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This is one of those movies that made only a commercial and critical blip on the cinematic landscape and promptly vanished, but that one is oddly compelled to see. While I can't really say that I enjoyed it, I did admire the strong performances and the strikingly (and often beautifully) shot soullessness. As for its worth, I pretty much agree with Ebert: "What you see is what you get. Sometimes less than that. Some viewers of "The Informers" criticize it for lacking a third act, but these lives are all two-act plays. (Two and a half stars.)"
Apparently Brandon Routh was cast as a vampire in a subplot cut at the last minute, and that the movie was originally conceived as something much more comic, along the lines of American Psycho. Now that could have been interesting.
The 98-minute movie feels considerably longer than it is, and while an hourlong movie is of course not commercially viable (though HBO might be able to pull it off), I think that, in its current state, it would have been more effective at such a length. Thornton, Basinger and Ryder all give good performances, but since none of them evince any potential for redemption, they're not really necessary to the sorta-central story of Graham, the young man at the middle of it all. I could say the same for a slightly more interesting story, in which a dad takes his teenage son to Hawaii and then accidentally makes him completely miserable.
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Here's my insta-fan edit, with help from Wikipedia:
The movie opens in 1983 at an elegant Los Angeles party at a mansion attended by a good-looking, well-off young crowd. Amidst the pulsing dance music and free-flowing alcohol and drugs, a young man, Bruce, wanders away from the party. As he steps out onto the street in front of the mansion, he is killed by a speeding car. After the funeral, his friends Graham, Martin and Tim appear indifferent as they sit drinking on a fancy hotel patio afterwards. Only Raymond is truly devastated by the accident, and he cries bitterly. The friends dismiss Raymond's tears and urge him to accept that nothing can be changed about the death. Graham seems to feel a little more for Raymond's pain, so that when Raymond leaves, crying, and goes to be alone, Graham follows him. The friends joke that Raymond, who is the most distraught of all of the friends about the death of Bruce, is crying about a man who hated him. The accident is an effective opening shock, but since it barely seems to affect anything, would have been much more effective had it not been referenced again.
Graham is the son of a rich, estranged couple. The father is a movie producer who is having a rocky relationship with his pill-addled wife. Even as the father goes through the motions to try and repair the problems in the relationship, he continues to pursue his affair with a local TV anchorwoman. His wife, meanwhile, is having sex with her son's friend Martin. see above.
A new wave rock singer named Bryan Metro flies into Los Angeles. In a haze of heroin and alcohol, he seems only dimly aware that he used to live there. He stumbles through his fancy hotel room and has casual sex with young groupies. Getting out of the bath, he slips on the wet floor and slashes open his hand. He is so stoned that he merely watches to blood seep out, as if he is mesmerized by the image. He answers the phone, and he is berated by his manager for sleeping with underage groupies, and he mumbles that he needs a doctor. Later, he is taken to meet a movie producer who hopes to make a profitable B-movie starring the singer. The singer appears to be barely coherent at the meeting, and his attention is only caught when he sees a young girl wearing braces watching TV in an adjoining room. Bryan staggers towards her and takes her into a bedroom. Later, he stumbles into a hotel room filled with empty liquor bottles and finds a groupie in his bed. Slurring his words, he asks her to come closer, and he kisses her, and then hits her in the face.This character's band is "The Informers", which I suppose accounts for the title, though why that should be the case is hardly clear.
Jack, a hotel doorman in Christie's place, has escaped from a rough upbringing in a small desert town with a family enmeshed in crime to come to try and seek his fortune in Los Angeles as an actor. His dreams of acting have not panned out, apart from a few roles in TV commercials. He is making a humble living working as a doorman and he lives in a small, run-down house, but he seems at least happy that he has left his shady family past behind. He is alarmed when he gets a phone call from his grizzled uncle Peter, a drifter ex-con who claims he needs a place to stay. Jack angrily refuses the request, because he wants to leave the immoral, criminal side of his impoverished family background behind him. However, when Jack returns home, his uncle is waiting for him in a beaten-up van. To Jack's horror, his uncle is involved in a gangland kidnapping-for-hire plot, and the uncle has brought a kidnapped child to Jack's house. When a cleanly-dressed, yet menacing gangster (Wikipedia rather intriguingly reports that this may be the only vampire to survive the final cut) calls on Jack when the uncle is out, and asks to collect the "package", Jack feigns ignorance to avoid surrendering the boy. When the uncle returns he tells Jack that the boy has to be killed, on the grounds that it will be more humane than what the gangsters will do to him, Jack offers to kill the boy. Instead of slitting the boy's throat, Jack pretends to kill the boy but actually releases him. Jack hides his failure to kill the boy by cutting open his hand and smearing blood on his hands and face, and he joins his uncle in the van and flees the scene. This subplot, while only very indirectly connected to Graham via two scenes between himself and Jack (the more substantial of which I'd probably cut), is redeemed by the always-awesome presence of Mickey Rourke and a genuine sense of urgency, so I'd keep it in.
