verushka70

Ohhhh! Yes, White Palace is quite good... but he's also really good in Secretary. And of course there is Sex, Lies and Videotape. It seems so *tame* now, compared to the stuff we can see on TV now. I remember when it was shocking! But then, it retains an eroticism other more graphic films lack... probably because it doesn't show everything.

Even though Brett E.E. (author of Less Than Zero) isn't amongst my favourites, I have read his earlier works.

I read Less Than Zero. I remember the first line -- at least I think it was the first line of LTZ: "People are afraid to merge on LA highways."

I remember not being allowed to watch LTZ when it first came out because it was 'so' adult.

I was 20 years old, so no one could stop me. *g* I saw it like 3 times on the big screen.

Having watched it a couple of times since then, I still feel sort of meh about it.

Oh, I was never meh about it. For one thing, I really loved Robert Downey, Jr. in it, and that had me following his career (such as it was) for quite some time. I was glad to see him finally get his shit together and get a big blockbuster role in Iron Man. I was afraid he was never going to do that.

Also, I guess I have a thing for movies that portray someone's downward spiral, especially if it's a sympathetic character. Around the time LTZ came out, I had a bf who was also spiralling downward into coke addiction, but we were all doing it then, too. It was nowhere near as glamorous as LTZ but the horrors were every bit as horrible. Like McCarthy's character, I broke away to college (butI never physically left; I went to the University of Illinois at Chicago). But I kept trying to help him like Jami Gertz's character. So it all sort of rang true.

I also have a thing for SoCal decadence and sleaze, which dates far back in movie history. I mean, The Big Sleep the film, which portrays the sleazy side of SoCal/LA life, is from 1945, but the original novel by Raymond Chandler was from 1939. I like reading and seeing that stuff; it reminds me that things aren't any worse now than they were then -- they were just hidden better and hushed up more. *g*

Last of all, I think the cinematography of LTZ is gorgeous. The saturated -- but not over-saturated -- colors, the pool-blues... it's gorgeous, and it's one of the things I find hypnotic about it. I could watch it with the sound off, it just looks so beautiful and decadent.

I don't know if you're aware that Andrew's character was supposed to be more ambivalent (morally speaking even though he's supposed to be the one 'good' guy amongst his friends) AND also bisexual (which they totally erased from the movie.)

Yeah, I vaguely remember that from the book. I remember, too, that the m/m sex scenes in the book were surprisingly 'meh' for me -- and at a time when I was really getting into m/m stuff.

But the whole tone of the book is kind of a 'meh' monotone of emotionally disconnected people. Not that there is anything wrong with that; I think that's what Bret E.E. intended. And the opening line of the book stuck with me after all these years...

Never got up the nerve to read American Psycho. Picked it up in a book store once. I have quite a strong stomach, and I read a lot of true crime, and I'd already read Silence of the Lambs and some of that author's other Hannibal books. So I picked it up. But for some reason I just couldn't keep reading. It went on in detail for like three pages on what he was doing to this chick. And I was like, Okay, don't need to read this right now, putting it down, walking away... I didn't protest it (and don't believe in that or censorship). But I didn't read it, either.

I did see the film American Psycho, though. (I'd previously seen and liked Mary Harron's I Shot Andy Warhol.) I thought it was almost viciously satirical about that "Wall Street" conspicuous consumption era. Christian Bale was really good in it. I think the violence was considerably tamed down from what I read in the book. Still really creepy, though.