Need a movie to keep you company until you literally can't keep your eyes open? Join us tonight when we pass out to Cruel Intentions [starting @ 12:45 a.m. on More Max]

Why we’ll try to stay up and watch it: If you need an object lesson on how long ten years really is, look no further than the marketing campaign for Cruel Intentions. When the Dangerous Liaisons-Goes-Prep-School teen film came out in March of 1999, the poster featured the giant heads of stars Sarah Michelle Gellar and Ryan Phillippe, but only a tiny shot of Reese Witherspoon, sitting crossed legged between them. For her work on Cruel Intentions the future Oscar-winning actress earned $250,000; now Ms. Witherspoon commands nearly $15 million per picture.

Of course, that was a different time for Hollywood. It might be hard to remember, but from 1996 through 2000, Neve Campbell, Jennifer Love Hewitt and Rachel Leigh Cook ruled the box office, starring as similarly virginal good girls thrown into demographically approved situations (horror, high school or both). Ms. Gellar made her fair share of appearances alongside those actresses, but she never really fit in with the crowd. There always seemed to be something more salacious running underneath her mostly benign screen personas. Enter Cruel Intentions, where, as Kathryn, the actress gets to embrace her inner bitch—activities include: snorting coke out of a Crucifix necklace, scheming to ruin peoples lives and spouting a torrent of unprintable sexual come-ons—her line reading of “you can put it anywhere” would make a porn star blush. We truly love everything that Leighton Meester does as Blair on Gossip Girl, but she only wishes she could conjure up a performance like Ms. Gellar’s.

Meanwhile, as Kathryn’s stepbrother, Sebastian, a bored teenage womanizer who pouts his way through the film and uncorks howlers like “I’m sick of sleeping with these insipid Manhattan debutantes”, Mr. Phillippe shines. Perhaps Ms. Witherspoon should have taken his perfect embodiment of this character to be a foreboding sign of things to come instead of an invitation to hopeful wedded bliss.

When we’ll probably fall asleep: The funny thing about Cruel Intentions is that, despite a healthy use of the word “fuck” and a few too many head-drops-out-of-the-frame-to-pantomime-oral-sex jokes, the film doesn’t seem much more scandalous at this point than a regular episode of Gossip Girl. (That might be all you need to know about how much times have changed.) However, Cruel Intentions does feature one debauched encounter that, thus far, Gossip Girl has refused to try: the lesbian kiss. So we’ll make it until 1:15, 30 minutes into the film, when Ms. Gellar teaches a very game Selma Blair how to get to first base. The reason the kiss manages to be more than just another exploitative soft-core male fantasy is because the two actresses are wildly funny together—no one plays innocent stupidity like Ms. Blair, and Ms. Gellar treats her with a perfect blend of incredulity and phoniness. The kiss winds up being secondary to their skills as comedic performers. And, well, yeah… that it’s also pretty hot doesn’t hurt either.

Even though her film career has never taken off the way we're sure she would have liked, we have always found Ms. Gellar to be an incredibly interesting actress. She seems to be the one female lead in her age group who really can sleaze it up at a moments notice (see: Southland Tales, Cruel Intentions) and isn't afraid to show audiences an unflattering side. The Wonderful Maladys could do for her career what Weeds did for Mary-Louise Parker.

And as for HBO, this is just yet another positive step forward in its comeback story. Entourage is rejuvenated, True Blood has gotten some sparkling reviews (ahem), and now, HBO has some interesting series in the pipeline (Maladys, the Jason Schwartzman-Ted Danson show Bored to Death). It's almost enough to make the network forget about ignoring Matthew Weiner's pitch for Mad Men. Well, not really.

Sarah Michelle Gellar met her bestie, shoe designer Manolo Blahnik, on a rainy Manhattan day at Bergdorf.

In the February issue of Radar, the 30-year-old actress—whose next film, Possession, will be released at the end of February—sets the scene: “One day, a couple friends and I went into Bergdorf just to get out of the rain,” she said, adding: “A man who works there, who I know, he said, ‘Mr. Blahnik is here signing autographs and doing sketches. You have to come meet him. And there was this big line of women, and I thought, This is going to be so embarrassing, he’s going to have absolutely no idea who I am! So I’m waiting for this blank look from him, and he’s like [imitating his Spanish accent], ‘It’s Sarah Michelle! I love the Buffy!’ He was so lovely. He sketched a shoe and signed it, and it actually hangs in my closet.”

