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less than zero
2 Jun 2012 01:14 pmSo yesterday I had bad abdo pain and stayed curled up in bed and there was nothing else to do but use up my monthly 2GB phone bandwidth and I ended up watching a 40 minute interview of RDJ.
Well, 2 40-minute interviews. The second one consisting most memorably of Jude Law agreeing that RDJ is indeed a beautiful man and then proceeding to sigh lovingly at RDJ's (to be frank, slightly creeped out) gaze.
Seriously if they weren't two notorious playboys they'd never get away with this.
But Inside the Actor's Studio interview was an amazingly candid interview. I've watched a couple of interviews from the past 5 or 6 years ever since he broke it big as Tony Stark. While RDJ is always a reliably amusing interviewee, he now has the license to act like Tony Stark personified, full of smartass quips and over-dramatic airs and deflective answers. So it was amazing to see him in this old interview, before Iron Man was made, to see him answer questions with unflinching sincerity.
I think, amazingly too, is how direct the questions were too. It's been a long time since we last heard a tangential question glancing at his previous drug addiction problem, even though many people thought it apt that both Holmes and Stark had addiction problems. It was amazing how frankly he acknolwedged it without trying to pin the blame on anyone or any event.
So of course, I had to look up the movie that notoriously kicked him into the habit: Less than Zero.
And then, of course, I had to go read the book. Only for you, RDJ, only for you.The last time I said that was for Gantz and look how well that turned out.
I haven't read for leisure in a long time and I finished this in about 3 hours because it was the kind of book I'd never read again =___=
Clay, the main character, was a very fly-on-the-wall existence. He did nothing, he changed nothing, he cared for nothing. He was there only as a lens through which the readers observed the world around him.
If anything, there were only 2 moments of judgement and 2 moments of moral choice, one involving a snuff film and another involving an invitation to participate in rape of a minor. From both of these he voluntarily departed, yet he did not try at all to prevent the events from occurring.
Otherwise he remained completely unmoved by the depravity around him, going so far as to be eager to sit and watch his best friend Julian prostitute himself to a man for a debt, and doing nothing when the dealer forced Julian to continue prostituting himself by making him addicted with heroin. The movie (which I haven't watched) kept only Julian and Rip's plot similar, making Clay instead the moralistic evangelist.
The writing was difficult to engage with. The author calls it "minimalist", which may be a fancy word for a grocery list.
There's a lot of names and a lot of characters, none distinct and none worth caring for, because they're all indiscriminately snorting coke or shooting up heroin or getting stoned. Occasionally someone would have sex with someone and it really doesn't matter who's doing it with whom, which may be the point but also make the book really difficult to care for. All the boys who do get described are blonde, thin, tanned and short-haired so after the sixth random blonde thin tan short-haired boy I don't know why the author bothered.
It's not that I don't like this genre. I still remember The Outsiders and The Chocolate War as some of the most memorable books I've read, the latter in particular being one of the few teenage books where good stood up in the face of overwhelming corruption and lost.
But Less than Zero I will always remember as the film that kick-started RDJ's career, and unlikely much more.
Well, 2 40-minute interviews. The second one consisting most memorably of Jude Law agreeing that RDJ is indeed a beautiful man and then proceeding to sigh lovingly at RDJ's (to be frank, slightly creeped out) gaze.
Seriously if they weren't two notorious playboys they'd never get away with this.
But Inside the Actor's Studio interview was an amazingly candid interview. I've watched a couple of interviews from the past 5 or 6 years ever since he broke it big as Tony Stark. While RDJ is always a reliably amusing interviewee, he now has the license to act like Tony Stark personified, full of smartass quips and over-dramatic airs and deflective answers. So it was amazing to see him in this old interview, before Iron Man was made, to see him answer questions with unflinching sincerity.
I think, amazingly too, is how direct the questions were too. It's been a long time since we last heard a tangential question glancing at his previous drug addiction problem, even though many people thought it apt that both Holmes and Stark had addiction problems. It was amazing how frankly he acknolwedged it without trying to pin the blame on anyone or any event.
So of course, I had to look up the movie that notoriously kicked him into the habit: Less than Zero.
And then, of course, I had to go read the book. Only for you, RDJ, only for you.
I haven't read for leisure in a long time and I finished this in about 3 hours because it was the kind of book I'd never read again =___=
Clay, the main character, was a very fly-on-the-wall existence. He did nothing, he changed nothing, he cared for nothing. He was there only as a lens through which the readers observed the world around him.
If anything, there were only 2 moments of judgement and 2 moments of moral choice, one involving a snuff film and another involving an invitation to participate in rape of a minor. From both of these he voluntarily departed, yet he did not try at all to prevent the events from occurring.
Otherwise he remained completely unmoved by the depravity around him, going so far as to be eager to sit and watch his best friend Julian prostitute himself to a man for a debt, and doing nothing when the dealer forced Julian to continue prostituting himself by making him addicted with heroin. The movie (which I haven't watched) kept only Julian and Rip's plot similar, making Clay instead the moralistic evangelist.
The writing was difficult to engage with. The author calls it "minimalist", which may be a fancy word for a grocery list.
"There's nothing much happening tonight except that Blair has heard about the New Garage downtown between 6th and 7th or 7th and 8th and so Dimitri and Kim and Alana and Blair and I decide to drive downtown."
There's a lot of names and a lot of characters, none distinct and none worth caring for, because they're all indiscriminately snorting coke or shooting up heroin or getting stoned. Occasionally someone would have sex with someone and it really doesn't matter who's doing it with whom, which may be the point but also make the book really difficult to care for. All the boys who do get described are blonde, thin, tanned and short-haired so after the sixth random blonde thin tan short-haired boy I don't know why the author bothered.
It's not that I don't like this genre. I still remember The Outsiders and The Chocolate War as some of the most memorable books I've read, the latter in particular being one of the few teenage books where good stood up in the face of overwhelming corruption and lost.
But Less than Zero I will always remember as the film that kick-started RDJ's career, and unlikely much more.
