American Psycho
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(This post was updated on )
 Patrick is a successful young career man who kills for no apparent reason. His days are spent in a normal working environment but his nights find him turning into a monster without a soul...When Bret Easton Ellis’s 1991 novel American Psycho was released outraged members of NOW (the National Organization of Women) immediately went on talk shows, news programs, and published articles decrying the glamorization of the merciless, misogynistic protagonist. They painstakingly listed the number of rapes, murders and incidents of torture in the book. I had to have it. I read it in shocked amazement, poring over every shocking page. The writing was good and the story was original, but the tangent-chasing Ellis did seem to be a little too in love with his own prose. More succinct and satirical than the book, director Mary Harron’s slice of American Psycho is a tasty treat that’s almost as easy to swallow as protagonist Patrick Bateman’s lithium tablets. American Psycho is the portrait of a morally bankrupt, financially flush, superciliously apathetic Wall Street turk. But the film doesn’t merely observe 80s yuppie Patrick Bateman (Christian Bale) — it invites us into his world. A swanky world of designer suits, haute cuisine, chic skin creams, custom-made tanning beds… oh, and a hooker’s gore-spattered head in the glossy, steel-front freezer (right next to the gourmet sorbet, natch). Patrick is so obsessed with taking his cues from the outside for what to wear, what to eat, what to listen to, who to date, who to be seen with, who to be, that there is nothing inside. Aw, how sad. But wait — it’s funny, too. Mary Harron and Christian Bale create an almost magical balance between the tragic and comic elements of this story. Ellis’s Patrick Bateman is more predatory, more sadistic. In the book, he murders a small boy at the zoo and after enjoying the mother’s hysterics, he regrets that the child wasn’t old enough for the death to devastate more people. In the film, which is an improvement over the book in that it is more focused and more cohesive, Harron’s Patrick Bateman is absurd, even downright funny at times. When his business card doesn’t quite measure up (the business cards being used as an amusing analogy of penis-size) to his business rival’s, Patrick just has to murder the bastard in a most brutal manner. But make no mistake — Bale’s performance is not tongue-in-cheek. There are no wink-wink, nod-nods at the camera. Even when he’s orchestrating a threesome with a street hooker and a high-priced call girl (while checking his perfect smile in the mirror), Bale as Bateman is the seamless sociopath. During sex, and while killing, Patrick plays his favorite pop tunes and waxes on why he adores them — his discourse on the evolution of Huey Lewis and the News’s music is sheer, absurd brilliance. Much of the dialog, particularly the first-person voiceovers, is taken directly from the novel. Without leaving you unsatisfied, American Psycho asks more questions than it answers. Is Patrick Bateman really a homicidal killer, happily hacking, sawing and drilling his nights away? When he confesses to his equally empty social clique, they either don’t hear him, or they laugh it off — that Patrick, such a joker! Is it all just a satirical social parable, telling us that as long as you’re rich, tan and have killer abs, it doesn’t matter what you do? Are the murders all in Patrick’s lithium-laden head? Or are they fantasies to allay the feelings of inferiority and the frustrations he suffers? Whether he did it or not, there is no doubt that Patrick Bateman is insane, and Bale’s portrayal of him as he unravels is stellar. The supporting cast — Reese Witherspoon as Bateman’s society fiancée, Chloe Sevingny as his mousy secretary, Jared Leto as the man he wishes he was, and Willem Dafoe as the private investigator tailing him — couldn’t be better. Just in time to cash in on Bale as the title character in the big-budget blockbuster Batman Begins, Lions Gate is releasing a new edition of the DVD touted as “uncut” — actually, there isn’t much difference. The real reason to upgrade if you already have another edition, is the new bonus material. There are two separate audio commentaries; one from the writer/director, and one from actress/co-writer Guinevere Turner. Also new to this edition are five brief deleted scenes, preceded by interview snippets (nearly 15 minutes total, each with optional commentary by Harron). There are also newly-produced video essays that cover the American Psycho journey from page to screen (though interesting, there is absolutely nothing from author Ellis, which is rather disappointing), a short called The Pornography of Violence, and a mini-doc (about 30 minutes) about the 80s and why the decade was one of such excess and empty flash.  A New York stock broker spends his evenings killing people, or does he? Published in 1991, Bret Easton Ellis' third novel was greeted by howls of hatred more appropriate to a small war in the Third World or another Golan-Globus Lemon Popsicle sequel. A first person report from inside the mind of Patrick Bateman, who epitomises the ills of the 1980s by combining the professions of Wall Street broker ("mergers and acquisitions") and serial killer ("murders and executions"), the book was widely misinterpreted as a hideously misogynist tract that used explicit violence to draw attention to a thinly-plotted pretend thriller with dollops of surface-level satire. There has always been the threat of a film, with such scary names as Oliver Stone, Brian De Palma and David Cronenberg in the ring - but the project has fallen to Mary Harron, the ex-BBC documentarian who made an underrated debut with I Shot Andy Warhol, who has cannily brought aboard the apparently unlikely Guinevere Turner (the lesbian icon from Go Fish) to co-write and play the funniest victim. The result is the best imaginable film of very difficult material; it doesn't say much more than, "The 80s were shit," but manages exactly to catch the all-surfaces, dazzlingly obsessive tone of the novel, making its points by treating all subjects - nouvelle cuisine, MOR rock music, fitness kicks, clothes, personal grooming - with exactly the same pornographic attention to detail as the sex and violence. Like the book, the film makes a point of not having a real plot: a smooth PI (Dafoe) seems set to nail the killer for the murder of a rival trader (Leto), but fades into the wallpaper along with the crime itself. Bateman, played with dead-inside charm and mounting hysteria by an astonishing Christian Bale, invites us into his world of reservations at exclusive restaurants and competitions over the quality of business cards. His detours into murder - prefaced by detailed speeches about now-embarrassing musical enthusiasms ("You actually own a Whitney Houston CD?" gasps Turner through contemptuous laughter. "More than one?") - are hardly more bizarre and tasteless as everything else in his life. In the end, the scariest thing about Bateman is not that he's a Lecter-like freak - his crack-up in the last act brings him horribly closer to humanity - but that he is no worse than everyone else in his world, except humane-but-dim office minion Sevigny, whose role is to make the film bearable. As for the horror: Harron is mostly very discreet, but delivers one terrific apartment-of-grue sequence as Bateman's life falls to pieces along with many victims, featuring a truly nerve-shredding chainsaw sound effect. Often laugh-out-loud funny, conveying the cruelty of its world through persistent mistakings of identity among the well-scrubbed young men and details like the all-sharp-edges interior decor and elaborate but tiny meals, it's cool in the sense of remote rather than hip. Christian Bale ... Patrick Bateman Justin Theroux ... Timothy Bryce Josh Lucas ... Craig McDermott Bill Sage ... David Van Patten Chloë Sevigny ... Jean Reese Witherspoon ... Evelyn Williams Samantha Mathis ... Courtney Rawlinson Matt Ross ... Luis Carruthers Jared Leto ... Paul Allen Willem Dafoe ... Det. Donald Kimball Cara Seymour ... Christie Guinevere Turner ... Elizabeth Stephen Bogaert ... Harold Carnes Monika Meier ... Daisy Reg E. Cathey ... Al, the Derelict imdb Download Torrent 
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