The Informers

The current events surrounding this post are interesting considering I have been wanting to talk about this movie for quite some time now. They announced that Bret Easton Ellis' novel, The Informers was going to be made into a movie about two years ago and I have been looking forward to it for a while. Strictly from the basis of the synopsis and the intriguing characters involved. I have not read the novel, but that should be fixed once I am finished with my current book. The novel follows different peoples living in LA during the 80's. It follows their everyday lives and socially critiques them and their lack of humanism. You have an array of characters from a pop musician, aging newscaster, and naturally a vampire. Ellis has always focused on the inhuman subculture and the immorality, or straight forward disdain for others. We are all familiar with American Psycho, and if you aren't, you should be. This novel was not well received by critics but still has found a nice home with his fans. I personally like his cold, heartless, and almost uninformative writing. He never describes where his characters have been or what has turned them into who they are, he just tells you what they do and leaves the rest up to you. You are free to judge, dispute, argue, hate, or even psychoanalyze the characters you are introduced to. The intriguing portion of this is the recent death of Brad Renfro, which Dru mentioned in an earlier post. He stars in the movie and had recently wrapped for the film before he died. Renfro has had an ongoing bout with drug abuse and run ins with the law and I guess it finally caught up to him. I don't think his death is going to have an impact on the Hollywood and social community like River Phoenix, but those who are familiar with his work know that there is one less great actor in the world. It is interesting though that their is now probably a drug and over indulgence death now associated with this film about drug abuse and the over indulgence of the Hollywood socialites.