Last update: 12.30.99
ARTICLES
Here are some articles, summarys and reviews for the movie "Cruel Intentions" with their designated authors and/or sources:
The following article is from Blockbuster Video.
Cruel Intentions
Actors: Sarah Michelle Gellar, Ryan Phillippe, Reese Witherspoon, Selma Blair, Louise Fletcher
Director: Roger Kumble
Category: Drama : Dramas
Rated: R
Running Time: 95 minutes
Year Released: 1999
In an adaptation of Choderlos de Laclos' novel, Les Liaisons Dangereuses, Kathryn Merteuil (Sarah Michelle Gellar) and Sebastian Valmont (Ryan Phillippe) are half-brother and sister living in Manhattan. With their absent parents travelling in Europe, the wealthy pair have the family penthouse to themselves as they while away their summer break before beginning senior year at a private high school. Sebastian, bad-boy lothario, has apparently slept with all the girls in town and appears numb to it all. Kathryn, who appears to be the good girl class president, is actually far more amoral and malicious than Sebastian, but maintains appearances to the contrary. When she is dumped by her boyfriend, Court Reynolds (Charlie O'Connell), for the innocent Cecile Caldwell (Selma Blair), she schemes revenge by destroying Cecile's reputation. She challenges Sebastian to deflower Cecile and transform her into a tramp to humiliate Court. Sebastian isn't as interested as Cecile -- she's spent her whole life in a Catholic girl's school and presents no challenge. The girl who has caught his attention is Annette Hargrove (Reese Witherspoon), the new headmaster's daughter. Annette had written an article for Seventeen Magazine on her plans to stay a virgin until she finds her one true love. Kathryn makes a wager. If Sebastian fails to lure Annette into bed before the summer is over, Kathryn gets his car. If he succeeds, Sebastian gets Kathryn, whom he wants anyway. Sebastian accepts the bet, but Annette turns out to be more than either of them bargained for. -- Ron Wells, All Movie Guide
The following articles are from Entertainment Weekly
8.3.99
CRUEL INTENTIONS
NEW VIDEO REVIEWS
RELATIVELY SPEAKING Phillippe and Gellar keep it in the family
Sarah Michelle Gellar, Ryan Phillippe, Reese Witherspoon
Rated R
Here is Cruel Intentions, the fourth screen adaptation of Choderlos de Laclos' ''Les Liaisons Dangereuses,'' a novel derided centuries ago as ''a picture of the most odious immorality.'' Director Roger Kumble treats its plot as the framework for a glossy exploitation film; he's less concerned with exploring the souls of cynical libertines than with plumbing the nuances of teenage lesbian tongue-kissing. Phillippe's Valmont and Gellar's Merteuil are bratty Manhattan step-siblings who lay a carnal wager over whether he can waste the chastity of Reese Witherspoon's little miss. The picture is odious, sure, but its first hour is so zippily titillating as to make for tasty trash. Viewers eager to gobble more of the same can tune in to the film's TV spin-off, ''Manchester Prep,'' this fall. Grade: C+ -- Troy Patterson
3.5.99
CRUEL INTENTIONS
NEW MOVIE REVIEWS
''CRUEL'' TO BE KIND Gellar and Phillippe dream a little scheme
Sarah Michelle Gellar, Ryan Phillippe
Rated R
Writer-director Roger Kumble's foxy, snotty, enjoyably trashy update of 1988's ''Dangerous Liaisons'' isn't the second or even the third movie to adapt Choderlos de Laclos' 1782 novel about sexual manipulation among spoiled aristocrats -- Roger Vadim's ''Dangerous Liaisons'' (1959) and Milos Forman's ''Valmont'' (1989) came before. But ''Cruel Intentions'' is the first to move the story from gilded 18th-century Paris to moneyed contemporary Manhattan and set the players in high school. It's the first time we've ever heard Valmont report on his erotic adventures like this: ''If you're asking if I nailed her, the answer is no.''
And it's certainly the first time the heartless Marquise de Merteuil -- a fangs-baring role previously occupied by Glenn Close and now rented by ''Buffy the Vampire Slayer'' 's Sarah Michelle Gellar as Kathryn Merteuil -- describes her position in society comme ça: ''I'm the Marcia f---ing Brady of the Upper East Side.''
''Cruel Intentions'' is calculatedly, wantonly naughty; no passing character is too negligible to ridicule, from Swoosie Kurtz as Sebastian's media-star psychiatrist (an in-joke: Kurtz costarred in Frears' ''Liaisons'') to Christine Baranski as the snobby mother of a dim-bulb virgin (Selma Blair) about to fall into Sebastian's clutches. (The virgin is given a particular boot in the rear: She's made to galumph around in an Australia souvenir T-shirt that is, like, so lame.)
Yet for all the sewer talk, for all the times Kathryn anesthetizes her ennui with toots of cocaine from a silver crucifix, ''Cruel Intentions'' never shocks or even offends by ascribing fully adult cruelties and erotic activities to obnoxious kids; such harshness wouldn't flatter a cast this moussed and magazine-layout-ready. Showing less skin than an average Lever 2000 soap commercial and making less orgasmic noise than promos for Clairol shampoos, these teenthrobs are merely playing at being studs and vamps.
They're fawns, they're puppies, they're tadpoles with potty mouths. She may run her hands over her corseted breasts and strike a smoldering pose (assisted by a hair-color change from Buffy blond to bitch-brunet), but Gellar looks about as come-hitherish as Monica Lewinsky in that sad, sad beret, waiting to hug the Big Creep. Witherspoon plays a good girl who gives her heart and then her bod to the wrong man, but she does so like a 4-H club member at a livestock fair. And Phillippe? Well, he's livestock if ever I've seen some, an androgynously pretty young man with a ripe lower lip. That his Sebastian can bag young women is remarkable, considering how he can barely be bothered to smile or stand up.
There's a satisfying payoff in ''Cruel Intentions,'' courtesy of the original novelist. It's not as electrifying a theatrical moment as when Glenn Close wipes lipstick off her powder-white face while one tear falls, but it'll do. A bitch gets her comeuppance and a bastard repents in tragedy. What sneakier way to teach teens a lesson than to let them think the adults are shocked -- shocked -- by their experimentally wicked ways? Grade: B- -- Lisa Schwarzbaum
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