Too many fans seem to be blown away

Fantastic!

Although it has its amusing moments, in eneral the plot does not convince.

A story that's too fascinating to pass by...

It's 1983 L.A. A bunch of privileged teens lose their friend who got run over by a car. Graham Sloan (Jon Foster) is the son of movie producer William (Billy Bob Thornton) and pill-popping wife Laura (Kim Basinger). Their family is completely dysfunctional and so is everyone connected to them. She's sleeping with Graham's friend Martin. William is sleeping with local TV anchor Cheryl Moore (Winona Ryder). Graham's girlfriend Christie (Amber Heard) is also sleeping plenty of men including Martin. There are also many other characters in and around show business of that area.I don't care about any of these people. It's not necessarily the lifeless aimless characters' fault although they don't make it easy. These people are empty but not in a compelling way. There is also so many of them that each one feels completely scattered and unimportant. It's basically a bunch of hot, naked, drugged-out, pretentious and hopeless people in an emotional wasteland.

This meaningless film wallows in the sewer for its entire running time, then ends on an equally pointless and sour note. It's a bunch of dead end story threads about shallow, scum characters that don't engage the viewer on a single level. It's slips way past boring and into tedium watching these fools misbehave and talk gobbledygook about their drab, pathetic empty lives. The producers threw writer Nicholas Jarecki off the picture who was set to direct and replaced him with Gregor Jordan, who changed the script to suit his misdirected vision. Being fired from this production gave Jarecki's career a shot in the arm, when it freed him up to begin his directing effort Arbitrage, which is miles better than this garbage. Gregor Jordan on the other hand has moved on to straight to video and television productions, which is ample punishment for creating this soulless hack work.

In hindsight the only reason to watch this movie is to admire Amber Heard's next to perfect physique.Otherwise it is yet another boring adaptation of king of boring Bret Easton Ellis, who delights in writing about shallow people living their shallow lives - to be sure in luxurious settings. Unfortunately none of these people are the least interesting and one probably learns more about the world studying an ashtray for two hours.Thanks to an uninspired script and a directing without direction the fantastic cast can't act with either credibility or passion and looks as interested in the movie as we are.It may be that this film becomes watchable under the influence. Perhaps a DVD is given free of charge for any significant purchase of coke in Hollywood.

I can't call this movie utterly worthless because it does feature a beautiful and gloriously naked Amber Heard in several different scenes, as well as a couple of veteran performers who are fun to watch. Taken as a whole, however, I've gotten more enjoyment out of reading the ingredients on the side of a box of cereal.Set in 1983 Los Angeles, this film is based on a novel by Bret Easton Ellis. But unlike Less Than Zero, an Ellis-based movie that was roughly contemporaneous to the era it was depicting, The Informers is a dry and as cold and as distant as an archaeological dig or a scientist studying something under a microscope. It also has all the subtlety of an incontinent badger, tossing awful 1980s fashions and hairstyles in your face and throwing up a 80s pop culture reference roughly ever 4 minutes. I nearly stopped the DVD before this thing was halfway through and did something more useful with my time. Like clipping toenails or plucking out some back hair.This is one of those stories where we're all supposed to learn something by looking at the miserable, pathetic lives of a bunch of tangentially connected people. Graham Sloan (Jon Foster) is an aimless, drug-dealing college kid who spends his time either having sex with his girlfriend Christie (Amber Heard) and his best friend Martin (Austin Nichols) or lamenting the emptiness of his existence. Martin one of Ellis' soulless douchebags and Christie is basically just a hot piece of ass that winds up being another 80s pop culture reference. Graham's father (Billy Bob Thornton) is a movie producer that's trying to get back together with Graham's mother (Kim Basinger), even though he's still hung up on a local newswoman (Winona Ryder).But wait, there's more! Graham's other friend Tim (Lou Taylor Pucci) spends the movie in Hawaii with a father (Chris Isaak) he feels nothing but contempt for. We also get the tale of a burned out rock star (Mel Raldo) whose wife is also sleeping with Graham's friend Martin. And we get to see the front desk clerk at Christie's apartment (Brad Renfro) get mixed up in a kidnapping and sex slavery deal with Peter (Mickey Rourke), a scary dude and the clerk's father figure.As mentioned previously, the good of this movie consists of three things.1. The nude and lovely Heard.2. Kim Basinger's performance as a woman on the edge of emotional collapse. She only gets one scene where she gets to yell and carry on, but the seething turmoil she keeps going under the skin of Graham's mom is something to see. For an actress who was never much more than a face in her prime, Basinger is aging quite gracefully as both a woman and a thespian.3. Getting to experience Mickey Rourke's charisma on screen. Whatever that indefinable "it" is that some people have and some don't, Rourke has it in spades. It's too bad that so many years of various forms of self-abuse have left Rourke so freakish-looking that there will never be that many more good roles for him. He's barely more than a cameo here, which is what his career will largely be from now on…unless he starts doing a lot of science-fiction.Beyond that, and some good work in a bad role by the late Brad Renfro, the rest of The Informers is pedantic rubbish. There's no point to these characters, their perversions or their suffering. Billy Bob Thornton looks like he's acting under the influence of Prozac. Winona Ryder appears to have taken this job as a form of extended community service. The younger members of the cast have the appeal of frozen slabs of beef, which may be intentional but remains unappetizing. All of the disparate plot threads resolve themselves exactly the way you expect them to, occasionally doing so with a character explaining what the resolution is supposed to mean so the audience doesn't miss it. It's enough of a struggle to get through a stupid film. It's almost too much to bear when that stupid film thinks I'm stupider than it.This is yet another one of those movies that leaves you wondering "Who the bleep thought this was a good idea?" It's not like the name of Bret Easton Ellis guarantees any box office or critical acclaim. There had to have been a lot of money, drugs and sexual favors exchanged to get this film made. Unless someone is willing to give you money, drugs or do that thing your significant other won't do, stay away from The Informers.