The Rules of Attraction

Saturday March 5, 2005 at 12:50 pm

“…and it struck me then that I liked Sean because he looked, well, slutty.  A boy who’d been around.  A boy who couldn’t remember if he was Catholic or not.”

That is truly the only funny thing about The Rules of Attraction, a poorly made college angst movie.  That one line was the only part of the movie I found entertaining.  The rest of it was a messy, thoughtless menagerie of college-kids-gone-wrong clichés.  Even at that they failed to make the clichés entertaining.

The idea that all of these kids are immoral doesn’t surprise me in the least.  When people are real, they appear “immoral” to everyone who still hangs on to the puritanical religious zealotry that has always given rise to the bigotry and hypocrisy that can only be seen from outside of religious circles.  I would have expected that, with such a focus on the darker side of humanity that is enveloped in selfishness only, this movie would have provided some level of entertainment.  Wrong.

It’s the anguish of immorality and how, when it’s practiced, we often find things don’t work out quite the way we planned, that drew me to watch it.  I happen to enjoy raw comedy.  I happen to enjoy dark comedy.  I watched this movie solely based on the idea that it was an example of both.

Sadly, that was not the case.

This wasn’t comedy at all.  It was just bad writing.



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