American Psycho actually gets better with repeat viewings

WHY??????

he's such a fuckbucket

american psycho is an awesome book but the movie only had one scene that was as funny as the book and that was the business card scene

also there is no way you could translate the things that r gr8 about the book into a musical

"This is Sussudio
It's a great great song
This is Sussudio
Won't you sing along?

You know, Duke was the album
Where Phil Collins made them good
The early stuff was too arty
Too smart? Too stupid! Any fool would
Trade that in, don't you and I know,
To listen again, to hear Sussudio..."

i thought the movie was funnier than the book.

ok ned otm

"You've got to get a head in life
Excuse me, gotta find that knife..."

i dunno, when i saw the movie it was on tv on a station that regularly edits so maybe its better than it seemed

christina bale is attractive

christian.

I cannot imagine watching "American Psycho" edited. I think it would be 20 minutes long...?

oh wait, is the movie violent???

dude, what

yeah no way you can see the edit of this, like at all -- at the very least bcuz of the xtian bale nudity

this was in the top 5 of my movies poll

movie is fantastic. have no interest in the novel, really.

have mentioned b4 that i have like all the time in the world for brett easton ellis tho

Christian Bale is too recognizably Christian Bale in this movie. He doesn't disappear into the character like he does in Empire of the Sun or the Machinist. That thing about him doing a Tom Cruise impression for the entire length of the movie is awesome, though. Valiant effort!

the books is better than the movie cuz its scarier and truer w/ still bein funny. the movie is p rad tho

So much of the humor in the film was "lol 80s yuppie culture" - so much of it was a particular aesthetic, that because the book is a book, it doesn't come through quite as well.

i thought the opposite, the jokes were kinda flat on the screen the book was just boring boring boring, punchline punchline punchline punchline, masturbating with a hookers blood, boring boring boring, etc.

yeah - the jokes were flat - it was all about flat - the accessories, furnishings, settings - that was what was funny to me.

Are you talking about the Whitney Houston music reviews? Because the movie is clever about incorporating it, but if you've read the book first, it still comes off as forced. I agree that a book cannot play "walking on sunshine" at you in a funny way.

i read the book after seeing the movie, and i liked the way the movie dealt with the music reviews better than the book.

It was pretty clever how they did it, but Bale has a very forced, pinched way of speaking, and he doesn't sell it very well. Patton Oswalt could have pulled it off, I bet.

"American Psycho" starring Patton Oswalt is melting my brain with awesome

I was about to say, someone create this alternate reality now please.

Bale has a very forced, pinched way of speaking, and he doesn't sell it very well.

this is what made it perfect for me, sorry.

really wanna read lunar park

it's pretty bad! there's good bits in it, though.

i read the first couple pages in a bookshop once and i woulda bought it if id had any cash on me.

This is from the e-book version of Lunar Park that's floating around:
"What I didn*t*and couldn*t*tell anyone was that writing the book had been an extremely disturbing
experience. That even though I had planned to base Patrick Bateman on my father,
someone*something*else took over and caused this new character to be my only reference point
during the three years it took to complete the novel. What I didn*t tell anyone was that the book
was written mostly at night when the spirit of this madman would visit, sometimes waking me from a
deep, Xanax-induced sleep. When I realized, to my horror, what this character wanted from me, I
kept resisting, but the novel forced itself to be written. I would often black out for hours at a
time only to realize that another ten pages had been scrawled out. My point*and I*m not quite sure
how else to put this*is that the bookwantedto be written by someone else. It wrote itself, and
didn*t care how I felt about it."

American Psycho being based on his dad is a much more horrifying premise (and true)!

So much of the humor in the film was "lol 80s yuppie culture" - so much of it was a particular aesthetic, that because the book is a book, it doesn't come through quite as well.

― sarahel, Wednesday, February 3, 2010 2:22 PM (2 hours ago)

yeah but the book was written in the (late) 80s so the moviemakers could set up the "lolz 80z" easier cuz the audience had the benefit of the procession of time. i read the book once (like 20 years ago almost) and even then i admired his immediate take on the 80s, but then again I guess Wall Street adressed a lot of the same themes during the 80s.

It was pretty clever how they did it, but Bale has a very forced, pinched way of speaking, and he doesn't sell it very well. Patton Oswalt could have pulled it off, I bet.

― Philip Nunez, Wednesday, February 3, 2010 2:30 PM (2 hours ago)

If you ever hear CB's speaking voice (or yelling voice from the Terminator Salvation on-set breakdown) you'll realize it was in character...?

no I agree it was an affectation, but he used the same voice in batman (as wayne), and it wasn't convincing as a spoiled rich guy there, either.

I found it convincing, and I've met some spoiled rich guys.

this is probably Bale's best role to date

the book and the film are both awes, but different

"I've met some spoiled rich guys."

Oh man, did they really talk like that? Were they sociopaths (aside from being spoiled and rich)?

only scene I remember finding funny was bale taking the bloody sheets to the chinese laundry

xp - yes. I don't know if they were sociopaths - they were generally pretty boring and talked about boats and vacations and ideas for products they thought that would make a lot of money that were really stupid.

I HAVE TO RETURN SOME VIDEOS

my go-to movie about zinging 80s corporate culture is robocop, fwiw

wait wait, let's hear these product ideas!

fur sink

electric dog polisher

"jump to conclusions" mat

I thought the music reviews came off better in the book

no one would claim am psycho is better than robocop but still a great, great film

they are both special in their own ways - i love them both.

I just watched this again, because of this little web article: http://www.wordandfilm.com/2011/09/censorship-causes-blindness-the-5-best-banned-books-turned-films/

Which listed it first among the best adaptations. And while I would get into a bar fight about some of their other choices, this one I agree with this one totally. What Mary Harron did with the material is, I believe, actually better than what Brett Easton Ellis did with it. Ellis half meant it, which makes for heady but truly unpleasant reading. The satire in the movie is blunt, but bever blunt like an overly-obvious statement, more like a baseball bat used as a deadly weapon. And it's never dull, because of course Patrick Bateman sharpens all his various knives to a glimmering shine.

I don't think the movie is at all ambiguous about whether he is a mass murderer or simply going mad. The movie makes it clear that he's going -- has gone -- totally mad. He shoots a police car with a pistol, and it explodes, and then he looks at the gun as if to say, "Wait... that only happens in movies. Something is very wrong. Even wronger than I thought." The cutaways during the final scenes of Chloe paging through his datebook, which becomes increasingly and then totally filled with nothing but violent and pornographic ink sketches, is expository of the fact that he's slowly been losing his mind over that period of time. (Think of Robert Crumb's older brother.)

And the last speech, which ends with, "This confession has meant nothing," is straight from the book IIRC, and carries the same weight that Ellis meant it to. After all the jokes and the Lynchian weirdness and the revelation that he is nothing but totally mad... he is still totally mad. Whether he killed a bunch of people or not. And he still has no purpose whatsoever to his life.

Great movie. Brilliant movie.

my go-to movie about zinging 80s corporate culture is robocop, fwiw

I agree, but American Psycho is not about that. It's about indulging your basest (and often most motivating) senses of status and pleasure and vanity, and getting extremely good at doing so, and then one day suddenly realizing that you have no reason to exist, and it's difficult for you to imagine anyone else having any reason to do so, either. It's about deep -- REALLY deep -- crisis of spirit and identity. Robocop asks, "Why are they there?", but American Psycho asks, "Why am I here?"

Yeah, this is a dope movie.

Perfect adaptation of the material. Tasteful without dulling the novel's edge, actually improving on it in a lot of ways.

robocop still better though