Underrated Movie of the Week: The Rules of Attraction

Watch the twisted R-rated trailer for The Rules of Attraction right here on Fancast.

The Rules of Attraction, based on a Bret Easton Ellis novel, looks like an annoying film on the surface - one of those generic debauchery-as-hip-cool-cutting-edge-stylized horsepuckey stories soaked in drugs, booze and bastards; self-important collegiate jerks waxing just-read-it-in-philosophy-class intellectual while knocking back pills and blow. It starts off feeling that way, with all the backwards-winding zany cinematography and some straight-up appalling depravity right off the bat. But Roger Avary, one of the co-writers of Pulp Fiction, delivered a film that never quite goes where you expect it to go.

That’s a bit of an understatement. This movie is relentlessly unpredictable in it’s off-the-wall insanity, which makes for a particularly amusing pitch-black comedy.

It might help to sell the film by noting that the surprisingly excellent James Van Der Beek is playing Sean Bateman, who is the brother to Christian Bale’s Patrick Bateman from American Psycho, based on another Ellis novel. Sean is a beaten and bruised drug dealer who dubs himself an “emotional vampire.” Kate Bosworth plays one of his conquests, but his true prey comes when he runs into Lauren (Shannyn Sossamon), a virginal blow-fiend (not your typical combination) hung up on a guy who’s bumming around Europe. Then there’s Paul (Ian Somerhalder), the guy obsessed with seducing straight men - or at least manufacturing their attraction to him in his own mind, and this includes Sean. Keep an eye out for Paul’s ex-freak Dick (Russell Sams), who is easily the funniest part of the film for the few sequences he shows up for.

In crazy supporting roles, we’ve got Clifton Collins Jr. as Sean’s angry supplier, Kip Pardue as Lauren’s Euro-bum who is most definitely not hung up on her, a cameo as a heroin addict from Fred Savage and, perhaps most notably, current hot-like-lava star Jessica Biel as Lauren’s roommate Lara, a really slutty drunk. Seriously, nowhere else are you ever going to see Jessica Biel wander into a dorm in her underwear, two-fisted drinking, and stroll herself right into a night of debauchery with an entire football team.

The film doesn’t try to make you root for any of these fools. Instead, it shows you just how ridiculous and empty their lives are by detailing their colossal downward spiral of mistakes, miscalculations and mental misfires. It’s a crazy, crazy movie, and it needs to be appreciated as such. Check out the preview and go rent it, and then watch another Avary film, the starkly related Killing Zoe, in its entirety right here on Fancast.