Unlike so many other child stars in Hollywood, Ms. Gellar has seemingly managed to remain relatively grounded and healthy. Addressing the issue, she told the magazine: “As a kid, performing was my passion, but it wasn’t at the forefront of my life. I wasn’t a child star; I was a working child actor. So I got more from seeing other actors who had missed their childhoods.”

Not entirely perfect, she also admitted to having rather superficial fantasies. “My dreams are just so on the surface that, literally, there’s nothing to actually read into,” she told the magazine.

Sarah Michelle Gellar Has Superficial Dreams [Just Jared]

Socialite Genevieve Jones looked beautiful in her daisy headband.  Man about town Paul Johnson-Calderon chose a red one (with a matching sash around his waist). to accessorize his tuxedo. The artist duo Andrew Andrew, who dress as twins à la Gilbert-and-George and Viktor-and-Rolf, sported matching ones.  “We bought them in a Japanese supermarket in Hawaii,” they boasted. 

Top model Agnyess Deyn was a standout in her canary-yellow mini-dress by London label Preen.  The Manchester, England, native recently moved to New York.  “I’m still in my honeymoon period with the city,” she said with a smile.

The actress Rosario Dawson, stunning in Max Azria (the design label sponsored the event), said she’s looking forward to Fourth of July Weekend in the Hamptons, where her buddies are throwing a big bash.  Last summer in the Hamptons, The Transom kicked it with Ms. Dawson and her madcap moms, Isabel.  This year, she said, she feels a bit out of it.  “Oh, I don’t even know all the parties,” she said.  “No one ever tells me, I’m never invited anywhere, you know that!”

But attention comic book fanatics: Ms. Dawson is the prototype for a crime-fighting heroine in a comic book named O.C.T.: Occult Crimes Taskforce.  The trade paperback of the first four issues is coming out June 13, and shortly thereafter Ms. Dawson hits the road on a book tour. Whee!

Conspicuously absent from the crowd were the art-world power brokers--curators, critics, gallerists and the like – most of whom are jetting their way to Europe and the month-long jamboree of big exhibitions there.  “There’s only a handful left,” said Whitney director Adam Weinberg of the art gang.  But, no worries, the poor artists themselves are still here, he said. Oh, phew.

Luba Azria, wife of Max, was introduced to Walis Singh Ahluwalia, the jewelry designer.  Ms. Azria, perhaps inspired by Mr. Singh Ahluwalia’s turban, decided to inform him that she’d once attended a great Eastern-meditation camp, of sorts.  “It was a totally amazing experience. It changed my life,” she said.  Mr. Singh Ahluwalia blinked and nodded blankly.

“I’m building a big, beautiful house for all my friends, brick by brick,” he later said about his gem company, House of Waris. 

At last year’s party, Moby told The Transom that he’d washed his hands of the whole affair (“I’m bored,” he’d said.)  This year, he didn’t wash his hands after peeing.  The head-shorn musician turned from the men’s room urinals and headed straight for the door.  “What I love about this party in particular is it’s this odd combination of socialites and degenerate artists,” he said.  “And they sort of rub off on each other.”

“I think it’s important to have courage,” said Mr. Fraser, who allowed that he was “a little warm” in his green stressed-leather jacket. “Especially as creators, as actors, as directors, you have to have courage, and it’s not easy,” continued the 38-year-old actor, currently filming The Mummy 3. “But if you have that, you can go forward in life.” Anything else? “Eat broccoli, sleep properly, read a book every now and then, take your vitamins. It’s not that complicated!”

Ms. Gellar had apparently been slacking on the vitamins; she was suffering from a bad cold. “I think, at the end of the day, you just have to follow the path that you believe in and be true to yourself,” said the erstwhile vampire-slayer, now 30 but still girlish in ultramarine silk gown and black stilettos, after a contemplative pause. A few feet away, her wholesome hubby, Freddie Prinze Jr., busied himself by awkwardly talking into a cell phone.

