Movie Trailer Friday: The Informers

Rumor has it that Oliver Stone gets angry when fans thank him for Gordon Gekko’s “Greed Is Good” speech in Wall Street, because Gekko is the villain, and that speech is the opposite of the movie’s moral. And yet, like the gangster movie, the primary allure of the 80s materialist movie is the glamorization of the superficial lifestyle from which the protagonist supposedly needs to be redeemed.

Brett Easton Ellis directing a movie based on a book by Brett Easton Ellis, set in the 80s, is hugely exciting. But it’s exciting purely because it represents another chance to vicariously live through the 80s. It’s like watching Less Than Zero on DVD in 2009 while getting drunk by yourself and wondering why you never got that glamorous cocaine-covered life you deserved. Only you watch it in a theater, with other people, and you get drunk after instead of during, and the movie came out in 2009, not when you were in high school, so the fact that you get caught up in the glamour of it makes you feel a little bit less pathetic.

The Informers Quicktime trailer

The long version is much less cathartic and 80s-ish.