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Movies

* 1/2 “Less Than Zero.” CBS/Fox. $89.98. R.

The title comes from an Elvis Costello song, but there’s not a note of it on the sound track. Bret Easton Ellis’ novel of rich Los Angeles teen-agers--bored, jaded, hedonistic--has been turned into an anti-cocaine parable mixed with a sentimental romance: twisted inside-out and strangled with evasions designed to placate the people who would have hated the movie anyway. So, in Marek Kanievska’s film, we get a beautifully shot tour of “hip” L.A. with a triangle of high school chums rudely awakened as one of them (Robert Downey Jr.) is forced into a hysterical nightmare of drugs and homosexuality. The book’s nightmare was lower-key, far more frightening. The movie is about as scary as the Bangles--who do the title song instead of Costello.