Special bonus life insight from thinking person’s sex object Andy Garcia, 51, whose character in The Air I Breathe was not assigned an emotion, but who was wearing a very fetching Prussian blue suit and a tightly knotted scarf that dangled just so: “Never take a step backward, not even to gain momentum,” Mr. Garcia said. “I try to use that every day.”

We're in the middle of a plague of moronic teenage movies featuring thumb-sucking Lolitas with three names. In the ads, confusion reigns. Rachael Leigh Cook. Lara Flynn Boyle. Jennifer Love Hewitt. Judy Evans Greer. Joey Lauren Adams. And on and on, until the marquees run out of letters and ticket buyers run out of curiosity.

These girls come from TV sitcoms or trashy movies no grown-up ever sees, like Scream 2 and I Know What You Did Last Summer . I can't tell one from the next. They look and sound alike, and they all act with their hair. Oh, well. I got used to Jennifer Jason Leigh, Mary-Louise Parker and Mary Stuart Masterson. Maybe I can learn to live with Sarah Michelle Gellar. That is, if she ever graduates from Buffy, the Vampire Slayer (a TV show I've never seen, although my friends assure me I need only take one look and I'll know why).

She is certainly trying. Fresh from the dismal Simply Irresistible , her Q rating has now landed her in a more ambitious project, Cruel Intentions , a Gen-X update of the scandalous 18th-century French novel Les Liaisons Dangereuses by Pierre Choderlos de Laclos that transports the lust, betrayal, deception, guilt and sexual duplicity of 1782 Paris to Manhattan's Upper East Side for no other reason than to seduce the youth market. It's the fourth time around the block for this Gallic warhorse. In 1959, the story of the wicked and sadistic aristocrats Marquise de Merteuil and the Vicomte de Valmont became a lavishly praised Roger Vadim film with Jeanne Moreau and Gérard Philipe. In 1988, using an adaptation by Christopher Hampton of his hugely successful London and Broadway play, Stephen Frears triumphed with Dangerous Liaisons , starring Glenn Close and John Malkovich. One year later, Milos Forman flopped with yet another rehash called Valmont , with Annette Bening and Colin Firth. Alas, the predatory sexual conspirators are now up to their old tricks again, but as venomous Park Avenue preppies their capped fangs have lost some bite.

In Cruel Intentions , the treacherous Marquise de Merteuil is named Kathryn (Ms. Gellar) and the web-spinning, sexual conquistador Vicomte de Valmont is Sebastian, played by Flavor of the Month Ryan Phillippe, who survived the disastrous 54 with pubescent hearts pounding for more. Bored and massively rich, with too much free time on their hands, no parental supervision and not a schoolbook in sight, they waste their summer vacation seducing everybody between the ages of 15 and 20 who lives in an upper-crust 30-block radius between Elaine's and Tiffany's, discarding their victims and ruining lives just for the fun of it.

Kathryn has just been dumped by her latest beau for an innocent virgin named Cecile (Selma Blair) and enlists Sebastian's help in destroying her reputation. Sebastian considers this assignment too easy. What he really wants is unbridled sex with Kathryn, also his stepsister. So they make a bargain. If Sebastian can ruin Cecile and deflower the even more chaste and virtuous new prep school headmaster's daughter Annette (played by the enchanting Reese Witherspoon) before the fall school term begins, Kathryn will fulfill his fantasies in bed with no holds barred. If he fails, she gets his treasured 1956 Jaguar.

Plotting strategies with the cool, calm detachment of four-star generals deploying their troops into battle, these decadent and immoral teenagers go to work. While Kathryn lures the idiotic Cecile into uncharted lesbian submission and then turns her over to a black cello instructor from Juilliard, Sebastian diabolically works on Annette, who is brighter and more resistant to his bait than he planned. (Annette has even published an idealistic manifesto in Seventeen on the value of fidelity before marriage.) Along the way, the terrible twosome finds time to blackmail the school football hero (who is a closet homosexual) and enrage the interfering shrinks and mothers who get in their way.

