[DaWsonSReaLJoEy]

old thread: http://www.forums4fans.com/ultimateb...&f=43&t=000778

Hey, I saw the other thread was on page 11 so I decided to start a new one. [img]smilies/smile.gif[/img]

Discuss, admire and worship the movie that is ROA.

Anyone need caps of the movie besides caps of James? PM me...and I'll hook you up.

Mel [img]smilies/wink.gif[/img]

[ 04-30-2003: Message edited DaWsonSReaLJoEy ]

[Beatriz]

Thanx Mel!

Yep, seems like we can´t stop talking about this movie, hee hee [img]smilies/biggrin.gif[/img]

I can´t wait till I have the DVD in my hands [img]smilies/biggrin.gif[/img] But God knows when will that be here in Spain *sigh*

Beatriz

[Stela]

Thanks for the new Rules thread, Mel. Good thinking. [img]smilies/smile.gif[/img]

I hope the DVD comes to Spain soon, Bea. It's totally worth it. [img]smilies/biggrin.gif[/img]

[DaWsonSReaLJoEy]

[img]smilies/wave.gif[/img] Bea and Stela, no prob! So you both live in Spain, I'm guessing your dvd players are different "Regions", then in the USA, but if not I'd be more than happy to get u both dvds and send them to u!! [img]smilies/smile.gif[/img]


Mel [img]smilies/wink.gif[/img]

[Chase.This.Light]

I wnat the dvd here asap too

[Beatriz]

Thanx Mel [img]smilies/smile.gif[/img]

And yes, my DVD player is different than yours. Well, actually, I don´t have DVD player, but play station 2 [img]smilies/lol.gif[/img] so I can´t watch a DVD from the States in it [img]smilies/frown.gif[/img]

Beatriz

[DaWsonSReaLJoEy]

Aww I hope u get it soon there soon then!! Well hey if it takes too long you, Karen and Stela can all come to my house and watch it, I'll make the popcorn [img]smilies/lol.gif[/img]


Mel [img]smilies/wink.gif[/img]

[Stela]

[img]smilies/lol.gif[/img]

I don't live in Spain, Mel. I should've worded that more carefully. I live in New York and I do own the Rules DVD. I've watched it a couple times already, and I'm thinking of watching it again soon.

[Chase.This.Light]

haha, I couldn't stop laughing when Mel thought Stela was in Spain.

I live in New York and I do own the Rules DVD. I've watched it a couple times already, and I'm thinking of watching it again soon.

Stela do you have any idea how many things you said there I want?

I wnat to be living in NY, I wnat an RoA dvd AND I wnat to have watched it a couple (hundred) times and be about to watch it again.

[DaWsonSReaLJoEy]

Originally posted by Stela: <STRONG> [img]smilies/lol.gif[/img] I don't live in Spain, Mel. I should've worded that more carefully. I live in New York and I do own the Rules DVD. I've watched it a couple times already, and I'm thinking of watching it again soon.</STRONG>

Oh, ok [img]smilies/lol.gif[/img] Don't mind me, I'm a little slow [img]smilies/goof.gif[/img]


Mel [img]smilies/wink.gif[/img]

[Kayden]

NZoom.com, New Zealand

Sampath Soysa gets to grips with the pretty-young-things-get-decadent drama based on the book by Bret Easton Ellis ( American Psycho ).


I was expecting a high quota of shock value from this film as it came from the makers of Pulp Fiction and American Psycho , and is based on the novel written by Brett Easton Ellis who penned the novel American Psycho (still the most warped and sickest book I've ever read...bar none). However while The Rules of Attraction certainly delivered a fair bit of grubby depravity, I found much of it to be gratuitous and in conjunction with the lack of plot, meant the experience was a wee bit ambivalent.

The Rules of Attraction has as both its setting and main subject matter, that quintessential hotbed of excess, nihilistic lifestyle and wanton substance abuse - university students. In this case, the students (and at least one faculty member) of Camden College - a small, affluent liberal arts college in New England. In case you're not up to scratch on your American socio-economic demographic profiling, this means lots of rich spoiled white kids away from home.

