Product Description

No Description Available.
Genre: Feature Film-Drama
Rating: R
Release Date: 7-JUN-2005
Media Type: DVD

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #5563 in DVD
• Brand: MCCARTHY,ANDREW
• Released on: 2002-03-05
• Rating: R (Restricted)
• Aspect ratio: 1.85:1
• Formats: Closed-captioned, Color, DVD-Video, Widescreen, NTSC
• Original language: English, Spanish
• Number of discs: 1
• Running time: 98 minutes

Amazon.com
Dreary, pointless late-'80s novel by literary poseur Bret Easton Ellis focused on listless, shiftless, drug-sniffing, sex-swapping, dead-end California teens with too much money and time on their hands. Which just about sums up this movie, though it's not nearly as interesting as that. This is mostly due to the ridiculously cleaned-up script and lifeless direction, which whitewashes the baser depravity and replaces it with perversion-lite and fashion shows. It doesn't help that director Marek Kanievska is saddled with Brat Pack lesser (make that least) lights Andrew McCarthy and Jami Gertz. The only things that lift this film above the muck are the performances by James Spader as a particularly heinous drug dealer and Robert Downey Jr. as a rich-kid addict with no self-control. --Marshall Fine

Customer Reviews

Great title, Great movie.
Less Than Zero I've heard of this movie for years & I finally got it! It's a sad & intense tale of someone who "marches to the beat of their own drum" (while strung out on drugs & alcohol) without checking his bearings or vision with others (a.k.a. self-deluded) & ultimately becomes the cause of his own demise. There are enabling individuals who help him on his way too. Strongly reminds me of the "Very Draining People" chapter in the book, "Ordering Your Private World".

Good for Downey jr Fans
Great movie for any fans of Downey Jr. You can see his desperation and the lost hope of his friends and family. Awesome performance.

Seems Like a Flashy Version of an Afterschool Special about Drug Abuse.
"Less Than Zero" must be in the running for the movie that least resembles its source material, in this case Bret Easton Ellis' 1985 novel of the same name. In this 1987 film, Clay (Andrew McCarthy) returns to his native Los Angeles for Christmas break his freshman year of college. He hopes to rekindle his relationship with girlfriend Blaire (Jami Gertz), who had taken up with his best friend Julian (Robert Downey, Jr.) in Clay's absence. He's disappointed to find Blaire strung out on cocaine and annoyed by her insistence that Julian is in some kind of trouble and needs his help. Julian's business failures have left him deep in debt to a drug dealer (James Spader) and wasted all the time.

There probably isn't much point in comparing "Less Than Zero", the movie, with the book. They have little more than the characters' names in common, but Ellis' novel does strike me as a strange source for an anti-drug movie. The tone of the movie is wired for the MTV generation, in contrast to the book's droning, indifferent narration and aimless characters. Nosebleed Clay has been replaced with a goody-two-shoes, in love with Blaire, concerned about doing the right thing, who won't touch cocaine! This is a conventional drama about friends trying to save one another from the abyss of drug dependency and its concomitant evils. The film is a humorless converse of the book in most respects.

Judging the movie on its own merits, I like the cast, although Andrew McCarthy is conspicuously too old to play 18. I also like the theme song, The Bangles' remake of Simon & Garfunkel's "Hazy Shade of Winter", which plays in its entirety over the sequence of Clay's return to L.A. That song captures the 1980s better than the rest of the movie. The trouble is that this film is a very straightforward, one-note, anti-drug message, and that's all it is. Drugs will ruin your relationships, plunge you into the depths of despair, and probably kill you. It's surprisingly talky, and the dialogue clanks. Clay tries to save a couple of friends from their vices between semesters. Not horrible, but not noteworthy either.

The DVD (20th Century Fox 2001): There are 3 theatrical trailers, an English trailer (1min 30 sec), a Spanish version of the same trailer, and a "Hard Version" trailer in English (2 min). And there are five 30-second TV spots. Subtitles for the film are available in English and Spanish. Dubbing available in French.