Cruel Intentions

In the game of seduction there is only one rule. Never fall in love. What you can’t have, you can’t resist.

Kathryn (Sarah Michelle Gellar) and Sebastian (Ryan Phillippe), two wealthy, manipulative teenage stepsiblings from Manhattan’s uppercrust, conspire in Cruel Intentions, a wickedly entertaining tale of seduction and betrayal. The stakes are high when the duo agrees upon a deliciously diabolical wager of sexual conquest without consequences. The pawns? The naive Cecile Caldwell (Selma Blair) and the virginal Annette Hargrove (Reese Witherspoon)…

It’s summer break, and Kathryn has been dumped by her beau, Court Reynolds, for the innocent Cecile. Desperate to get even, Kathryn challenges Sebastian to ruin Cecile by deflowering her and turning her into a tramp-thus humiliating Court by delivering Cecile to him as damaged goods. Sebastian has pretty much ‘had’ all of the girls in New York City up to this point, and he’s gotten a bit bored of it all. Though this is too easy a conquest for him, he obliges.

He sets his sights on a greater challenge-the new headmaster’s daughter, Annette, who recently wrote an article in Seventeen Magazine about how she intends to stay pure until she marries her boyfriend. Sebastian bets Kathryn that he can seduce the chaste and pristine Annette before school begins in the fall. Kathryn thinks this feat impossible and quickly agrees to the wager. The stakes: if Sebastian succeeds, Kathryn must give him a night of unbridled biblical pleasure, something he’s wanted since their parents got married. If he fails, he must forfeit his priceless 1956 Jaguar to Kathryn and suffer the shame of defeat.

This will forever be one of my favorite movies. The soundtrack is timeless; I still listen to it until this day. Unfortunately, the sequel lacked luster in my opinion. I didn’t make it past 13 minutes, to say the least.

Blue Jasmine

It’s obvious from “Blue Jasmine” that Woody Allen has been to Hell; what’s more, he imagines some of the neighborhoods there that he was spared from visiting. It’s a movie about pain and loss—and specifically, it tests the limits of the bearable, particularly among those who have never had to bear much. In a peculiarly negative and inverted way, the movie displays Allen’s own lifeboat in a sea of trouble and shows what happens when someone doesn’t have one of her own. The subject is the idle rich, the problem is idleness, the crisis is self-delusion in the face of fear and despair, and the basic material of the movie is the definition of identity. And, as it turns out, Allen’s vision of a modern-day Job is simply someone without a job.

I absolutely loved this film, possibly because I’ve encountered people with similar characteristics. I’d consider it a combination of being self absorbed, but more self centered than anything. More often than not, a result of self induced isolation- not wanting to be bothered. According to the 48 laws of power, “Isolation is dangerous”. Which truly is; yet in today’s times can you blame one for the desire to do so? Lol