I recently watched "Rules of Attraction" about five times, and there are a few things I need to note. First, it is a great, wonderful, fantastic movie. It is the only movie I have ever seen which is needlessly depressing, and the single best example of a film which really portrays the absurdity of most of our lives. It's a movie where there are no heroes, and where the never ending quest of the protagonist is the destruction of purity. Sadly, I identified with the primary character to a degree which gave me much pause.
They did fall prey to one thing which has, more and more, begun to piss me off about film, however. In many movies they want to get across the depth which people actually possess if only you give them a chance. It sells well to a certain demographic (ugly people) if you package the message of even a subplot of your film as, "Oh, no, he would never reject you if only he knew the true you!" In order to do this they invariably cast the "nerd" or "dork" chick who the hot football player or whatever falls in love with after going through a number of gorgeous Hungarian models and finding himself unsatisfied. The relevance to the above movie is, of course, that in RoA they have a "nerdy" girl who kills herself over a guy who ignores her - something which is a fantastically produced scene, but which only seems to draw any real sympathy on the grounds that the "plain" girl is actually really fucking hot. Why do film producers do this? Is it for the irony? Of course not - it's becuase, deep down, none of us really care about people who don't have some potential to benefit us, in this case sexually. It's still annoying, though. I really wish some day some producer would actually sacrifice some focus-group love for the sake of creating something worth watching. Good fucking luck, but still. It's something to shoot for. cranked out at 5:07 AM | |
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