<p>In a trailer for The Canyons, the coming thriller written by Bret Easton Ellis, Lindsay Lohan’s character thinks back to the days when people watched movies in a theatre. <br /><br />Images of the old spaces in ruins remind us — a bit paradoxically, in a preview for a film being released both in theatres and on iTunes — how the times have changed. But just as we begin to sense a dab of sentimentality, Lohan says, “It’s just not my thing anymore.”<br /><br />An avowed film fanatic, Ellis, who became a literary star at the age of 21 with the release of his debut novel, Less Than Zero (1985), has recently become a star on social media for, among other things, a challenging, opinionated and often brilliant Twitter stream of rants and raves about the big screen. “As someone who loved American movies,” he tweeted recently, “at some point in 2013 I realised that they were probably dead as an art form. I am late to the game.”<br /><br />This guarded irreverence, declaring the collapse of the status quo, runs through each of the adaptations of Ellis’s books, Less Than Zero, American Psycho, The Rules of Attraction and The Informers — a series of films that, although they have different screenwriters and directors, form a genre unto themselves. Not only do Ellis’s screen characters not fear an unknown future, but these definitively Generation X hellions, motivated by little other than greed, lust and vengeance, also often fancy themselves horsemen of the coming apocalypse, rushing to welcome the new order to the sounds of New Order.<br /><br />Ellis’s The Canyon is a procession of the beautiful and the damned of his generation from one sadistic bacchanalia to another. Their ridiculously opulent settings, in the mansions above Los Angeles, hallowed halls of Camden University (a stand-in for Bennington) or the dungeon clubs of Koch-era Manhattan, brim with a kind of late Roman symbolism seeming to signal the coming dark age. <br /><br />In this sea of anomie, any pleasure or panic Ellis’s characters feel — or is that desperate need for love, or can they even tell? — is so deadened by drugs, sarcasm and irony, they seem to sink like stones through the fast-rushing melodramas of their lives.<br /><br />The first and most successful of the adaptations, despite, or maybe because of, its infidelity to the source material, Less Than Zero is a kind of Brat Pack movie with cocaine and prostitution. Darker by a shade or six than John Hughes films of the era, the movie’s adolescent love triangle torn apart by drugs, excess and James Spader’s drug dealer, Rip, might feel a bit like propaganda for the DARE programme today, if not for the raw verve of Robert Downey Jr. as the tragic Julian in his drug-addled tragic death spiral.<br /><br />Like almost all of Ellis’s creations, Julian is a child of immense privilege who wants for nothing save parental guidance and affection. Cut off emotionally, or at least muffled by deep cushions of wealth, the absentee parents in Ellis’s world are often too busy doing their own drugs and having their own affairs to provide anything like a home for their children.<br /><br />“I want someone to tell me what’s good,” says the hopelessly flailing son of a studio executive in The Informers. “And I want someone to tell me what’s bad. Do you know what happens if that doesn’t happen?”<br /><br />What happens, we will soon see, is Patrick Bateman, the hollow Ken doll of a Wall Street trader who becomes, or just fantasises himself as, a mass murderer in American Psycho. Mary Harron’s witty, opéra bouffe adaptation of Ellis’s most satirical work wasn’t a huge hit when it came out in 2000, but it has aged incredibly well. Bateman is a vacuum, merely acting in accord with consumer culture in the latter days of capitalism. <br /><br />But in movies, as opposed to novels, we are conditioned to expect a glimmer of hope, a happy ending from this indictment. Within Cinema Ellis, the most traditional of these flashes comes in the otherwise bleak campus comedy The Rules of Attraction, an Eminem-era adaptation of a Devo-age comedy of manners. <br /><br />In a way, all the adaptations of Ellis’s books are monster movies, turning his heroes into heartless creatures who feel nothing to let nothing hurt them. The Informers, which Ellis adapted with Nicholas Jarecki (Arbitrage), is an inky Los Angeles version of Kids set in the early ‘80s, and it misses becoming a straight zombie by a single F-stop. <br /><br />Open on The Canyons, the first film with an original screenplay by Ellis. After a Kickstarter financing campaign and a troubled production, The Canyons aims to be both hopeful counterprogramming to the standard Hollywood production slate and a gleeful messenger of doom. <br /></p>
