Although published in 1994, Bret Easton Ellis’ The Informers is surely a product of the 1980s, reconstructing the decades’ tireless myths via a collection of terse, loosely interconnected short stories that the author wrote while still a Bennington debutante. I doubt I’ll ever get to see the early version of Gregor Jordan’s adaptation of The Informers that Ellis referred to as “an outstanding movie floating out there somewhere” in his recentinterview with Scott Tobias over at A.V. Club, but the version that will make its way to theaters today is a hopelessly boring effort, one which only escapes its slapdash aesthetic when it verges on camp transcendence, exploiting its aging cast’s built-in Hollywood in the sleazy 80s vibe. It’s by no means however, quite as gut wrenchingly unwatchable as a few of zeitgeist-leeching 80s lit adaptations below, many of which happen to be authored by Ellis’ brat pack co-conspirators.
Less Than Zero is obviously bad, and we don’t need to talk about why that didn’t work. And American Psycho—that is, I think, an impossible book to adapt. But whatever, it was the greatest hits from the book, more or less. Mary did a very good job of keeping that movie together, as did Christian Bale, and I think Roger did a terrific job. And with The Informers, I think there is really an outstanding movie floating out there somewhere, and I hope one day people might be able to see it. But it’s very interesting. I am not comparing The Informers to The Godfather on any level, but there’s that famous story where Paramount asked Coppola to cut like an hour out of the movie, because they didn’t want to release a three-hour movie. And Coppola did, and showed it to the executive, and it was terrible. It moved very slowly at two hours. And then when he put the other hour back in, it moved very quickly. And that’s all I want to say about The Informers.
Scott Tobias has a very interesting interview with Bret Easton Ellis at the A.V. Club, in which the author/screenwriter of this week’s The Informers admits to not liking the cut of that film that’s being released, and assesses the other filmic adaptations of his work, concluding that Roger Avary’s The Rules of Attraction is the only one that “fully works.” He also describes the upcoming American Psycho musical as “like a multimedia rave situation,” so take that for what you will…
In better news for the legacies of Andrew McCarthy and James Spader, there’s a new Pretty in Pink video game, and it’s apparently awesome. Or, at least, better than a Clueless video game made by the same people. It also allows complete lunatics with a thing against upward mobility to rewrite history by having Andie end up with Duckie instead of Blaine. Insert mid-80s version of “FAIL” here.
There is a good reason Hollywood continually makes Animal House wannabes and avoids producing films that actually focus on academia. Kids prefer their college movies to be about the fun stuff. And so a movie like Old School grossed $75 million while another Luke Wilson comedy called Tenure currently lacks a distributor. The latter film may also be hilarious, as a satire of the tenure process, but if it doesn’t concentrate more on beer bongs and naked co-eds, it won’t attract as big an audience. And according to some scholars, it may not even resonate with them, because it couldn’t possibly be what the process is really like. Film blogger and associate professor Chuck Tryon was quoted about the film last year as saying, “my ongoing pursuit of tenure typically involves me sitting in front of my laptop until 1 a.m., I don’t know how interesting that would be to watch.”
And evident by the scathing reviews from Sundance of John Krasinski’s Brief Interviews With Hideous Men, it appears another film about academia has failed to make a strong case for the subject matter. Too bad for the late David Foster Wallace, whose stories were adapted for the film, that Gus Van Sant wasn’t at the helm. A decade ago, in an interview with Van Sant, Wallace pretty much gushed that Good Will Hunting is the most accurate film about academia ever made. Do we agree with him? Let’s just say there’s not a whole lot of competition for such an honor. But in our attempt to recognize the ten best films about academia, Good Will Hunting doesn’t quite make the top spot. …Read more
For those of you who don’t like the cold weather in Park City, Sundance is in negotiations to launch a version of its film festival in Abu Dhabi (pictured). Original idea was to hold the new fest in April, but it’s likely to happen later due to the current economy.
Also an effect of the recession: a leaner Sundance, with lowered attendance, smaller crowds (particularly for lack of a lot of the people who go to Park City just to hang out), and fewer parties. The Salt Lake Tribune examines all the cutbacks, including economic effects on documentary filmmaking, distribution and Sundance deal-making, and ends with a nice quote from Robert Redford: “What might be a positive is that if there is less hoo-ha, less of a circus atmosphere, there will be more tendency to focus on what it is that we’re really about, which is the independent filmmakers and the quality of the work.”
The Hollywood Reporter also spoke to Redford, who admits there are currently too many film festivals, and Sundance may eventually become obsolete as a result: “My feeling is when the day comes when we’re no longer providing the mission we started with — not creating something new for audiences, not creating opportunities for new artists to have a place to come and develop — then we shouldn’t be here, and we won’t. As long as we continue to create new advantages, we will continue, but not just to be continuing.”
The New York Times profiles The Informers and its ill-fit premiere at this year’s fest. Says author/co-screenwriter Bret Easton Ellis: “When people tell you something’s ‘a real Sundance movie,’ that’s more negative than a compliment.”
UPDATE: The trailer has been removed under request by the copyright holder.
