Stars: James Van Der Beek, Shannyn Sossamon, Jessica Biel, Kate Bosworth

Director: Roger Avary

Summary: A drug dealer at a Vermont school becomes involved with a girl while sleeping with her friend and a boy who fancies him...

THE RULES OF ATTRACTION, based on the novel by Bret Easton Ellis, stars James Van Der Beek (DAWSON'S CREEK) as Sean Bateman, campus drug-dealer and 24-hour-a-day reveler at affluent Camden College. A senior at the New England school, Sean is caught up in a nihilistic love triangle. He has a crush on Lauren (Shannyn Sossamon), an arty virgin who is saving herself for a vapid, vacationing ex-boyfriend, while Paul (Ian Somerhalder), a beautiful bisexual, has a crush on Sean. Every night is a party at Camden, where students celebrate with a "Dress to Get Screwed" theme and teachers appear more often on the dance floor than in the classroom. Director Roger Avary conveys the individual angst of the three lovelorn main characters in a series of vignettes, using their different perspectives to weave together a complex tale of misunderstanding, drug binges, alienated sex and violence, and above all, extreme loneliness. Equal parts fantasy and reality, THE RULES OF ATTRACTION, like other Ellis adaptations LESS THAN ZERO and AMERICAN PSYCHO, is a deeply observant, daring antiestablishment film. Camden College and its characters resonate with the very real despair and rebellion of many generations of university students.

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Based on Bret Easton Ellis's often-overlooked second novel, The Rules of Attractionworks better as a film than the disastrous Less Than Zero, though not as well as the canny American Psycho. Writer-director Roger Avary--who lets slip a nasty Quentin Tarantino reference that feels like sour grapes--can't quite decide whether to ditch the novel's extremely 1980s cultural references and make a contemporary-set picture or to evoke the period in which the book was written. Set on a small New England campus, the film offers a love triangle between "emotional vampire" Sean Bateman (James Van Der Beek), skateboarding "innocent" Lauren Hynde (Shannon Sossamyn) and gay libertine Paul Denton (Ian Somerhalder) that gets complicated by passing characters.

While not as hung up on time as Mementoor Irreversible, the film does play its tricks, opening at an "end of the world party" to show its three leads at simultaneous low points, reversing to take stabs at each of them, then hopping back and forth in time as different narrators take over, with time-outs for a fast-forward tour of Europe by a minor character and a drug-dealing subplot to keep Avary's crime credentials in order. All in all it's a satirical piece that is removed from reality, always striking, sometimes funny or horrifying, but ultimately hard to connect with. --Kim Newman

Aspect Ratio:	16:9 Wide Screen
Main Language:	English
Region:	Region 2
Special Features:	Two Audio Commentaries, The Anatomy Of A Scene, TV And Radio Spots, Theatrical Trailers
Year:	2002
Release Date:	July 4, 2005
Runtime:	86 minutes
Certification:
Catalogue Number:	D 093889
Keywords:	Comedy, Rules, General, Wide, Screen, Attraction
Genre:	Comedy