Bret Easton Ellis' novel is turned into a good looking but utterly pointless film (much like his novels). Ellis' work was documenting the 1980's rich and beautiful (and wannabe rich and beautiful) in a series of books that revealed how empty and vapid it all was. Here it's more of the same as the death of one person sends tremors through the people who knew and pretended to love him. The film looks fantastic. Every shot is perfectly composed like a perfume ad. Its eye candy of the highest order and the sort of thing you'd like to use to show off an HD TV. The plot is sex and drugs and bad behavior as the interrelated stories spin out and the various people who you probably would never want to deal with in real life try to get by as their utterly empty lives play out. I'm not sure if we're supposed to take these people seriously or laugh at them. Certainly there seems to be little connection to reality as characters who look more like an idealized idea of Hollywood in the 80's talk about their petty lives and unremarkable tragedies. I was amazed at times that this many empty people could be in one room with out it imploding into a black hole. None of it seemed real, and having lived through the decade I can pretty say people only looked like this in retouched advertisements. The real problem here is that unless you're rich and vapid nothing in this film has no bearing on anyone's lives. Having read some of Ellis' early work I was always struck by how his writing never had any connection to most people's lives. Its nice to be young and beautiful and rich, but the lives are so unconnected to anything in my life that I never cared what happened. In this film, as in his books, I was always of the opinion that if everyone suddenly died and we were just left with empty rooms there would be no difference in what was going on. Its sound and fury signifying nothing. If you want a good looking, well acted but utterly meaningless movie give it a try. Actually if you want to see the best part of the film, watch the accident that opens the film then turn it off because it never gets better than that.