Using a quite surreal and unsettling camera style we are introduced to the three key players - Sean Bateman (James Van Der Beek - Dawson from Dawson's Creek , Varsity Blues ), Lauren Hynde (Shannyn Sossamon - A Knight's Tale , 40 Days and 40 Nights ) and Paul Denton (Ian Somerhalder - Young Americans and the US face of the Guess clothing label). The three are attending a raucous party (separately) but from this early point we soon realise that their lives will intersect repeatedly throughout the film.

In this styley opening scene the film follows respectively, Sean arriving covered in fresh blood and bruises (presumably from a fight), knocking back a 40 oz of Jack Daniels and picking some nubile conquest from the perky line-up; Lauren getting picked up by a arty film student, drugged and deflowered; and queen Paul hitting on some E-ed up jock and getting a beating for his troubles. Interestingly, the pulsing house music of the party sounds normal when the film is moving forward as well as when it runs backwards. Hey, I thought that was clever.

This party sets the tone for the rest of the film - rife with binge drinking at such salubrious events as the "Dress to get Screwed Party" and the "Pre-Saturday Night Party" and plenty of hard drugs and random promiscuity. Forget the relatively innocent and warm fuzzy "beer and buds" good times of films like Dazed and Confused - this film is more akin to a fly-on-the-wall doco about the grubbier side life on a modern university campus and might set alarm bells ringing for parents whose little darlings are first years in a hall of residence in another town somewhere. The cinematography in certain places is innovative and dare I say it, spectacular - watch out especially for the scene where Lauren and Sean separately get ready for a Saturday morning tutorial they are both going to - classssssy camera work.

There are a lot of well-known faces too who pop up throughout the film - Marc (Fred Savage - The Wonder Years ) one of Bateman's junkie regular clients; Mitchell (Thomas Ian Nicholas - American Pie 1 & 2 ) - Bateman's naïve and unsuspecting rich friend and Mr Lance Lawson (Eric Stolz - Pulp Fiction, Killing Zoe ) a younger lecturer who pops along to many of the parties to prey on his drunk female students. Biggest cameo surprise was Faye Dunaway as Paul's pill-popping mother. The three main characters' stories form the "plot" as their paths cross in a lust triangle - all unrequited of course. I mentioned shock value earlier - as a side note, as far as gratuitously explicit scenes go, you'd be struggling to top the gruesome suicide scene which adds very little to the plot, but certainly doesn't glamorise the act.

Many of you will have mentally written this film off when you saw those fateful words, "Dawson's Creek" - but you shouldn't. Van Der Beek is great in this role - any semblance of his previous pretty boy pop teen role goes out the window in a few seconds. His character Sean Bateman is the campus drug dealer and yes, in the novel is the brother of one Patrick Bateman - Mr American Psycho himself (played so convincingly by Christian Bale in that film). Fans of Bale's Bateman (i.e. pure evil incarnate) will be more than content with Van Der Beek's equally bland smile which masks the disturbingly perverse thoughts that lurk behind it.

The Rules of Attraction is the culmination of a 15 year project by director Roger Avary ( Killing Zoe and co-author of Pulp Fiction ) who believed quite reasonably, that Ellis' novel and social commentary was timeless. That's why the American Psycho Bateman of the mid-1980's can completely relate to this Bateman of the new millennium - fraternally (although the connection isn't stated in the film) and as character metaphors for all that is wrong with those who may seem to be materially successful in a Western society. In a similar style to American Psycho - many of the characters here are young, highly privileged and completely aimless - they live superficial lives with little meaning, little effort on their part and rarely have to face the consequences of their actions& their interactions and "relationships" have all the depth and meaning of stray dogs sniffing each other's butts while walking past on a street.

From my experiences with American Psycho , I am keen to now read the book just to see how much of it was omitted in the transition from paper to screen (the novel American Psycho was off the scale in terms of the depravities which never made it into the condensed filmic version). High on shock value and high on drugs, low on plot but completely watchable. Also, this has all the ingredients of a film which the moral crusade crowd will latch onto to try and ban (without seeing firsthand of course) so get in and see it sooner rather than later.

Sampath Soysa
http://entertainment.nzoom.com/enter...29-132,00.html

[Kayden]

New Review of "Rules of Attraction" from the New Zeland Herald, May 30, 2003

The Rules of Attraction at Rialto

30.05.2003 By RYAN GIBLEY
If you saw Roger Avary in the street, you might mistake him for a beach bum, or a heavy metal roadie on his day off. It's the sunbleached locks, the dopey-dude eyes; there must be a Lebowski lurking in the branches of his family tree.