Tim is pressured to go with his father on a trip to Hawaii, ostensibly for the two to share father-son bonding time. They go to a bar, where Les starts a chat with two young women, who may be willing to have sex with them. However, Tim is not interested, and he is disgusted by his father's drunken, leering passes at the women. Tim does later find a girl he likes at the beach, but when the three of them have dinner together, Les begins to make passes at her and then both the father and the young woman make fun of Tim by suggesting that gay men were making passes at him at the beach. Tim leaves the dinner and goes out to be alone. When his father finds him, Tim rebuffs his request to talk things out, saying he has nothing to say. see above.
Graham confronts Martin about Christie, and asks Martin if he has been sleeping with her, apart from the menage-a-trois scenarios of group sex. Martin denies betraying Graham, and then is shocked to realize that his friend seemingly has developed feelings for her; in their social scene, most interactions are fleeting couplings based on desire, not relationships based on caring. Graham then tells Martin that he feels adrift in his life, as if he does not have anyone who can tell him what is right or wrong.
When one of Martin's lovers calls Graham to tell him that Christie has become ill, and is lying out on the sand, he drives over to the house to see her. Even though he sees that she has developed rashes all over her body, he seems unable to take care of her and take her to a hospital. Instead, he kisses her once, and leaves her lying on a towel on the beach, alone on an empty stretch of sand. For a collection of stories without a real climax, the image of a beautiful girl under a dark midday sky, utterly alone and dying of AIDS, is a rather striking parting shot. There's perhaps something admirable in this understated conclusion.
Estimated edit runtime... hard to say. Around 45 minutes, maybe? The length of a Miami Vice episode set in LA, without cops.
----------------------------
Would I care enough to actually make such a fan edit? I don't know. I saw this a few days ago, and as I said, didn't think all that much of it, but despite its deficiencies, I did find its unapologetically beautifully-nihilistic tone and style oddly haunting, and Mickey Rourke was great. So who knows... at some point, I just might.
I mean, The Informers. How cool a title is that, just to say aloud? Almost enough reason to salvage the film right there.
----------------------------
Red-Band Trailer
LOL - Star Jon Foster played the ampm cashier in T3.
Oh, and KBM... no intertitle sequence would be needed!
This is one of those movies that made only a commercial and critical blip on the cinematic landscape and promptly vanished, but that one is oddly compelled to see. While I can't really say that I enjoyed it, I did admire the strong performances and the strikingly (and often beautifully) shot soullessness. As for its worth, I pretty much agree with Ebert: "What you see is what you get. Sometimes less than that. Some viewers of "The Informers" criticize it for lacking a third act, but these lives are all two-act plays. (Two and a half stars.)"
Apparently Brandon Routh was cast as a vampire in a subplot cut at the last minute, and that the movie was originally conceived as something much more comic, along the lines of American Psycho. Now that could have been interesting.
The 98-minute movie feels considerably longer than it is, and while an hourlong movie is of course not commercially viable (though HBO might be able to pull it off), I think that, in its current state, it would have been more effective at such a length. Thornton, Basinger and Ryder all give good performances, but since none of them evince any potential for redemption, they're not really necessary to the sorta-central story of Graham, the young man at the middle of it all. I could say the same for a slightly more interesting story, in which a dad takes his teenage son to Hawaii and then accidentally makes him completely miserable.
----------------------------
Here's my insta-fan edit, with help from Wikipedia:
The movie opens in 1983 at an elegant Los Angeles party at a mansion attended by a good-looking, well-off young crowd. Amidst the pulsing dance music and free-flowing alcohol and drugs, a young man, Bruce, wanders away from the party. As he steps out onto the street in front of the mansion, he is killed by a speeding car. After the funeral, his friends Graham, Martin and Tim appear indifferent as they sit drinking on a fancy hotel patio afterwards. Only Raymond is truly devastated by the accident, and he cries bitterly. The friends dismiss Raymond's tears and urge him to accept that nothing can be changed about the death. Graham seems to feel a little more for Raymond's pain, so that when Raymond leaves, crying, and goes to be alone, Graham follows him. The friends joke that Raymond, who is the most distraught of all of the friends about the death of Bruce, is crying about a man who hated him. The accident is an effective opening shock, but since it barely seems to affect anything, would have been much more effective had it not been referenced again.
Graham is the son of a rich, estranged couple. The father is a movie producer who is having a rocky relationship with his pill-addled wife. Even as the father goes through the motions to try and repair the problems in the relationship, he continues to pursue his affair with a local TV anchorwoman. His wife, meanwhile, is having sex with her son's friend Martin. see above.
