Episode #152 – The Rules of Attraction (2002)

Out in the liberal-arts quadrangle of film podcasts, there lies an audio bench dense with hot takes, algorithmic thirst traps, and men shouting “actually” into microphones that cost more than their rent. Welcome to Fear and Loathing in Cinema Podcast, which has established a curious little watering hole of its own.

The show traffics in pop-cultural critique and nostalgic spelunking, but its true specialty is the affectionate cinematic autopsy. It delights in exhuming movie relics once booed, mocked, or quietly escorted to the cultural landfill, and asking, with a raised eyebrow and a responsibly refilled glass of gin, whether we might have misjudged them in our youth. The tone is irreverent but not careless, sharp but never bloodless. It is criticism with a pulse. The hosts revisit these films the way one revisits a high-school yearbook photo. They are mortified, tender, and faintly impressed by the hair.

The quartet behind the microphones is improbably well-balanced. Bryan Kluger, a media director with a taste for irony and a scholarly fascination with the gloriously inappropriate, presides as ringleader, grinning as he lights the fuse. Dan Moran, a lawyer by trade, applies an alarmingly literal legal framework to Hollywood logic, to the filmography of Kevin Costner, and occasionally to the cultural implications of Sydney Sweeney, as though preparing closing arguments for a jury of bewildered studio executives. Preston Barta, a critic with a soft spot for the bruised and forgotten, champions the movies no one else remembers, or admits to remembering fondly. And Chelsea Nicole, a culture critic with a gimlet eye for horror and social dynamics, reminds everyone that movies are about us, whether we’d prefer they not be. Together, they operate in that rare air between sincere analysis and gut-busting humor, where loving cinema means being willing to cross-examine it and yourself.

On the show’s 152nd episode, Bryan and Preston head back to campus with The Rules of Attraction, the 2002 collegiate fever dream starring the late James Van Der Beek alongside a parade of early-aughts luminaries. Adapted from the novel by Bret Easton Ellis, yes, that Bret Easton Ellis, of American Psycho infamy, and directed by Roger Avary, the film follows a semester in the chemically enhanced lives of morally unmoored college students. It plays, at times, like Stanley Kubrick wandered onto the set of Animal House and decided to dim the lights.

Bryan and Preston dissect the film with the enthusiasm of former undergraduates who survived both dorm life and their own taste in cinema. Was it ahead of its time? Is it too raunchy for contemporary sensibilities? Did it capture campus life or merely its hangover? The discussion spirals into witty side quests, movie history, and collegiate confessions that feel only mildly subpoena-able.

In a podcast ecosystem that often mistakes volume for insight, Fear and Loathing in Cinema prefers curiosity, candor, and the occasional well-aimed joke. Class, as they say, is in session.