Trailer

Back in the day, before he became obsessed with Fifty Shades of Grey and casual homophobia, Bret Easton Ellis was an interesting writer with a number of interesting things to say. The Rules of Attraction, arguably his most famous and accomplished novel outside of American Psycho, was one of my favourite books as a teenager. As a godless sodomite born into a family of amoral atheists, I needed something to act as a bible and, for a while, The Rules of Attraction filled that void. I felt like I “got” it more than anything else I’d ever read and, more importantly, I felt like it “got” me too. It was the book that I always turned to when I…

In high school I read American Psycho, on the recommendation of a woman in Connecticut I met in an AOL chatroom when I was 13 and thought I was in love with. I was thrilled by the book for all the wrong reasons, knowing so little about affluence and the elements of the 1980's that it was satirizing, just enjoying the graphic descriptions of murder and the absurdity of chapters about Huey Lewis and such. I would later, after a couple viewings of Mary Harron's adaptation (which I liked but did not love), come to appreciate what Bret Easton Ellis was really doing with his book.

The Rules of Attraction came at just the right (and wrong) time for me.…

What makes this such an effective film is the lack of fulfillment at every corner. No one is happy and everything is a disappointing waste of time. The apathy is refreshing, especially at the hands of post-teen actors who used to lie to us about love in J-Crew cargo shorts on the dock of a Creek. College, or College-age is possibly the worst time in our lives. It's when the most hopes are dashed and it's suddenly clear that everything will be harder than we thought.

I'm a very nostalgic person who generally remembers things more fondly than how they actually happened. Bad memories tend to be filled with a lot of blind spots. My college experience is among these…

What makes this such an effective film is the lack of fulfillment at every corner. No one is happy and everything is a disappointing waste of time. The apathy is refreshing, especially at the hands of post-teen actors who used to lie to us about love in J-Crew cargo shorts on the dock of a Creek. College, or College-age is possibly the worst time in our lives. It's when the most hopes are dashed and it's suddenly clear that everything will be harder than we thought.

I'm a very nostalgic person who generally remembers things more fondly than how they actually happened. Bad memories tend to be filled with a lot of blind spots. My college experience is among these…

Rules of Attraction

Let's get this one thing out of the way. Roger Avary is barely remembered for helping to jump-start the career of a young Quentin Tarantino. History comes back washed in the silica of the day after, and following the Oscar ceremonies, when Pulp Fiction took home an award for screenwriting, people barely remember that it was Avary, behind the scenes, providing the ingredients for the special sauce. I remember him. I remember struggling through his sci-if telefilm "Mr Stitch", or sitting on a couch in suburbia, stoned and watching Killing Zoe, and reveling in the Eurotrash tough guy characterizations, and wondering if they were real, or sketches, or both.

In the Tarantino/Avary/ Eli Roth et al film-verse,…

Points of entry: I had these two friends. One friend moved to NYC, scraped by at various gigs while living high in a floodplain of drugs. You want a friend like this, the friend who took it too far and fucked over everybody but you, because those memories are worth more than whatever/wherever they are now, for you and them both. $100 loan at payday, always got it back. They worked sometimes at this restaurant called Pop, a see-and-be-seen spot of dubious turn-of-the-millenium provenance, and often did an impression of their manager complaining about Bret Easton Ellis pulling a dine-and-dash.

Friend Two was floppin’ around a bit in the city, not unlike myself. Our relationship was complicated, maybe just for…

In high school I read American Psycho, on the recommendation of a woman in Connecticut I met in an AOL chatroom when I was 13 and thought I was in love with. I was thrilled by the book for all the wrong reasons, knowing so little about affluence and the elements of the 1980's that it was satirizing, just enjoying the graphic descriptions of murder and the absurdity of chapters about Huey Lewis and such. I would later, after a couple viewings of Mary Harron's adaptation (which I liked but did not love), come to appreciate what Bret Easton Ellis was really doing with his book.

The Rules of Attraction came at just the right (and wrong) time for me.…