<p>In a trailer for The Canyons, the coming thriller written by Bret Easton Ellis, Lindsay Lohan’s character thinks back to the days when people watched movies in a theatre. <br /><br />Images of the old spaces in ruins remind us — a bit paradoxically, in a preview for a film being released both in theatres and on iTunes — how the times have changed. But just as we begin to sense a dab of sentimentality, Lohan says, “It’s just not my thing anymore.”<br /><br />An avowed film fanatic, Ellis, who became a literary star at the age of 21 with the release of his debut novel, Less Than Zero (1985), has recently become a star on social media for, among other things, a challenging, opinionated and often brilliant Twitter stream of rants and raves about the big screen. “As someone who loved American movies,” he tweeted recently, “at some point in 2013 I realised that they were probably dead as an art form. I am late to the game.”<br /><br />This guarded irreverence, declaring the collapse of the status quo, runs through each of the adaptations of Ellis’s books, Less Than Zero, American Psycho, The Rules of Attraction and The Informers — a series of films that, although they have different screenwriters and directors, form a genre unto themselves. Not only do Ellis’s screen characters not fear an unknown future, but these definitively Generation X hellions, motivated by little other than greed, lust and vengeance, also often fancy themselves horsemen of the coming apocalypse, rushing to welcome the new order to the sounds of New Order.<br /><br />Ellis’s The Canyon is a procession of the beautiful and the damned of his generation from one sadistic bacchanalia to another. Their ridiculously opulent settings, in the mansions above Los Angeles, hallowed halls of Camden University (a stand-in for Bennington) or the dungeon clubs of Koch-era Manhattan, brim with a kind of late Roman symbolism seeming to signal the coming dark age. <br /><br />In this sea of anomie, any pleasure or panic Ellis’s characters feel — or is that desperate need for love, or can they even tell? — is so deadened by drugs, sarcasm and irony, they seem to sink like stones through the fast-rushing melodramas of their lives.<br /><br />The first and most successful of the adaptations, despite, or maybe because of, its infidelity to the source material, Less Than Zero is a kind of Brat Pack movie with cocaine and prostitution. Darker by a shade or six than John Hughes films of the era, the movie’s adolescent love triangle torn apart by drugs, excess and James Spader’s drug dealer, Rip, might feel a bit like propaganda for the DARE programme today, if not for the raw verve of Robert Downey Jr. as the tragic Julian in his drug-addled tragic death spiral.<br /><br />Like almost all of Ellis’s creations, Julian is a child of immense privilege who wants for nothing save parental guidance and affection. Cut off emotionally, or at least muffled by deep cushions of wealth, the absentee parents in Ellis’s world are often too busy doing their own drugs and having their own affairs to provide anything like a home for their children.<br /><br />“I want someone to tell me what’s good,” says the hopelessly flailing son of a studio executive in The Informers. “And I want someone to tell me what’s bad. Do you know what happens if that doesn’t happen?”<br /><br />What happens, we will soon see, is Patrick Bateman, the hollow Ken doll of a Wall Street trader who becomes, or just fantasises himself as, a mass murderer in American Psycho. Mary Harron’s witty, opéra bouffe adaptation of Ellis’s most satirical work wasn’t a huge hit when it came out in 2000, but it has aged incredibly well. Bateman is a vacuum, merely acting in accord with consumer culture in the latter days of capitalism. <br /><br />But in movies, as opposed to novels, we are conditioned to expect a glimmer of hope, a happy ending from this indictment. Within Cinema Ellis, the most traditional of these flashes comes in the otherwise bleak campus comedy The Rules of Attraction, an Eminem-era adaptation of a Devo-age comedy of manners. <br /><br />In a way, all the adaptations of Ellis’s books are monster movies, turning his heroes into heartless creatures who feel nothing to let nothing hurt them. The Informers, which Ellis adapted with Nicholas Jarecki (Arbitrage), is an inky Los Angeles version of Kids set in the early ‘80s, and it misses becoming a straight zombie by a single F-stop. <br /><br />Open on The Canyons, the first film with an original screenplay by Ellis. After a Kickstarter financing campaign and a troubled production, The Canyons aims to be both hopeful counterprogramming to the standard Hollywood production slate and a gleeful messenger of doom. <br /></p>