"I need someone to tell me what is good," says someone in The Informers. "I need someone to tell me what is bad." For bad, he need look no further than this film.
Adapted by Bret Easton Ellis from his novel, The Informers is set in 1983, when RayB
ans are big, shoulderpads are bigger and the people are aggressively shallow. Billy Bob Thornton is a film producer who has been having an affair with Winona Ryder's newscasterette but is hoping to have another go at marriage to his pill-popping, poolboy-ogling ex-wife, Kim Basinger
Their son Graham (Jon Foster) is a drug dealer who, along with his girlfriend Christie (a mostly naked Amber Heard), is having an affair with pal Martin (Austin Nichols) although the film is too coy to show any boy-on-boy action. Not much resonates in the other subplots either, which include a dazed rock star (Mei Raido) who beats up his groupies, Chris Isaak as a clueless lothario who tries to undercut his own son with young women, and a couple of lowlifes who have a kidnapped 10-year-old tied up in their bath. One of the kidnappers is Mickey Rourke, below, with musketeer facial hair; the other is Brad Renfro, the actor who died of a heroin overdose in January 2008, which just shows how long The Informers has been on the shelf. One omission from the cast is a vampire, who plays a major role in Ellis's book but was cut out of the film script at the eleventh hour for budgetary reasons. A shame, since a vampire would have livened up all this languid disaffection no end.
Instead, death shadows everyone via Amber Heard's character, who discovers mysterious skin lesions just five minutes after a news report on a new disease. Aids plays a curious role in this story, both as a handy way to tie up the film's loose ends and as retribution on characters for having too much money, too much sex, too many drugs, too little sense of responsibility. It makes for a rather emphatic message that excess is a bad thing – but really, nobody should have to watch The Informers to understand that.
BURMA VJ (12A)
***This Danish documentary is directed by Anders Ostergaard but its subjects are the journalists of the Democratic Voice of Burma, anonymous local heroes whose faces we never see for obvious fear of reprisals. The footage smuggled out of Burma tells the story of September 2007, when hundreds of thousands of people – many of them monks – took to the streets to confront the Burmese government. The eventual crackdown by the military is shown in dreadful detail but this compelling film is a testament to those who risked all, including the three reporters currently in jail for their part in providing reportage.
• Both on general release from Friday
