Cruel Intentions (1999)
Directed by Roger Kumble
Slaking a thirst for dangerous games, Kathryn challenges her stepbrother, Sebastian, to deflower their headmaster's daughter before the summer ends. If he succeeds, the prize is the chance to bed Kathryn. But if he loses, Kathryn will claim his most prized possession.
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6 films that influenced Cruel Intentions
What critics say influenced Cruel Intentions
Glenn Close and John Malkovich made gender politics diabolical sport in "Dangerous Liaisons" as the two appealed to one another's self-loathing.
I knew Dangerous Liaisons (1988), starring Glenn Close and John Malkovich, was really good, but I forgot how good until last night.
"Cruel Intentions" is literally "Dangerous Liaisons" transplanted to present-day Upper East Side Manhattan and featuring ruthless teenagers playing sexual power games instead of 18th Century French aristocrats.
"Cruel Intentions'' is a modern-day version of "Dangerous Liaisons,'' with rich kids in a prep school playing roles that were written for jaded French aristocrats in the wicked 1782 novel by Choderlos De Laclos.
It's Les Liaisons Dangereuses, the 1782 French novel of sexual manipulation that led to the 1988 films Dangerous Liaisons and Valmont (as in Sebastian Valmont).
Now comes Cruel Intentions, inspired by Choderlos de Laclos's "Les Liaisons Dangereuses" (better known in this country as "Dangerous Liaisons").
Think of it as Whit Stillman's innocent "Metropolitan" as reinvented by a pervert with a bad attitude, to say nothing of heartburn.
Cruel Intentions offers a modern-day, American adolescent version of a classic tale -- following the lead of Clueless (which adapted Jane Austen's Emma) and Baz Luhrmann's hip, modern take on Romeo and Juliet.
Clueless was a new take on Jane Austen's "Emma."
First there was Clueless (Jane Austen's "Emma"), then She's All That ("Pygmalion"), and now Cruel Intentions.
In a variety of retellings most recently Stephen Frears's "Dangerous Liaisons" and Milos Forman's "Valmont" this 18th-century epistolary novel by Pierre Choderlos De Laclos gaily shocks the choir, affronts the vicar and titillates all hedonists too lazy to awake on Sunday morn.
Rather, pair Valmont up with Patrice Leconte’s fantastic 1996 film Ridicule or even the fun modern American update Cruel Intentions .
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The diabolic behavior isn't far removed, in fact, from the revolting seductions in 1995's controversial Kids.
Dickens' "Great Expectations" put Gwyneth Paltrow and Ethan Hawke in modern-day Manhattan.
Even if the dramatic pretensions of literary fidelity get the better of him in the end, it is Kumble's sense of humor that makes Cruel Intentions a step above recent then-to-now translations such as William Shakespeare's Romeo + Juliet and Great Expectations .