know, because I, like many other people on the board, have read it. Likewise the film.

D Terminator XXXIII

13:08 / 19.05.04

I thought the movie a vast improvement over the book.

But I'm odd, you know?

14:37 / 19.05.04

I don't think Dawson played evil really, more that Sean Bateman was bored and a bit lost and had nothing better to do than play evil himself, if you get meh. The same for the drug dealer guy, i found him pretty objectionable untill i saw him as a much less tough person than he was pretending to be, kind of out of his depth and stuck playing that role.

As for why Shannyn Sossamon (or whatever) can't act, I see her as a kind of designer "thinking mans woman", a mess of short hair, kooky clothes and bizarre, meaningless "coy" facial gestures precariously balanced on a skateboard. She always seems to allude to some sort of unspecific uniqueness and/or intelligence which really doesn't seem to be there.

15:10 / 21.05.04

I saw it at a Popbitch screening last year (or was it the year before?), a bit too self-congratulatory audience wise but we cackled like witches down the front.

"I'm on my break"

The whole scene with the mothers popping whatever it is they're popping: "What is it?" "Does it matter?"

The Euro-scene was frenetic.

I probably wouldn't go out of my way to see it again but after reading terrible reviews in the States when I was there I was pleasantly suprised when I saw it.

Any film that has Van Der Beek ina homo-encounter gets my vote, just for the embarrasment factor.
And the brunette (forgotten his name) was a bit too hunky, stab his eyes.

13:46 / 19.03.05

Uh, people saying Patrick Bateman isn't the same Patrick Bateman, wha? Of course he is.

I just finished reading the book and so went out and rented the movie last night. For the most part I tried to keep my "I read the book" alarm turned off, but there were two major choices by the writer/director that bothered me -

SPOILERS, IF ANYONE CARES.

1. Lauren being a virgin. In the book, the deflowering scene was a flashback, and for the whole of the story she's slept around and still is sleeping around. In the movie, of course, she stays "pure" throughout until the sordid devirginizing at the end. Changing her character in that way is no small decision on the writer's part. It appeared to me that besides playing up the whole trite boy-meets-girl idea (surely the worst part of the movie), he thought she had to be a virgin in order for us to feel the compassion for her that Ellis makes us feel for her. And for obvious reasons it bothered me, this assumption that we can't feel compassion for a girl who sleeps around and feels chronically empty and lost. The whole "pure virgin" thing is generally Blechh.

2. Sean not actually fucking Paul, but Paul just thinking about doing it while he jerks off. Why? I can only imagine that Avary didn't trust the audience to go there, and see Sean as casually fucking just anyone without being "gay." Which I'm sure has to do with the misguided idea of aiming this flick at teenagers instead of an older audience with a slightly more sophisticated experience of sexual mores & politics. Anyway, this not only gave us an incomplete picture of Sean as someone who has a major deficiency of character - will proclaim to love Lauren while still fucking Paul for months - but it was also unfair to Paul. The characterization of him as some desperate, loserish queer who's totally at the mercy of his lack of sexual options as opposed to the cool-headed guy with a keen sense for ambiguous sexuality that he is in the book, just seemed like a totally lame and possibly homophobic copout.

All that said, the scenes which did stay more true to the novel were really funny and well done. I wish he'd stuck to that tack of adaption, it could have been great.

Jack The Bodiless

10:33 / 21.03.05

Ummm... I was under the impression that the novel leaves it fairly obvious that Sean does not have a physical relationship with Paul. If I recall correctly, all the sections narrated by Sean dismiss Paul completely as slightly odd, and only the sections narrated by Paul ever mention them fucking. I assumed from this that Paul was fantasizing the whole thing...

12:07 / 21.03.05

I seem to remember the novel being a bit more ambiguous than that. It was never that clear as to who was fooling themselves, as I recall. Though I'd agree that the movie seemed a bit more weighted in Sean's favour.

I thought it was okay, but I could have done without all the showy camera work ( the scene where Paul and Dick bounce around on the bed to 'Faith,' the pointlessly drawn-out bathtub suicide, ) which a lot of the time felt like the director was auditioning show reels for MTV. And he can't seem to do pacing at all - the (mid) section he scripted for Pulp Fiction almost sank the whole thing for me, and his last film, Killing Zoe, was just a bit of a mess, IMHO. And Rules Of Attraction seemed to suffer from the same problem - there was never much of a sense of it actually going anywhere.

Point of minor trivia; the novel is Easton Ellis' personal favourite, the one where he feels he best-realised what he was trying to get across. It's also far and away the one that sold the least copies, to the point where he had a major crisis of confidence at the time.

23:25 / 21.03.05

Right, I actually forgot it was ambiguous - mostly because I felt Paul was a far more reliable narrator. I also "believed" Lauren's accounts over Sean's.

06:02 / 22.03.05

It's been awhile since I read the book. But I always felt that Sean was just deluding himself. For example, Paul asks him to drive him to the bus depot, and Sean actually meets him (even though he fakes something wrong with the bike). Also, I think that they spent a long period of time together (although all the descriptions are from Pauls point of view, so if's exaggerating, or whatever, then it could be a lie).
I thought that the movie was rather fun. Definitly captured the feel of the novel. Some of the individual scenes are quite clever (euro- montage, split screen sean -and - lauren, credits), in fact Avary has said on his blog that multiple commercials have now copied these ideas. I also remember reading a few interviews with Ellis at the time, wherein he said that he quite liked the movie. That he thought that it was closer in spirit to his work, then the American Psycho movie had been.

Jack The Bodiless

15:27 / 22.03.05

See, my memories of the book are that Sean's narrative constantly references the fact that Paul's acting a little weird around him, whereas Paul's narrative doesn't incorporate any dissonance at all - I actually came away with the impression that, in a book full of unreliable narrators and spiked recollectionsm, the fact that Paul seemed to be the most reliable probably made him the least reliable. Everyone else seems to be jerkily colliding with one another, causing unnecessary damage, coming away with completely different impressions of events and people - which sounds like life to me. Paul's narrative voice is strong, directed and almost completely unaffected by outside events - which sounds like a fantasist to me, at least within the confines of the metanarrative.