It's a delight, under these stressful circumstances, to welcome such veteran scene-stealers as Swoosie Kurtz and Christine Baranski. Most of the film is a somber, manipulative affair in which the décor is often more engrossing than the smarmy snickerings of smug, cynical teenagers. Despite all the prurient dialogue, director Roger Kumble, making his feature-directing debut after the dubious honor of writing Dumb and Dumber , is positively bashful about actually showing anything remotely sexy.

By the time Sebastian makes the fatal mistake of falling in love with the charming Annette, he has become almost as virtuous as his victim. Where the acid cynicism of Glenn Close and John Malkovich provided a clash of cobras, the coyness of Mr. Phillippe (who is no Gérard Philipe, either) and the youthful inexperience of Ms. Gellar provide little more than a spat between brats. By the time they get what they deserve, the cruelty and psychological complexity of a sophisticated work have long been dissipated, and the ensuing tragedy has little resonance.

Cruel Intentions might have been more convincing if the immensely gifted Reese Witherspoon had switched roles with Ms. Gellar. She has played spunky, tarted-up and sexually precocious teenagers with such dexterity and relish in Freeway , Twilight and Pleasantville that she might bring to the role of Kathryn some of the skill and conviction Ms. Gellar lacks. (Even as the angelic Annette, she easily walks away with the picture.) But even with perfect casting, Cruel Intentions is a pointless miscalculation. Soulless adults doing cruel things to wreck the lives of weaker adults and knowing they're doing what they should not do is not the same thing as selfish, unformed teenagers doing what comes naturally.

At the end of Dangerous Liaisons , when Glenn Close's eyes turned to marble as she paid the ultimate price for self-destruction on the altar of decency, the effect was chilling. In this naïve teenage spin, Ms. Gellar gets snubbed on campus. It only feels like someone turned up the air-conditioning.

London Robbing

Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels is a British underworld caper about four goons from the crime-ridden East End of London who gamble their cocky lunkhead lives on a sure thing and find themselves up to their accents in mobsters. Best mates who have saved up their takes from a variety of petty larcenies, they bet all they've swindled on one card game they can't lose. When the game turns out to be a setup, they end up owing $800,000 to the game's host, the murderous owner of a notorious sex club named Hatchet Harry. If they don't come up with the money in one week, their fingers will be chopped off, digit by digit.

As their no-brainer slowly turns into a "bad day in Bosnia," the poor sods put their heads together and orchestrate a caper that could pay off their gambling debt and even net them a hefty profit. It involves two antique guns worth a fortune at Sotheby's and a theft from a trio of gay drug dealers who turn out to be anything but sissies. Everything backfires. Plots, subplots and counterplots ensue, as the number of gangs multiply and all the crooks try to outwit each other. It's fast, funny and violent.

It is also confusing. With so many competing characters, spiraling snafus and too little help from the script, you keep asking, Which gang is this? Who is Barry the Baptist, and what does he have to do with Big Chris and his pint-sized son, who is fast growing up to be a skinhead like his old man? Which gang's got the money now? The narrative remains unfathomably complex until the end (it all makes perfect sense if you just hang in there) and the script finally sizzles with wit, insolence and suspense.

Crucial to the film's remarkable authenticity are not only the gritty performances (Jason Flemyng, Nick Moran, Steven Mackintosh and a surprising turn by Sting are standouts in a big and impressive cast), but the robust direction by Guy Ritchie, who also wrote the punchy screenplay, and the raw, dark camerawork that captures a real sense of pace and place. The narrative is perhaps a bit over-eventful (a new corpse hits the sidewalk in practically every scene and you're not always sure who it is, or why) and the violence is so graphic it may unsettle some viewers, but this is an audacious, provocative and compulsively watchable film with thrillingly black humor.

The use of subtitles would be a blessing; the dialects are so fast and furious and butchered you sometimes wonder if it's the English language you're hearing. But Mr. Ritchie, who is making his directorial debut, clearly has talent to spare, and the bristling, cliffhanger ending will leave you reeling. Already one of Britain's sleeper box-office hits of the year, Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels is crazy and unpredictable enough to repeat its success here, too. It roars and ignites and hits the ground running.

