Less Than Zero

I watched this movie from 1987 again and still can't believe it has been 20 years since I lived the plot of the Bret Easton Ellis novel of the same name. Around that time I went home from college and found a bunch of people had either died, moved away, got married, been in rehab or jail. Among the users were a few suburban freebase smokers, the "white" version of crack cocaine. A friend had me drive him to rehab only before he bought a can of soda he poured out in the parking lot and a box of baking soda so he could make a pipe out of the can and base up one last time... it was sad to the extreme, but I had my own problems, mostly with women go figure! Cheaters, fakes and phonies, pretending to be one thing to get you to like them and then turning into their true personalities while I stuffed my own feelings inside, lived in denial and bounced from one relationship to another like a pinball on its way to a tilted game...

The movie had mixed reviews, but Robert Downey Jr.'s portrayal of a cocaine addicted over-privelaged Hollywood boy was more than foreshadowing for his later life. The soundtrack was assembled by Rick Rubin and includes a good time capsule for the mid-1980s.