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Post by RhodoraO on Feb 17, 2017 16:03:00 GMT
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Post by RhodoraO on Feb 17, 2017 18:17:39 GMT
Josh Lucas on shooting American Psycho: American Psycho (2000)—“Craig McDermott” Josh Lucas: I was a little nervous. I hadn’t really done much, film-wise, and had done a little TV. I hadn’t done anything with real pressure on it. But I would say American Psycho had real pressure on it because of the extraordinary book. Mary Harron had busted her ass to keep the job of the director and also to have the visions that she had for it—which were definitely different from the book. She was incredibly specific, wanting Christian Bale for the lead role.
On my first day at work I’m with Willem Dafoe and Bale, and I was really *beep* nervous. And I drove to set in a van with Dafoe and I said, “I’m really nervous.” Dafoe turns back at me: “Man, I am too. If you’re not nervous, there’s a problem.” I’ve taken that advice for the rest of my career. I feel like that movie really stood the test of time, and all those memories are still close with me because they are some of my earliest ones.
The A.V. Club: Did you know what Harron was going for on set? The lunacy of it all?
JL: Look, I was only worried about my little part of it, but I had read the book and I didn’t really understand it. It was insane to me. I felt like Mary was trying to do something a bit less insane. The book is so repetitive. There are 37 pages where he writes about putting a rat inside of a woman. It’s mental, manic writing, and I feel like Mary was using the source material and making something more comedic and entertaining and ironic about Wall Street culture and New York wealth. It captures the ridiculous, coked-out, New York wealth of that period of time. Talk about soulless people being terrified and worried about the wrong things, like what restaurant they chose and their business cards.
AVC: How did you not die of laughter in shooting that business card scene?
JL: We kind of all did. It has an [iconic] status to it. To this day, people hand me a business card and reference that scene. I know that I look at business cards differently because of it. I also think—look, we were a group of insecure, competitive young actors. I don’t know if we were laughing as much as we were being like those characters and being dicks. We would sit around rooms and try to out-act each other. www.avclub.com/article/josh-lucas-american-psycho-russell-crowe-and-disas-224193
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Post by RhodoraO on Feb 17, 2017 21:51:16 GMT
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Post by RhodoraO on Feb 17, 2017 22:06:04 GMT
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Post by RhodoraO on Feb 26, 2017 21:44:34 GMT
Critics site The Dissolve used to conduct weekly movie discussions where the contributors all watched a film and conducted a discussion over it. The following quotes are about Bale from their American Psycho discussion, dated April 16, 2014. The whole conversation is a great analysis of the film, Bateman and the difference's with Ellis's own vision: thedissolve.com/features/movie-of-the-week/512-american-psycho-materialism-misogyny-and-machismo/Nathan [Rabin]: Harron gives the film an almost Kubrickian coldness and detachment that perfectly suits the material, particularly Christian Bale’s brilliant performance, which alternates between clammy coldness and manic excitability.
Does the material fit Bale's style?:
Scott [Tobias]: Harron directs with the control Bateman wants to exert on the world; if he’d directed the movie, it would probably look much the same. It’s also the perfect style for the world of the film, where everyone seems to be aspiring to live amid gleaming surfaces that match the polished “professionalism” of the pop hits Bateman loves so dearly... But does the material always fit that style? It sometimes feels like Bale’s brilliant performance wants to break out of it, and into a movie that’s a little looser with its humor.
On the role of the voiceover:
Matt [Singer]: My favorite component of American Psycho’s style is Bale’s voiceover narration. In the opening scenes, he describes his morning routine with absolute calm and composure. (“In the morning, if my face is a little puffy, I’ll put on an ice pack while doing my stomach crunches.”) In a couple of sentences, he establishes exactly who this man is: superficial, materialistic, and narcissistic. (“After I remove the ice pack, I use a deep-pore cleanser lotion. In the shower, I use a water-activated gel cleanser, then a honey-almond body scrub.”) Bale’s self-assured delivery is like the misdirection in a good magic trick; only in the final scenes do we begin to realize how unreliable a narrator Bateman really is. He seems like a man in absolute control of himself and his surroundings. The deceptively levelheaded voiceover makes that transition from crazy to absolutely, 100-percent batshit crazy that much more surprising and effective.
