The Informers (2008)
Directed by Gregor Jordan
A collection of intersecting short stories set in early 1980s Los Angeles, depicts a week in the lives of an assortment of socially alienated, mainly well-off characters who numb their sense of emptiness with casual sex, violence, and drugs.
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What critics compared The Informers to
Sort of a brain-dead "Short Cuts," this risible film follows an interchangeable collection of empty-headed blonds (of both sexes) who hop from bed to bed and from drug to drug.
Seriously, so many novels and movies have plumbed the presumed moral vacuum that swirls like toilet water around the city - from "The Day of the Locust" to "Crash," with Robert Altman's 1993 "Short Cuts" providing the clearest template for this new film - that goggling at the fauna just isn't enough.
Jordan’s film is comprised of different stories that have been patched together to form some kind of sub-Short Cuts narrative.
But this sprawling, wanna-be "Short Cuts" tale is so over-the-top and so insufferably unpleasant that it makes even his infamous "American Psycho" seem tame by comparison.
Director Gregor Jordan ( Buffalo Soldiers ) has indicated that the movie was inspired by Short Cuts .
If you want to see how to adapt a collection of short stories into a cohesive unit, watch Robert Altman’s 1993 film “Short Cuts,” which is based on numerous stories by Raymond Carver.
A slow, self-important exercise in aimless and dispirited debauchery reminiscent of Mark Kanievska’s failed movie version of Less Than Zero, The Informers squanders a solid cast (including Kim Basinger, Billy Bob Thornton, Rhys Ifans, Mickey Rourke and a criminally underutilized Winona Ryder) aiming at something akin to the moral grandeur of Hal Ashby’s masterpiece of LA ennui Shampoo.