But you could comb Hollywood for years and not find a more industrious talent. True, he has directed just two features in the past decade - the nasty 1994 heist movie Killing Zoe, and a trippy new film of Bret Easton Ellis' novel The Rules of Attraction.

He has not, however, been idle. After co-writing Pulp Fiction with his longtime chum Quentin Tarantino, and subsequently sharing the Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay, 37-year-old Avary has become one of the industry's most prized script doctors, earning what he freely admits is silly money. "After Pulp Fiction, my rate went through the roof. A simple polish can fund me for a year and a half."

Miraculously, you don't feel like pushing him down an empty lift shaft when he says this. It's the way he tells 'em; arrogance and boastfulness are beyond his repertoire.

Avary's latest film is evidently the work of someone smitten by cinema and its possibilities. Love it, hate it or pass out at it - and many people have, thanks to a graphic account of a bathtub suicide - there can be no ignoring Avary's transparent glee at breaking all the rules in The Rules of Attraction.

For starters, he has fashioned a poignant comedy out of Ellis's "difficult" second novel - "difficult" in this context meaning no one ever made it to the end because it was like wading through a cesspool.

It wasn't the drug-addled, vomit-soaked sex that rendered unpalatable Ellis's induction into life on a fictional New England campus so much as the misanthropy: all human life was DOA. Avary has translated Ellis's despair into sensitivity.

Everyone in the movie is still going to hell, but Avary hints this might be a bad thing. He does so by manipulating time to alert us to a sense of loss, a longing for what might have been; his technique of running the film backwards is on its own a powerful and judiciously deployed tool.

Next to The Rules of Attraction, a film like Run Lola Run is barely up to walking speed. There is the virtuoso section midway through the film when Avary absconds from the narrative for five minutes to follow a minor character named Victor on a hedonistic jaunt around Europe.

The director and his actor, ex-model Kip Pardue, did it for real, partying hard over two weeks with Pardue in character as Avary trailed him with a DV camera from breakfast to bed.

"Kip would bring girls back to the hotel room, they'd be making out. And beyond." How far beyond? "I have no interest in making pornography," he says, sounding mildly embarrassed at my prurience. "When I felt I'd got enough of what I needed, I'd go back to my room. There was no need to stick around until the final cigarette."

Avary is now editing the 70 hours of Victor footage into an accompanying film called Glitterati, which may or may not be a good idea.

Ellis himself has registered his approval of The Rules of Attraction. "Bret sneaked into an early screening," says Avary. "I was mortified. He's not known to monitor what he says, and I had heard he didn't like the other films based on his books [Less Than Zero and American Psycho]. But he told me it was not only the best adaptation of his work, it was one of his favourite movies."

One of Avary's smartest moves was to cast James van der Beek - the marshmallow-faced hero of Dawson's Creek - against type as a nasty piece of work. "I was initially sceptical. But I met James for lunch, and as he removed his sunglasses I glimpsed this capacity for cold, dark emptiness. His eyes were shark-like. No - doll-like. It creeped me out."

In the course of the film, we see van der Beek masturbating, taking a dump, smoking pot and punching a girl in the face.

While he prunes away at Glitterati, and prepares yet another Bret Easton Ellis adaptation (of Glamorama), Avary is having a ball doing rewrites on David Fincher's next film, Lords of Dogtown, about the 1970s Santa Monica skateboarding scene.

"I used to take writing jobs indiscriminately," he admits. "But now I only take the ones that I know will be fun. Because as everyone knows, fun rules." The words spill out of him; he's like a faucet on full blast. Perhaps that is why he devotes so much time to the detailed journal on his website.

Also, it's about being available. "Most film-makers end up insulating themselves from the world," he sneers. "I find that lame."

He organises competitions, polls, Q&As. If you log on now, you can discover everything you never realised you wanted to know about Roger Avary, from why he used his Oscar speech to tell the world that he needed to pee (well, he needed to pee) to whether he and Tarantino were lovers ("I'm open to just about anything, but I draw the line when it comes to sex with Quentin").

I ask Avary if he gets weary of Tarantino's name cropping up in every interview he gives, and for the first time in our long conversation he seems rattled affronted, even.