I can’t explain what attracts me so much to the highly unlikable characters of Bret Easton Ellis’ fiction — or, in my case, since I’ve never actually read his books, of movies based on Bret Easton Ellis’ fiction — but I absolutely love Less Than Zero, American Psycho, and especially The Rules of Attraction. However, I have to give more credit to the filmmakers behind each of these films, because all three adaptations have their own appreciable style that helps me to enjoy the stories of these horrible people.
The Informers may look like it fits in with the rest of the filmed versions of Ellis, but I’m skeptical. I was quite bored with director Gregor Jordan’s war satire Buffalo Soldiers, and I fear that he’s going to fail again at holding my attention here. I am eager to watch Brad Renfro in his final, posthumous role (maybe it’s Oscar-worthy!). I am anxious to see if Winona Ryder can regain my favor (she’s fallen pretty far in my mind since her days as my celebrity crush in the early ’90s). And I’m interested to see an Ellis film that the author actually co-adapted. Yet I’m maintaining low expectations after watching the new trailer, because it just looks like a dark movie about vacuous people without anything extra like the era-defining production design, the iconic performance by Christian Bale and the clever post-production tricks featured respectively in Less Than Zero, American Psycho and The Rules of Attraction.
…or, at least, The Most Essential 9:52 in All of Cinema Based on a Text By Bret Easton Ellis. Except for most of American Psycho. Well…maybe the Most Essential 9:52 in All of 80s Cinema Based on a Text By Bret Easton Eliis? Can we agree on that?
In short: Less Than Zero has been uploaded to YouTube in several chunks. Embedding has been disabled by the request of user 80sTeenMovies, but you can watch the first nine minutes and fifty two seconds––from the tacked-on graduation prologue, through Andrew “Clay” McCarthy’s EuroCine flashbacks to the dissolution of his relationships with Jamie “Blair” Gertz and Robert “Julian” Downey Jr, and up through the end of the triumphant “You can’t home home again…to a Ferrari showroom your parents mansion in Beverly Hills” montage set to “Hazy Shade of Winter” by The Bangles––here.
You don’t really need to watch the rest of the film, but if you’re looking for an excuse to kill the rest of the afternoon, you could. Or, you could just watch the above, vaguely-synergistic Bangles video, which includes that wonderful/horrible scene of Gertz and McCarthy making out in his convertible in the middle of Sunset Strip traffic.
With an almost completely dead, holiday hungover RSS, I spent the morning leisurely slogging through this LA Times profile of 80s it-boy novelist Bret Easton Ellis. Much of the story’s 3,000 words are devoted to defenses of Ellis’ literary reputation, most notably for our purposes from New York Times film critic A.O. Scott, who praises Ellis as “a much more radical writer than he seems.” The rest of it details the oft-adapted novelist’s own attempts to break into screenwriting.
Ellis’ published work has so far formed the basis of three released films: the gloriously trashy Less Than Zero, in which Robert Downey Jr. essentially plays a future version of himself; Mary Harron’s American Psycho, which broke with Ellis’ trademark moral passivity in order to turn the material into obvious satire; and Roger Avery’s Rules of Attraction, which seemed to be kind of more about Roger Avery learning how to use Final Cut Pro than anything else. Somewhere along the way, Ellis apparently “realized he’s not very good at script doctoring” and started concentrating on crafting scripts from scratch. The first of these efforts to see the light of day will be the upcoming The Informers, for which Ellis adapted his own shot story collection in collaboration with Nicholas Jarecki. But to say that Ellis’ outlook on his new career is less than rosy would be an understatement. After the jump, an excerpt from the end of the article, in which Ellis semi-bitterly acknowledges that he’s in a “lost period.”
Lions For Lambs, Tom Cruise’s first production as president of United Artists, will open AFI Fest in November. The film, which “explores issues surrounding the war in Afghanistan,” is Robert Redford’s first as director since The Legend of Bagger Vance. Redford, Cruise, and Meryl Streep star. The project is considered a major test for Cruise and his partner Paula Wagner, who were handed the reigns at the troubled UA after their very public split from Paramount.
The call sheet alone sounds like something out of Glamorama: Billy Bob Thornton, Kim Basinger, Brandon Routh, and Ashley Olsen have joined the cast of The Informers, which will mark Bret Easton Ellis’ first attempt at adapting his own material for the screen. Ellis wrote the script with Nicholas Jarecki; Gregor Jordan will direct.
In what Variety says is the cable network’s “biggest programming purchase in its 17-year history,” E! has spent almost $40 million on the network rights to a handful of NBC/Universal titles, including Knocked Up and Evan Almighty. The former film is the centerpiece of the deal: E! was so anxious to own a film partially shot in its offices that it shelled out for an exclusive 4-year window on the film, meaning no other network will be able to air Knocked Up from 2009-20013.
Andrew Herwitz’ Film Sales Company has brokered a deal to produce an English-language remake of Live-in Maid. The original is an Argentinian film about a broke socialite who turns to the help for moral support; it opened at Film Forum here in New York last month to packed houses and is set to pop up in nine additional cities in the coming weeks. The original is Film Sales’ first foray into distribution; the remake will be their first try at production.
We’ve had a bit of trouble getting this episode to go through the iTunes feed, so we hope this re-post will fix the problem. The original post, with episode description and embedded player, is here.
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With an almost completely dead, 
Lions For Lambs