On theatricality of Bale's performance:
Tasha [Robinson]: When I first saw [Bale] in this film, I thought he was perfect for the role, all urbane nerviness and banked danger. But after seeing him in so many less over-the-top roles, I found him a little phonier than I was prepared for this time around. He’s meant to be a phony—that’s part of the point, that his whole personality is a put-on. But I hadn’t realized on previous viewing that it’s so obvious.
And:
Nathan: In American Psycho, being a man is a patently ridiculous performance that entails being passionately invested in the wrong things (the stock and fonts of business cards, the quality of a haircut) and absolutely apathetic about the major things, like the “engagement” Patrick treats as if it’s as important and meaningful as those videotapes he’s always talking about returning. In that respect, the theatrical bigness of Bale’s performance makes perfect sense; there is no “there” there, just the mindless mania to get ahead, fit in, and indulge the hungers that are his sole reason for being. I also like the way Bale’s performance internalizes so many of Tom Cruise’s mannerisms and tics, like the eternal smirk and the nervous, jerky laughter. It’s a big, big performance, but one I love. Also, it’s Christian Bale we’re talking about here. Subtlety and understatement are not the man’s forte.
On Bale's and Bateman's physicality:
Matt: Bale is a very physical actor, and as he’s proven time and again, he’s more than willing to do extreme things to his body if he thinks it will help a role. For American Psycho, he became a gym rat, working out obsessively until he developed an absurdly chiseled physique. But that wasn’t enough for Bale; he actually underwent dental surgery to fix his, as he put it, “very English teeth,” because they didn’t fit Bateman’s conceited image. Sometimes these sorts of extreme bodily transformations strike me as unnecessarily showy, less for the film itself, and more for the actor to talk about in interviews and awards speeches. They work in this case, though; a man as vain and self-obsessed as Patrick Bateman wouldn’t be caught dead with anything less than a six-pack and a glistening, white smile.
About that moonwalk moment:
Nathan: One of my favorite moments in the film is also reportedly one of Ellis’ least favorite: that crazy sort-of moonwalk Bateman does just before killing Paul Allen. It’s easy to see why Ellis dislikes it: It crosses a line into bizarre physical comedy that he understandably felt should not have been crossed. But to me, it epitomizes the daring bigness and unabashed physicality of Bale’s performance. True, Ellis’ unused screenplay for American Psycho reportedly featured a musical number, but even he recoiled at having Bateman do the world’s whitest, weirdest, most awkward moonwalk—maybe because it’s an attention-grabbing moment that had nothing to do with him or his writing, and everything to do with Bale’s ballsy, intense, unique take on Ellis’ most famous creation.
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Post by RhodoraO on Mar 7, 2017 6:28:45 GMT
During the Genre is a Woman festival by Film Forum, Mary Harron talks about the business card scene and narrates a video clip of it: Tell me a little bit about this scene.
This scene comes fairly early in the movie, where all the main male members of the cast are gathered together in a world of intense masculine competition. Christian Bale, as Patrick Bateman, his anxiety is the engine of this scene.
Are there any key moments to look for?
I had a fantastic art department, but not so good at spelling. I also did not notice, and no one on set noticed that “acquisitions” is spelled wrong on the business card.
But one of the things that’s subtle in the scene is the sound design. We used the sound of Japanese dueling swords. There’s a “swoosh” every time a business card comes out because there is this element of classic masculine ritualized aggression. There’s also very crisp sounds of card cases opening and the “thwack” of the cards being laid down. It’s if it’s a military exercise but it’s being played out in business cards.
It’s one of my most favorite [scenes]. Although people think of “American Psycho” as this violent film, I think that what I and most people like best about it are the comic scenes. This has been much parodied. There’s a great Dutch jeans ad where it’s hipsters and denim instead of business cards. And there’s another one where people are comparing Sloppy Joe sandwiches.