"I love Quentin," he protests. "Pulp Fiction bought my home. And it afforded me complete artistic freedom. That's an incredible luxury. That movie wasn't just a success, it was a phenomenon. Like everything it can be a blessing and a curse. But it's not much of a curse, let me tell you."

The friends had a famous spat a few years back, but Avary insists it was nothing to do with him getting a mere "Story By" credit on Pulp Fiction, a subject he seems keen to avoid. (Addressing the matter of why his contribution was belittled, he writes on his website: "Good question. I'm still asking myself that.") But still, the dispute was another matter of literary property.

Avary had a hand in every Tarantino screenplay until Jackie Brown. He wrote The Open Road, the original script on which Tarantino based True Romance, and helped him organise the structure of that movie. He came to Tarantino's rescue when he was having difficulty with a scene in Natural Born Killers, and wrote background dialogue for Reservoir Dogs.

All this he could stomach; he was just helping out a buddy, right? Then one day in 1994, Avary is having lunch with the actor Eric Stoltz. Avary is telling Stoltz about a killer monologue that he's just put into a new screenplay, deconstructing the homoerotic subtext of Top Gun

Stoltz nearly chokes on his appetiser. "Oh my God, Roger," he says, "I'm so sorry. I don't know how to tell you this but Quentin just improvised that exact speech into a movie we're in."

The film was Sleep With Me, and Avary was mad as hell. "We were at Cannes with Pulp Fiction, and I just blurted out my anger in the hotel bar. Quentin was so apologetic. He said, 'I had to come up with something on the spur of the moment and your words just came to me'."

It's all history now. "I actually think he did a good job of delivering the monologue," says Avary, rather manfully. Whatever. I think it's clear who comes out of that story looking like a wretch.

But Avary bears no grudges, or else covers them up well. "We saw each other recently. We hugged, we talked about our movies. That's all we can do now because we're holding on to our own ideas."

Just when you thought this man couldn't get any sweeter, he admits to being awfully excited about the opening night of Kill Bill, Tarantino's upcoming martial arts thriller.

"I purposely haven't read the screenplay. I'm not going to the premiere. I want to be there on opening night with all the other fans who are prepared to eat paint in order to see the movie. It looks like just the kind of cheese I like with my cracker."
[URL=http://www.nzherald.co.nz/storydisplay.cfm?storyID=3504632[b]null[/b][b]One]http://www.nzherald.co.nz/storydisplay.cfm?storyID=3504632[B]null

[Kayden]

The Rules Of Attraction
The Rules Of Attraction (18, 110mins) Drama/comedy

What the critics say:

Nev Pierce, BBC: Bold, sexy, daring, clever, funny, ruthless and sad, Roger Avary's startling satire is the movie American Pie wishes it was.

Alan Morrison, Empire: Too strong for most and you can bet critics will howl. But for our money, Avary filters American Pie through Requiem For A Dream to create America's Trainspotting. A breathtaking story told in breathtaking style.

Chris Longridge, Heat: An interesting, if repetitive attempt to expose the blankness at the heart of US teenagers.

Starring: James Van Der Beek, Shannyn Sossamon, Ian Somerhalder, Jessica Biel, Kip Pardue, Thomas Ian Nicholas, Eric Stoltz, Fred Savage, Faye Dunaway, Swoosie Kurtz. Director: Roger Avary Released: March 28

Roger Avary's bravura adaptation of Brett Easton Ellis's novel about sex, drugs and angst on an '80s college campus is not for the easily offended.

Libertine Sean (Ian Somerhalder) lusts after emotionally empty Paul (a debauched departure for Dawson's Creek hunk James Vand Der Beek), who is besotted with fragile Lauren (Shannyn Sossamon), who longs in turn for blond hunk Victor. All the characters converge in one life-changing evening.

Avary brings startling invention and energy to his storytelling - changing the direction of the plot at key points by literally going into reverse - and the sexy young cast perform with gusto.
http://www.ananova.com/entertainment...sm_764339.html

Story filed: 14:39 Tuesday 25th March 2003

[Sandra*]

I´m looking for one song: It´s played in the scene when Sean is sitting down and reading the last letter of the girl who is in love with him. Any ideas? [img]smilies/smile.gif[/img]

[Stela]

Sandra - That scene occurs during the Suicide girl montage (post suicide. Ooh, morbid) and it's an instrumental playing in that scene, not a song. At least I think so. [img]smilies/smile.gif[/img]