Brett Easton Ellis' The Informers, vapid and vicous

Gratuitous cocaine use, ambivalent sex, and the perpetual party have aggrandized, transformed and bled unobtrusively into this decade from the eighties and nineties. Unsurprisingly, Brett Easton Ellis' and Gregor Jordan's The Informers, a fictional mingling of fates in the world of 1984 Los Angeles portrayed in an adaptation splayed on the white screen, felt eerily pertinent.

Social commentary aside; The Informers was beautiful, in that narcissistic, chiseled abdominal muscles and beautiful breasts way that only Ellis has captured unflinchingly in the past quarter decade.

Ellis has immortalized, satirized and exposed American culture with what he hasn't said in his novels since his debut Less Than Zero (1985), which was turned into a sterilized, but nonetheless disturbing, Hollywood rendition.

Director Gregor Jordan captained Buffalo Soldiers, a quaint but uncomplicated film about non-combative drug dealing US troops in West Germany at the cusp of the fall of the Berlin Wall, starring Joaquin Phoenix (To Die For).

The cast of Ellis' anticipated adaptation was canary diamond studded with Kim Basinger (Cool World), Mickey Rourke (The Wrestler) and Billy Bob Thornton (The Man Who Wasn't There) to name a few. All gave stellar performances with a limited screen time. Rourke and Basinger were especially engaging capturing Ellis' underlying ennui, savagery and frustration unnervingly.

Ellis even co-wrote the screenplay with relative newcomer Nicholas Jarecki, something he has yet to accomplish (negotiate) or take credit for from any of his previous novel to film adaptations.

The film could have been executed with more attention to emotion or the lack there of. Drugs weren't used that much or were they in 1984, and why is everyone so healthy looking through all this hedonistic debauchery?

All considerable questions, but Ellis' novels, before this point, as adapted were heavily sterilized, but The Informers was allowed to almost go blow for blow with its printed counterpart.

The film is not verbatim, of course, but viscerally it is the closest of Ellis' collaborations with Hollywood to date. The adaptation of Less Than Zero missed the whole voyeuristic and disinterested ultimate conclusion. Rules of Attraction was heavily entertaining but seemed to not warrant any serious credibility in the film world, and American Psycho was the most successful of Ellis' adaptations with the fascinating and frightening performance of Christian Bale (The Machinist), but was overlooked as a misogynistic horror thriller as opposed to a scathing social condemnation.

Ellis will be looked back upon as a scholar of Americans' selfish ways, bacchanalian whims and detachment.

Nobody in an escapist atmosphere, as our country falls into a recession caused by these dogmas, wants to be entertained by such base and phantasm-realistic cinema, but reality is tragicomic.

This film is for readers of his work, and no it is not completely well executed and lays stagnant at times, but for fans of the obscure collection of short stories it mirrors and their contrary creator, it will be a fresh bite of something ridiculously plated, pompous and numbing.

Brett Easton Ellis; "… and I take the sunglasses off and she tells me to put them back on and I put them back on and it stings when I come and then I guess she comes too. Bowie's on the stereo and she gets up, flushed, and turns the stereo off and turns on MTV [an excerpt from the novel Less Than Zero]."