VIDEO: The trailer for The Informers
Were the '80s an era of comic nostalgia, as in Adventureland, or one of inane nihilism, as in Gregor Jordan's adaptation of the Bret Easton Ellis novel? If filmmaking quality is any criterion, I'd opt for the former.
In Ellis's semi-conscious, all white, and mostly privileged LA dystopia, everyone is a shit, from top (Kim Basinger and Billy Bob Thornton as a drugged-out Hollywood couple) to bottom (Mickey Rourke as a drugged-out sociopathic drifter). In the middle lurk affectless young boys and girls with interchangeable bad haircuts and joyless hedonism. Ellis pulls this off by matching grotesquerie with banal prose. Jordan, however, turns it into Crash: without the impact, but equally moralistic and trite.
The best of the bunch is Bryan Metro (Mel Raido), the nearly aphasic lead singer of a Cure-like band. When he wakes up in a sour bed full of groupies, his look of disgust might mirror that of the audience.
