Wednesday, April 29, 2009
Less than zero: The Informers
Posted by Rhiannon Fionn-Bowman on Wed, Apr 29, 2009 at 9:36 AM
By Matt Brunson
I confess that I've never read any of the novels written by Bret Easton Ellis, but if the movies based on his output are in any way indicative of the quality of his books, then I imagine that Hell for me would consist of Rush Limbaugh and Sarah Palin taking turns reading out loud from his works for all eternity.
1987's ragged Less Than Zero remains the best of his adaptations simply by virtue of compelling work by Robert Downey Jr. and James Spader, while 2000's torturous American Psycho at least manages to make a couple of salient points about misguided machismo. 2002's The Rules of Attraction, on the other hand, is completely unwatchable, a designation it now shares with this latest atrocity. The problem isn't that Ellis enjoys focusing all his attention on vacuous, detestable people. After all, cinema is full of great Feel-Bad Bummers about life's losers -- it's hard, for example, to imagine a better representative of this field than Todd Solondz's Happiness, which made my 10 Best list for 1998. No, the problem with Ellis is that he makes his characters boring and their actions pointless, both unpardonable sins in any medium.
Read the rest of Matt's review here.
Watch the trailer here:
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