As a woman director, what was it like to direct this scene that is so charged with masculine energy?
I think that one of the things I loved about the book and what Guinevere Turner and I liked when writing the script was that “American Psycho” is a great parody of masculinity. It’s a sendup. It was accused of being sexist, but to me it was always an attack and satire of sexism and of male ego. And I think this scene is a perfect example of it.Link to the video: nyti.ms/2n9cipLReported by nytimes.com
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Post by RhodoraO on Mar 7, 2017 6:50:18 GMT
An excellent analysis at New York Times as to why the film and the book are not only highly relevant but much more acceptable today than they were in their own time: In Hindsight, an ‘American Psycho’ Looks a Lot Like Us By DWIGHT GARNERMARCH 24, 2016
When Bret Easton Ellis’s “American Psycho” was about to be published in 1991, word of its portrait of a monster — an amoral young Wall Street serial killer named Patrick Bateman, who nail-gunned women to the floor before doing vastly worse to them — was met with outrage.
There were death threats. A book tour was scuttled. The Los Angeles chapter of the National Organization for Women proposed a boycott of the novel’s publisher. An advance review of “American Psycho” in The New York Times Book Review was titled “Snuff This Book!” Some stores refused to stock the novel.
I didn’t read “American Psycho” at the time. I was two years out of college in 1991, and while I’d eagerly ingested the stylish mid-80s debuts of the so-called “brat pack” writers, of which Mr. Ellis’s novel “Less Than Zero” (1985) is a crucial artifact, I’d moved on.
Yet it disturbed me that, in the moral panic over “American Psycho,” so many smart people made a rookie mistake: They’d confused author with character. Bret Easton Ellis and Patrick Bateman were pariahs.
Flash forward 25 years, to 2016. Lo, how things have changed. Over the past decade or so, Bateman has become a pop something, a grinning, blood-flecked national gargoyle. A brash new musical based on “American Psycho” is set to open on Broadway. You can purchase Bateman action figures. Bateman memes — photographs and GIFs from the director Mary Harron’s excellent 2000 film version of “American Psycho” — splash across every corner of the web. (“I have to return some videotapes” is among the movie’s indelible lines.)
Each Halloween, there’s at least one Bateman at the party, some fellow with a gleaming ax and a raincoat, his hair slicked tightly back in that cretinous late-80s style still favored by Donald Trump’s sons.
How to fathom the second coming of Patrick Bateman? The cult following and gradual critical embrace of Ms. Harron’s film, which starred Christian Bale, has played the primary role. Ms. Harron recognized the coal-black satire in Mr. Ellis’s novel and teased it to the surface. In her “American Psycho,” dire comedy mixes with Grand Guignol. There’s demented opera in some of its scenes. The film, like a painful zit on one’s lower lip, pops.
That Mr. Ellis’s novel, alleged by some to be among the most misogynistic books in American lit, was coaxed to cinematic life by a woman adds Möbius-strip layers of cultural complexity. Film and gender scholars will be off in the corner, continuing to untangle the knots, for at least a generation.
With time, the book itself has picked up a good deal of grudging respect, too. It’s seen as a transgressive bag of broken glass that can be talked about alongside plasma-soaked trips like Anthony Burgess’s “A Clockwork Orange” (1962) and Cormac McCarthy’s “Blood Meridian” (1985), even if relatively few suggest Mr. Ellis is in those novelists’ league.
I read “American Psycho” for the first time recently, and this is certain: This novel was ahead of its time.
The culture has shifted to make room for Bateman. We’ve developed a taste for barbaric libertines with twinkling eyes and some zing in their tortured souls. Tony Soprano, Walter White from “Breaking Bad,” Hannibal Lecter (who predates “American Psycho”) — here are the most significant pop culture characters of the past 30 years. Along with Bateman, they comprise a Mount Rushmore lineup of the higher antihero naughtiness. (Lisbeth Salander in “The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo” is among the too-rare rejoinders to a world in which men can brutalize women without regard.) Thanks to these characters, and to first-person shooter video games, we’ve learned to identify with the bearer of violence and not just cower before him or her.
