So I'd been following some bloggers' obsessive posts thinking there must be a reason to be excited about "The Rules of Attraction". Then when I found myself taking refuge from a rush-hour thunderstorm at a megaplex theater and it was the next movie up I thought fate was telling me to watch it.
Alas, no, not unless fate wanted me to waste 8 bucks. One thing that made it pointless was the near-complete lack of irony, especially as compared with a good multinarrative movie about the misadventures of improbably goodlooking young adults, namely "Go". "Go" was funny. "Go" had intriguing characters. "Go" had surprising or whimsical plot twists. "Go" had relationships where you could see some chemistry even though both partners were jerks. "The Rules of Attraction" had precious little of any of these things. Instead it had a few minutes of pretentious cinematography (wasn't the reverse motion thing used up, and better, by MTV around 1994?) and a lot of closeup shots of characters so dull you can't imagine why they'd bother even to exploit one another.
I did like the fast-frame travelogue and one camp dance number, though. And Shannyn Sossamon should get the door prize for best impression of a winsome Winona Ryder.
After expending all those words on a movie I didn't like, I find I have little to say about two loosely related movies I did like, "The Royal Tenenbaums" and "Igby Goes Down". They, too, concern the foibles of the upper crust, with the Tenenbaums going for a wacky tone and Igby splitting the difference as a "dramedy". Both get great performances out of ensemble casts; Kieran Culkin in "Igby" is especially worth watching, although at moments I couldn't tell whether he was acting remarkably well or remarkably badly, like one of those optical illusions where the background and foreground flip before your eyes.