A new wave rock singer named Bryan Metro flies into Los Angeles. In a haze of heroin and alcohol, he seems only dimly aware that he used to live there. He stumbles through his fancy hotel room and has casual sex with young groupies. Getting out of the bath, he slips on the wet floor and slashes open his hand. He is so stoned that he merely watches to blood seep out, as if he is mesmerized by the image. He answers the phone, and he is berated by his manager for sleeping with underage groupies, and he mumbles that he needs a doctor. Later, he is taken to meet a movie producer who hopes to make a profitable B-movie starring the singer. The singer appears to be barely coherent at the meeting, and his attention is only caught when he sees a young girl wearing braces watching TV in an adjoining room. Bryan staggers towards her and takes her into a bedroom. Later, he stumbles into a hotel room filled with empty liquor bottles and finds a groupie in his bed. Slurring his words, he asks her to come closer, and he kisses her, and then hits her in the face.This character's band is "The Informers", which I suppose accounts for the title, though why that should be the case is hardly clear.
Jack, a hotel doorman in Christie's place, has escaped from a rough upbringing in a small desert town with a family enmeshed in crime to come to try and seek his fortune in Los Angeles as an actor. His dreams of acting have not panned out, apart from a few roles in TV commercials. He is making a humble living working as a doorman and he lives in a small, run-down house, but he seems at least happy that he has left his shady family past behind. He is alarmed when he gets a phone call from his grizzled uncle Peter, a drifter ex-con who claims he needs a place to stay. Jack angrily refuses the request, because he wants to leave the immoral, criminal side of his impoverished family background behind him. However, when Jack returns home, his uncle is waiting for him in a beaten-up van. To Jack's horror, his uncle is involved in a gangland kidnapping-for-hire plot, and the uncle has brought a kidnapped child to Jack's house. When a cleanly-dressed, yet menacing gangster (Wikipedia rather intriguingly reports that this may be the only vampire to survive the final cut) calls on Jack when the uncle is out, and asks to collect the "package", Jack feigns ignorance to avoid surrendering the boy. When the uncle returns he tells Jack that the boy has to be killed, on the grounds that it will be more humane than what the gangsters will do to him, Jack offers to kill the boy. Instead of slitting the boy's throat, Jack pretends to kill the boy but actually releases him. Jack hides his failure to kill the boy by cutting open his hand and smearing blood on his hands and face, and he joins his uncle in the van and flees the scene. This subplot, while only very indirectly connected to Graham via two scenes between himself and Jack (the more substantial of which I'd probably cut), is redeemed by the always-awesome presence of Mickey Rourke and a genuine sense of urgency, so I'd keep it in.
Tim is pressured to go with his father on a trip to Hawaii, ostensibly for the two to share father-son bonding time. They go to a bar, where Les starts a chat with two young women, who may be willing to have sex with them. However, Tim is not interested, and he is disgusted by his father's drunken, leering passes at the women. Tim does later find a girl he likes at the beach, but when the three of them have dinner together, Les begins to make passes at her and then both the father and the young woman make fun of Tim by suggesting that gay men were making passes at him at the beach. Tim leaves the dinner and goes out to be alone. When his father finds him, Tim rebuffs his request to talk things out, saying he has nothing to say. see above.
Graham confronts Martin about Christie, and asks Martin if he has been sleeping with her, apart from the menage-a-trois scenarios of group sex. Martin denies betraying Graham, and then is shocked to realize that his friend seemingly has developed feelings for her; in their social scene, most interactions are fleeting couplings based on desire, not relationships based on caring. Graham then tells Martin that he feels adrift in his life, as if he does not have anyone who can tell him what is right or wrong.
When one of Martin's lovers calls Graham to tell him that Christie has become ill, and is lying out on the sand, he drives over to the house to see her. Even though he sees that she has developed rashes all over her body, he seems unable to take care of her and take her to a hospital. Instead, he kisses her once, and leaves her lying on a towel on the beach, alone on an empty stretch of sand. For a collection of stories without a real climax, the image of a beautiful girl under a dark midday sky, utterly alone and dying of AIDS, is a rather striking parting shot. There's perhaps something admirable in this understated conclusion.
Estimated edit runtime... hard to say. Around 45 minutes, maybe? The length of a Miami Vice episode set in LA, without cops.
----------------------------
Would I care enough to actually make such a fan edit? I don't know. I saw this a few days ago, and as I said, didn't think all that much of it, but despite its deficiencies, I did find its unapologetically beautifully-nihilistic tone and style oddly haunting, and Mickey Rourke was great. So who knows... at some point, I just might.
I mean, The Informers. How cool a title is that, just to say aloud? Almost enough reason to salvage the film right there.
----------------------------
Red-Band Trailer
LOL - Star Jon Foster played the ampm cashier in T3.
Oh, and KBM... no intertitle sequence would be needed!