Review of The Rules of Attraction (2002) by Rafael J — 17 Feb 2009

An amusingly alternative look at "college". Don't be fooled by its pretensions of substance, because there isn't much there (of substances, on the other hand, there are aplenty ). It's hip and it's eye-catching, but it really doesn't penetrate the psyche as much as the characters seem to penetrate each other throughout the film.

The film is a bit too in love with itself and assumes that it has something profound to say somewhere beneath its attractively repulsive presentation. Somehow, by trying to satirize the "teen comedy", it almost becomes a teen comedy itself with its overuse of self-reflexive editing, cinematography and other upendings of any classical film forms.

By so intently trying to disrupt the viewer's processing of the film, the film manages to disrupt its own message and becomes lost in its own spectacle--the satirizing of the teen comedy is displaced by the movie's own inadvertent satire of itself.

Instead of showing the disgusting excess of the "college" lifestyle, it merely indulges in the excess of its own unquenchable "hipness", becoming a mere pantomime (in film form) of the lascivious and vapid university world it initially aims to skewer.