American Inferno - Bret Easton Ellis and Centralia

I found a Paris Review article about Centralia, that little town in Pennsylvania that is now burning underground for more than fifty years. And I wanted to write about it a couple days ago. Why would I want to do that? Because the movie version of Silent Hill used Centralia as its model for the town and shifted the whole background story of the videogame on this town of burning coal-mines and disrupted streets. And I liked that The Paris Review would do an article about it. But then I forgot or didn't have the time or just didn't bother too much.

But just about a couple minutes ago I received news (that are already four days old) that are intricately linked with the Centralia thing that I now have to talk about it. Well, Roger Avary, probably best known for co-writing the script for Pulp Fiction with Tarantino, also wrote the script for the first Silent Hill movie. And he also wrote the screenplay for Bret Easton Ellis's Rules of Attraction as well as directed the flick, which is the one really really good film adaptation of a Bret Easton Ellis novel that exists, and BEE loves Avary for that (as well as I do; well, on a whole different level, maybe). Just watch this little piece that introduces Victor Ward/Johnson into The Rules Of Attraction. Victor became later the protagonist of Ellis's masterpiece, Glamorama. Or this one, THE most amazing suicide scene ever.

Well, a lot of talk has been around if Avary would ever be able to raise the money for finally filming Glamorama, and it never looked very promising, because of 9/11 and are the Americans really ready for a movie like this and isn't it kind of too late now, anyway? But consider this tweet from Ellis, dated 10/13/11:

Just finished reading Roger Avary's adaptation of "Glamorama" which he will direct next year. Hilarious, horrific, sad. He's a mad genius.

So, this now makes top of my most eagerly awaited films list. In the meantime: Watch/Rewatch The Rules of Attraction. Avary really did the best job of his career with this one and if he had a hand in the casting as well, everything Bret tweeted is true: Hilarious, horrific, sad. He's a mad genius.