Ok folks...time for VHS of the week...
Hey! Check out the address on the sticker on the bottom right corner of this VHS case. You’re thinking...didn’t I go to 63 Salem Street and wait 5 hours to do something once? You did! It’s Neptune Oyster...and back when the joint first opened there was a video store called Video Cinema (points for name originality: zero) directly across the street. This was all well and good....especially with me...but you see Video Cinema had this awning where they strung up like fifty 100 watt light bulbs...and when they flipped that fucker on at night they blasted us Neptune folk OUT...just like that scene in Christmas Vacation. The poor oyster shuckers who had to work in the window probably still have some lingering ocular damage from Video Cinema’s Z-grade marquee special FX. Anyway...since the video store closed for the evening around the same time that we did (10 PM) the owner would always note when the marquee lights were turned off and immediately started pouring beers for the staff. So one Friday night we’re working away and the lights suddenly shut off at 7:30. The owner and I look at each other....he says “rules are rules!”...and beers are handed out to the staff (maybe you had to be there...it was funny...shut up). So the video store started closing early because they were going out of business...and a few days later a sign went up announcing a liquidation sale. So every day after work I’d take the $700 I made selling lobster rolls and go over to the video store and go bananas (not to be confused with Going Bananas...which is also a business on Salem Street). One afternoon I buy like 15 VHS tapes and walk up to Boarder’s to shop for books. As I’m leaving Boarders I set the security alarm off. The manager comes over and I’m like “sorry guy...must be one of these tapes.” He digs through my bag and calls over extra security and says “I’m sorry...I just don’t buy that someone is walking around with a bag full of VHS tapes in 2007.” I was like “I’m sorry your life is bereft of VHS joy...but you need to let me go! Do you even sell VHS tapes here? Do you think I’m smuggling out a copy of Infinite Jest in this Red Dawn jewel case??”
Oh right! I’m supposed to be talking about Less Than Zero! I saw a copy of Bret Easton Ellis’ debut novel in a pile of books I nicked from an estate sale and thought “that looks just fine”. I read it in an afternoon. Here’s what happens: a super rich college kid returns to LA for Xmas break and does a shit ton of blow and stares at a poster of Elvis Costello. He goes out to restaurants and eats dinner with all of his other white rich kid friends....even though they are all doing shit tons of blow. He has sex with boys and girls and runs over a coyote with his car. He watches MTV and listens to X and the Go-Go’s and Human League. Then he returns to college. By the end of the book my nose was running.
The movie is just like the book in less than zero ways. It’s basically an anti-drug rom com. The lead is played by a hot off of Mannequin Andy McCarthy...who is absolutely nothing like the narrator of the book. He does no drugs whatsoever...and doesn’t even smoke and cigarettes. I wanted to yell “dude, at least smoke a butt, dude!” at the screen. He goes to a ton of parties with Jami Gertz from The Lost Boys...but not to party, you dig? They are mostly trying to stop their pal Robert Downey Jr. from smoking crack. Basically it doesn’t work and he dies. They took out all of the fun, gay stuff and replaced all of the cool ass bands with Aerosmith and Poison and shit. The Red Hot Chili Peppers are in the movie but you don’t actually get to see them cuz the producers thought people would be offended by their shirtlessness. (Hey...at least they usually wore socks, know what I mean??) There’s even a sex scene set to a David Lee Roth tune called Bump n’ Grind...a song with all of the sex appeal of a photo of Donald Trump’s loose neck meat. I see that Rick Rubin produced the soundtrack and have always suspected that he was a secret fratboy asshat. Anyway....read the book instead…