Hello All!
I am back from an extended break to do what I enjoy the most, which is write about movies! Now since I haven’t had much time on my hands to go out and go to the theater (although I have been dying to see The Social Network), many of the films I have been watching have come courtesy of downloading online or my roommates Netflix.
Now American Psycho is in a different mold of many of the other movies in the fact that it stars a fairly unknown Christian Bale in what some could call his breakout role. Bale plays a troubled (to put it lightly) businessman that is just skating through the life of an executive at a company, yet Bale hides the fact that in his spare time, he likes to murder people. You know, some people like to hang out with friends, or ride bikes, but Patrick Bateman likes to kill. Now one thing that is very impressive about this movie I thought was the use of contrasting colors. Even from the title screen, we are treated with a white background, with what looks like blood drops, slowly, but meaningfully, drip-dropping down.
One of my favorite ideas that was placed in the movie was the fact that we as the viewers could hear almost all of Bateman, whether he was speaking or whether it was in thought. We could see what he held dear, what his mind focused on, and most importantly, we could get a personal connection with this man that really no other character could achieve. This is an interesting technique used by relatively unknown director Mary Harron, and I am under the impression that almost no one besides Christian Bale would have been able to pull of Bateman’s character in this way. Now whether or not you hate Christian Bale because of his attitude, you have to applaud the man for being one of, if not the most hard working actors of the past decade. The sheer effort that he will put in in order to learn and succeed to the greatest degree at his parts is almost inhuman (look at the transition of him in The Machinist to his next movie, Batman Begins). But the thing that I absolutely love the most about the way Bale portrays Bateman is the way that he delivers the lines so fluidly, so darkly comical, that its almost not as though you are watching a man acting as another man, but watching this fanatical, psychotic man go absolutely crazy.
There are two main scenes where Bale absolutely shines, and if you are on the fence about this movie, I would recommend that you seen these two scenes, and if you really enjoy them, then I can safely assure that you will enjoy the rest of this unusually dark comedy. Without ruining too much, one involves two men at Bateman’s apartment with Huey Lewis and the News, and the other involves Bateman, two “female companions”, and a lot of Bateman looking at himself in the mirror.
Its really hard to describe exactly what American Psycho is completely. One of its greatest strengths is that it rides the line of a “dark comedy” absolutely perfectly, because there are scenes that are incredibly dark, and the viewer can tell that something is going to happen that is going to be very bad, but the way that Bateman (which the more and more I type I realize looks more and more like Batman) delivers speech and dialogue leading up to these atrocious acts is no different from how he talks to his friends or co-workers. Because of how hard it is to completely describe, giving a recommendation to it is also tough. Personally, I think that it is an incredible movie, and the way that Harron directs and Bale acts are amazing, but the subjects that it brings up definitely warrant the dark portion of dark comedy, and it definitely lives up to its R-rating. Should you watch it? I personally think you should try it out, if only for the fact that you can see Christian Bale’s masterful performance as the haunting Patrick Bateman.
American Psycho: 5 out of 5
The Northwest Screen Guy 