Money is thrown around in such enormously large quantities-thousands of pounds here and thousands of pounds there-that even with the drug trade in the foreground everyone seems to be playing with Monopoly money. This is not like Trainspotting (1996) or The Full Monty (1997), movies with which Smoking Barrels has been linked in the advance buzz. Mr. Ritchie's romp lacks the hallucinatory interiority of the former and the communal solidarity of the latter. All its MTV-like camera angles and editing ingenuity is applied to the pacing of the action, and the trivialization of the nihilistic violence.

Yet amid all the shameless trickery and exploitation, the movie is not without wit, charm and an indefinable panache. I was thoroughly entertained while I was watching it, and I haven't hated myself since. And that is something, though I don't know exactly what. I didn't even mind not understanding most of the dialogue. Indeed, it might be better that way, though there is enough use of the F-word to express the generally angry and cynical state of mind among the universally criminal and quasi-criminal groupings of rascals.

The story centers around four grifters, Tom (Jason Flemyng), Soap (Dexter Fletcher), Eddy (Nick Moran) and Bacon (Jason Statham). You are made to root for them because they are driven to pull off a big heist only to get out of being mangled by crime boss Hatchet Harry (P.H. Moriarty) and his fearsome henchman Barry the Baptist (the late Lenny McLean, to whom the film is dedicated). Do these sound like Damon Runyon characters? Well, sort of.

As I said at the outset, it's the guys without the dolls, and by the end there are about a dozen corpses, and only a half-dozen survivors among the more conspicuous characters. Sting makes more than a token appearance as Eddy's hard-nosed pub-owning paterfamilias, J.D. And Steven Mackintosh as the marijuana-growing Winston impressed me with his poignant expression of weary depravity. Ultimately, Mr. Ritchie and his collaborators have successfully conned me into thinking that they have done something worth doing.

Evil Under the Snuff

By contrast, Joel Shumacher's loathsome Eight Millimeter , from a screenplay by Andrew Kevin Walker, doesn't fool me for a moment with its pious prattle about the evils of snuff films and pornography in all its pernicious guises, except, that is, the pornography of self-righteous violence in which Eight Millimeter shamelessly wallows. Mr. Walker previously wrote the screenplay for the much admired (though not by me) Seven (1995). The theme is the same as in Eight Millimeter : Evil is contagious enough to infect those seeking to root it out, Brad Pitt's police detective in Seven , and Nicolas Cage's surveillance specialist Tom Welles in Eight Millimeter .

Mr. Cage has become such a wet-eyed purveyor of moral anguish that he makes Mr. Pitt look calm, cool and collected. Indeed, Tom Welles is a character drowning in soulful guilt for all the horrors of the world threatening his baby daughter in his family's unpretentious frame house in Harrisburg, Pa. His job takes him away for weeks and months at a time from his mournful wife, Amy (Catherine Keener), who feels abandoned, and never more so than when Tom puts on his High Noon , a-man's-gotta-do-what-a-man's-gotta-do look as he prepares to dive into a cesspool of vice flowing from one sleazy coast to the other.

As long as the movie retains its private-eye aura of mystery, it moves along with narrative fluidity, but once the evil has been uncovered, the point seems to be to prolong the hero's pain and torture by his reluctance on at least two occasions to use his gun in a painlessly efficient manner. Thus, the bad guys temporarily get the upper hand so that they can indulge all their sadistic passions. This I find more objectionable than the transparent hypocrisy of preaching against pornography while contemptuously displaying it, but with just enough restraint to avoid an NC-17 rating. As for the danger of evil's contagion, it may apply to moviegoers as well as to surveillance specialists.

And Eight Millimeter is clearly an evil film.

The Post-Monica, Utter Banality of Blowjobs

Roger Kumble's Cruel Intentions , from his own screenplay, based on the 1782 novel Les Liaisons Dangereuses by Pierre Choderlos de Laclos, follows feebly in the footprints of Roger Vadim's 1959 French treatment with Gérard Philipe and Jeanne Moreau, Stephen Frears' 1988 English-language version Dangerous Liaisons , with John Malkovich, Glenn Close, Michelle Pfeiffer and Uma Thurman, followed almost immediately that same year by Milos Forman's Prague-based English-language version, Valmont , with Colin Firth, Annette Bening, Meg Tilly and Fairuza Balk.

