Spring Break
Informers A-list cast fails to deliver flawed film
Issue date: 4/30/09
The Informers captures its audience with a glittery, colorful and erotic atmosphere where morals don't exist, cheating is prevalent and orgies are the preferred kind of sex instead of the occasional indulgence. But it is too glittery and too blinding, like the sun if it were one mile away instead of millions. The film goes excessively out of its way to create such a strikingly incomprehensible picture that even the Lindsay Lohans and Paris Hiltons of the world would not be able to live in it, let alone understand it.
The plot centers on the lives of a handful of individuals from Los Angeles. Most of them are well-to-do, upper class, rich, successful and thus, intoxicated with all the problems stereotyped with their famed Hollywood status: drugs, divorce, adultery, power and money. Billy Bob Thornton plays a movie producer and Kim Bassinger stars as his dilapidated, cut-up but still whole, wife.
Their son Graham (Jon Foster) provides the link between his family and his friends, the youth of the movie and the propagator of all the problems. Graham's best friend is secretly sleeping with his mother (Bassinger) before her movie producer husband (Thornton) moves back in after the end of his pursuit of a female television anchor, played by Winona Ryder. This is just one of the many far-fetched situations that The Informers puts forth.
The movie also tells the tale of a couple of lower lives: a convict kidnapper (Mickey Rourke) and his scared adult nephew. Their lives, too, are greatly overexaggerated. Rourke's mysterious criminal past and his connections are very ambiguous, and his character again plays in the movie's scheme of hyperbole when he kidnaps a kid on a bike in broad daylight.
The ace of spades of the cast was a coked-out, pedophile rock star (Mel Raido), whose band gives the movie its name. The ridicule of his character can be seen in just one scene: He returns to his hotel after a concert to find an underage girl in his bed and starts making out with her for a few seconds before subsequently choking her and then punching her face.
The plot centers on the lives of a handful of individuals from Los Angeles. Most of them are well-to-do, upper class, rich, successful and thus, intoxicated with all the problems stereotyped with their famed Hollywood status: drugs, divorce, adultery, power and money. Billy Bob Thornton plays a movie producer and Kim Bassinger stars as his dilapidated, cut-up but still whole, wife.
Their son Graham (Jon Foster) provides the link between his family and his friends, the youth of the movie and the propagator of all the problems. Graham's best friend is secretly sleeping with his mother (Bassinger) before her movie producer husband (Thornton) moves back in after the end of his pursuit of a female television anchor, played by Winona Ryder. This is just one of the many far-fetched situations that The Informers puts forth.
The movie also tells the tale of a couple of lower lives: a convict kidnapper (Mickey Rourke) and his scared adult nephew. Their lives, too, are greatly overexaggerated. Rourke's mysterious criminal past and his connections are very ambiguous, and his character again plays in the movie's scheme of hyperbole when he kidnaps a kid on a bike in broad daylight.
The ace of spades of the cast was a coked-out, pedophile rock star (Mel Raido), whose band gives the movie its name. The ridicule of his character can be seen in just one scene: He returns to his hotel after a concert to find an underage girl in his bed and starts making out with her for a few seconds before subsequently choking her and then punching her face.
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