Gawker: defamer, the informers

Billy Bob Thornton Has Strange New Plan To Combat His Death Curse

Kyle Buchanan — Thu, 22 Jan 2009 18:10:08 EST

Though we've pointed out how many of Billy Bob Thornton's costars suffer untimely fates, we had no idea the star was taking extreme, air-shunning steps to curtail the curse.

As he told MTV in Park City, Thornton has now added "agoraphobia" to his laundry list of maladies that includes manorexia, a resistance to orange-colored foods, and a terrible aversion to monogamy. We can understand how a resume that has recently included Eagle Eye, Mr. Woodcock, and The Informers could drive a person to stay indoors, but we're choosing to believe that Thornton is simply performing a public service to his fellow actors. Sure, it might be strange to costar with him on the upcoming Bad Santa 2: Santa Is Delivering All His Lines From Behind A Heavy Door, but the health benefits are unquantifiable.

Sundance: Don’t Ask Billy Bob Thornton To Come Outside [MTV]

'The Informers': A Movie Cannot Survive On Amber Heard's Breasts Alone

Kyle Buchanan — Tue, 20 Jan 2009 17:00:25 EST

The Informers features the nuttiest Sundance cast this side of Push: Billy Bob Thornton, Mickey Rourke, the late Brad Renfro, Winona Ryder, and, of course, Amber Heard's breasts. So what went wrong?

On the surface, it looked as though the right decisions had been made: get Bret Easton Ellis to adapt his own novel (with co-writer Nicholas Jarecki), cast insanely, and have the youngest and most attractive actors (Heard, Jon Foster, and Austin Nichols) take off their clothes whenever possible. Still, the result is an enervating slog through an overly familiar setting: rich, debauched Los Angeles in the 1980s. Did you know they did coke then? It's true!

Intermittently, director Gregor Jordan captures that trademark Ellis vibe: dreamy surreality punctuated by bursts of tragedy that the numbed, drugged-out characters hardly know how to process. After a startling early car accident, though, the film shifts into low gear—and the removal of the book's vampire storyline means it has even less bite. "What was the point?" everyone asked in the lobby afterwards. Ellis's short stories coalesced into a meditation on mortality and meaning, but there's no theme or drive in the adaptation.

Still, good news for the Mr. Skin fans out there: Senator is releasing the film in April and was merely premiering it at the festival, meaning that screencaps of Amber Heard's performance as The Girl Who Never Puts a Shirt On will live forever, even after this film is long forgotten. Hey, will you look at that? Guess it managed to be a statement on mortality after all!

(Also, film critics: we are totally calling dibs on the headline "Regret to Inform." There, you cannot use it anymore. Thanks!)

'The Informers' Loses Its Fangs, But Will It Lose Its Fans Too?

Molly Friedman — Fri, 28 Mar 2008 13:30:34 EDT

When it comes to intertwining underage sex, loveable drug addicts and coldblooded serial killers, nobody does it better than Bret Easton Ellis. So when we heard a while back that The Informers would finally follow in the footsteps of Less Than Zero and The Rules of Attraction and make its way to the big screen, we couldn't have been more giddy. But now, IGN is reporting that Brandon Routh's turn as Jaime, the vampire-like leading man with a penchant for sucking blood, will be left on the cutting room floor; as anyone who has read the book will attest, his character was both a central figure in and a critical element of the depraved stories Ellis included in this book. The question is this: with no blood, gore, zombie fangs or Superman, will The Informers even be The Informers at all? Or will it just be Less Than Zero: The Sequel, minus the sight of a drugged up and passed out Robert Downey Jr. sprawled on the beaches of Malibu?

Well, even without Robert Downey Jr., we still have a feeling this Ellis flick has a major shot at success, mainly due to the fact that The Informers has one of the most stellar and talented casts we've heard about in some time. The film stars Winona Ryder, Billy Bob Thornton, Kim Basinger, Mickey Rourke, Rhys Ifans, and bittersweetly, Brad Renfro in his final role. Somehow this mesh of fucked up, problem-ridden stars seems like the ideal group to depict Ellis' vision of a bleak and vapid Los Angeles. The more and more we think about it, the inclusion of the clean-cut and chiseled Routh probably would have just messed up this merry little circle of misery anyway.