Curiously, the Vadim is much the weakest of the three, but Cruel Intentions makes Mr. Vadim look like Shakespeare, Sophocles, Molière and Chekhov rolled into one. Mr. Kumble has deliberately set out to transpose 18th-century Laclos into a 20th-century teenage toothless as well as clueless intrigue during an upscale high school's summer break. Why not? The conventional wisdom in Hollywood presumes that teenagers make up the only audience that counts demographically. So you take Sarah Michelle Gellar, whose past credits include I Know What You Did Last Summer (1997) and the television series Buffy the Vampire Slayer , and cast her in the villainous Moreau-Close-Bening role while pretty boy Ryan Phillippe, Ms. Gellar's co-star in I Know What You Did Last Summer , succeeds the previous Philipe-Malkovich-Firth Valmonts.

I could go on and on about the casting, acting, writing and directing absurdities of this enterprise, but what purpose would it serve? Anyone over 14 will find the proceedings excruciatingly silly, and surprisingly prudish, though the kids in the film talk dirty in post-Starr-Tripp-Lewinsky fashion, and sound cool about the utter banality of blowjobs.

Reese Witherspoon as a virginal deviation from the novel is the only performer who emerges with a shred of dignity and a semblance of competence. Louise Fletcher, Swoosie Kurtz and Christine Baranski are mercilessly mocked by the snickeringly spoiled, callow youth brigade around them. I hope these previously honored actresses got a decent paycheck for serving as high school dartboards. At this infantile level of appraisal, I suspect that Ms. Gellar and Mr. Phillippe may have a harder time next summer than last. But what do I know? I wrote off Tom Hanks after his first two gross-out movies.

Looking for a Date to Sundance

Myles Berkowitz's 20 Dates could be written off as the writer-director's bar mitzvah movie by a reviewer unkinder than yours truly. I would prefer to fault 20 Dates for the fallacy of the faux-naïf pseudo-Pirandellian pose already superfluous in the realm of Sundance and Slamdance cinema drowning in a sea of self-consciousness.

Having issued this disclaimer, and in the context of the horrors I have seen lately, I must confess that I managed to sit through the picture without fidgeting too much. We are asked to imagine that Mr. Berkowitz is a struggling filmmaker in Los Angeles trying to make a movie about his 20 different dates, on each of which he is hoping to find true love. Time and again, the young women are put off by the presence of a camera and sound boom. The endless varieties of polite rejection are amusing in a gruesome way for any viewer who has been trapped in a date from hell. But this sort of social Grand Guignol has been done to death in movies, sitcoms and stand-up routines. Besides, Mr. Berkowitz manages to make himself so clumsily obnoxious that he becomes a tired joke without an adequate punch line.

Guilt and Fear in Israel

Enough already. The 15th Annual Israel Film Festival, which is in the process of completing its program (Feb. 23 to March 11), has unveiled at least one film that would much improve the local film scene in general release. Shemi Zarhin's Dangerous Acts makes me wonder anew why the large Jewish-American art-house audience in New York is not more enthusiastic about Israeli cinema. Is it a question of being too close historically, but too far away emotionally? As a non-Jewish art-house type, I find mysterious depths of guilt and fear in Dangerous Acts that I cannot fully fathom.

An actress named Zvia Israeli (Gila Almagor) is confronted at the door of her apartment by Israel (Moshe Ivgi), the man whose reckless driving caused Zvia to lose her husband and daughter three years before. Israel has just been released from prison, and has come to ask for forgiveness. (Does the odd nomenclature of the characters suggest an allegory about the Holocaust?) When Zvia refuses, Israel jumps off the roof, is apparently crippled, and Zvia takes him into her home to care for him. He becomes more ominously possessive and demanding, but Zvia still fails to heed her friends' warnings until her own life is placed in jeopardy on the same stage where she is performing mediocre melodramas interspersed with song and dance interludes that comment on both the play and the real-life situation.

I am reminded somewhat of Saul Bellow's The Victim . I also suspect that the filmmaker has touched a masochistic nerve in the Israeli populace. Yet, there is something implacably aggressive on both sides of the confrontation. Dangerous Acts suggests that something interesting is going on in the Israeli cinema, something that should interest both Jews and non-Jews more than it apparently does.