On a lost classic (and showing my gen-x-ism)

Last night I stayed in town after a satisfying and relatively short game of Scrabble with my friend Jane, and instead of heading back over to Jersey, which Nemo and I are doing more and more these days, I decided to stay in town and act like a single girl again. For me this usually means eating late night snacks in bed and then falling asleep watching some movie I always meant to get around to.

Instead there was no snack, and I decided to let Neemes up on the bed in honor of the holiday. (Unless Gavin gives in to my desire for a king, N is relegated to the floor indefinitely. The good news is that he's got a fancy new dog bed en route.) I flipped around the digital cable menu, since I have misplaced all of my netflix, and watched the scenes of Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About Sex devoted to the fetish game show and the opening of the attack of the killer boob. Woody sure was random. I get it more than I did when I was in high school, though. Anyway I noticed that The Rules of Attraction was starting at 11, and at first I confused it with that Jennifer Aniston movie. What's that one called? When I saw it was an adaptation of a Brett Easton Ellis book, I was in.

Less Than Zero was one of the first movies I saw as a preteen that made me want to be urban and cool. Not to mention moneyed. There is also a decent amount of serious-seeming teen sex in it, which is sort of exciting when you are twelve and living in New Hampshire. I recall later finding out when I was in college that a ten year old neighbor who took care of our cat had sneaked herself my copy. I knew exactly why. That scene when Andrew McCarthy has sex with Jamie Gertz up against the wall by the pool is hot stuff when you're that age. Maybe it still is now...

So it turns out I have seen a few minutes of The Rules before: a 5-minute sequence about a rich American college student who jet sets around Europe, hooking up with models, dropping acid, staying in nice hotels, and going to cool clubs that I could never seem to find when I was there with my dorky friends from England. It's filmed like a documentary, edited together at a really furious pace in synch with the character's narration, so fast you can barely make out all that he's saying. It's brilliant and a disturbing portrait of spoiled American youth in the nineties. Empty, beautiful, powerful, and sick.

What I didn't know is that this little vignette came about two-thirds the way through the movie to introduce the character, who up until then was just a far-away boyfriend of one of the main characters.

It goes without saying that any Brett Easton Ellis movie (presumably this one was set at a fictionalized version of whatever elite college he went to outside New York City; Sarah Lawrence?) is full of beautiful, lying rich kids who do a lot of drugs and screw each other silly. It's pretty well cast with people you love to look at but probably haven't seen before. Unless I really am just that old and out of it. Even Dawson from the Creek is great as the shallow and hostile parasite of a drug dealer. Whenever he puts his head down and looks up from under that brow at whomever, it freaked me out. Good career choice for James Van Der Geek (or is it Beak?).

But the directing and editing of the movie are what set it apart. The opending sequences introduce the three main characters (evil Dawson, the off-center beauty named Lauren--whose clothes I loved, even now--and the most beautiful closeted gay boy I may have ever seen. Okay, he's not that closeted. He spends the whole movie trying to bed straight guys, though. What do you call that?) in this inverted and reversed way, and it all really hits the jugular in more ways than one. The music is great, too. I wonder if there's a soundtrack.

I also was *stunned* to see that Eric Stoltz had the audacity to play yet again the inappropriate and aging academic. This time a professor who is so disgustingly self-satisfied and sicophant-y that it's hard to believe he's playing it straight. This still does nothing to undo my love for him in Kicking and Screaming (a classic of the same general subject with a lot more heart and non of the BEE homocidal/suicidal mania).

I'm sure there are also other films in the BEE library I've missed or need to review. I think I'm going to netflix American Psycho. I miss Christian Bale.