I’ve got a lot of problematic faves. Alec Baldwin comes to mind almost immediately; the man is a nightmare, but he’s my nightmare, you know? I understand him on a visceral level.

I think we all have problematic faves and sometimes, despite their problematicness or maybe because of, we can focus on what makes them our faves. Bret Easton Ellis is one of those, for me. I’ve never read a BEE book I didn’t fall head over heels in love with, even though he was the very first person I ever blocked on Twitter. He was just so bad on Twitter. Maybe he still is. I couldn’t risk it ruining my good time!!! I blocked him in like 2011!!!!!

Less Than Zero is just such a good fucking book, and I love it even more now that I live in Los Angeles. It has one of my all time favorite passages in a book ever (though it’s not my favorite BEE quote*):

My sisters don’t say anything. “Teenage Enema Nurses in Bondage” by a group called Killer Pussy comes on the radio, and my mother asks if we have to listen to this and my sisters tell her to turn it up, and no one says anything else until the song’s over. When we get home, my younger sister finally tells me, out by the pool, “That’s bullshit. I can get my own cocaine.”

The movie Less Than Zero is a valiant effort on Hollywood’s part, but leaves a lot to be desired. I just don’t think any movie, no, not even American Psycho, can excise the pure evil and emptiness that oozes from Ellis’s prose and turn it into a commodity without losing some of the, well, ooze. Still, I do like this movie a lot, and it’s one of my “unlikely Christmas movie” entries. If you’re reading this you must know how much I love Christmas. It’s my entire personality.

Anyway. In the movie version of LTZ we have Andrew McCarthy as Clay, the hero, but he always looks like he’s staring into the gaping maw of space and time and is about to cry. It really annoys me, his face in this movie. Jami Gertz is hot as hell and I’m fairly certain BEE mentions her by name in a book (maybe American Psycho?); she is just so beautiful here and at one point does this funny whining pleeeeeasssseee that is very me-coded. RDJ is basically playing himself… and then we have Spader as Rip, the hustlin’ bustlin’ drug dealer and I have something to say about how they’ve styled him that has been haunting me since I first saw this movie in high school. Are you ready?

This is Spader as Rip.

This is Hopper as Koopa in 1993’s Super Mario Bros.

All I can see whenever I see Rip is goddamn Koopa. Since day one. And I’ve never told anyone this until just now. You’re welcome!!!!!!!

I think the biggest criticism regarding the Less Than Zero movie is that the characters are clearly defined as Good but Troubled™️ whereas the characters of the book are just… bad people who don’t really care much about each other. I hate to say it, but in movies, bad people who don’t really care much about each other are often infinitely more interesting to watch. So it goes, I guess. At least the movie has the cover of “Hazy Shade of Winter” by the Bangles, which is a solid Kolleen jam. But it is a fun movie to watch, if not depressing: rich kids with empty lives, too much money, too much excess. That scene with Jami Gertz dumping coke down the sink fills me with rage even though I haven’t touched coke in over a decade, so I’m really no better. God bless us, every one.

Not on Tubi which is shocking to me.

*My favorite BEE quote is from Imperial Bedrooms, the sequel to Less Than Zero:

When Laurie calls from New York I tell her she has a week to move out of the apartment below Union Square. “Why?” she asks. “I’m subletting it,” I tell her. “But why?” she asks. “Because I’m staying in L.A.” I tell her. “But I don’t understand why,” she says again, and I tell her, “Everything I do is for a reason.”