Mr. Bale’s role in Bateman’s liftoff is impossible to underestimate. You can trace the character’s ascent along the arc of the actor’s career. (Bateman, Batman, Bale, baleful — there’s a malevolent linguistic richness in this subject matter.) He’s slowly become recognized as the dominant actor of his generation. This lends Ms. Harron’s film backward flowing gravitas.
Picking up “American Psycho” now, you can’t help but ask yourself: Do people get outraged by books anymore? Salman Rushdie’s “The Satanic Verses” aside — it was published three years before Mr. Ellis’s novel — it’s difficult to recall a recent novel that was so arduously condemned.
The battles over books like “Lady Chatterley’s Lover,” “Tropic of Cancer” and “Lolita” are far back in the rearview mirror. The complicated misogyny and Islamophobia that flow through the French writer Michel Houellebecq’s novels are greeted with a wink and a shrug.
Reading Mr. Ellis’s novel today, the hysteria of 1991 is almost inexplicable to me. It’s apparent from the start that Patrick Bateman is a sendup of a blank Wall Street generation. He’s a male mannequin, the ultimate soulless product of a soulless time, Warren Zevon’s “Excitable Boy” come to howling fruition.
The New York Times Book Review piece was written by Roger Rosenblatt. The novelist John Irving, also writing in the Book Review, correctly called Mr. Rosenblatt’s essay “prissy enough to please Jesse Helms.”
Bateman is a serial killer. He’s also an Exeter and Harvard grad, a gourmand, a tanning enthusiast and a ruthless fashion critic. A common literary-world rap against this novel was frustration with its endless litanies of what people wear. (Typical sentence: “McDermott is wearing a woven-linen suit with pleated trousers, a button-down cotton and linen shirt by Basile, a silk tie by Joseph Abboud and ostrich loafers from Susan Bennis Warren Edwards.”)
I found these litanies shrewd, a signal that Bateman is all about surfaces. They also feel like Mr. Ellis’s satire of writers who fill their pages with descriptions of trees and birds and insects. Clothes are Bateman’s pileated woodpeckers.
It’s impossible, in 2016, to talk about “American Psycho” without mentioning Bateman’s hero-worship of another well-tailored suit: Donald Trump. Bateman keeps a copy of Mr. Trump’s magnum opus, “The Art of the Deal,” on his desk. His dream is to be invited on the Trump yacht.
This is probably the place to point out that a recent issue of New Statesman, the British weekly, had a drawing of Mr. Trump on its cover with this headline: “American Psycho.”
Bateman asks his girlfriend, “Why wasn’t Donald Trump invited to your party?” She replies: “Oh god. Is that why you were acting like such a buffoon? This obsession has got to end!” It provides a sense of this novel’s offbeat comedy to print Bateman’s response to this: “‘It was the Waldorf salad, Evelyn,’ I say, teeth clenched. ‘It was the Waldorf salad that was making me act like an ass!’” Who isn’t driven to the brink by a Waldorf salad?
This food talk is a reminder that “American Psycho” has yet to receive its full due as the most wicked and sustained mockery of the late-80s restaurant scene that we have in our literature. Bateman and his friends are forever sitting down to meals like eagle carpaccio and free-range squid and gazpacho with hunks of raw chicken in it.
The book’s consumption gets darker. By the end, Bateman attempts to turn a dead woman into meatloaf. Here we approach the grisly and infamous portions of “American Psycho.”
There are only a handful of torture scenes. This novel is not wall-to-wall mutilation; it’s wall-to-wall moral vacuity. Still, these scenes are brutal in their exactitude: There are power drills and chain saws and lips snipped off with nail clippers and vaginas cut out to store in gym lockers.
Mr. Ellis told The Paris Review he consulted an F.B.I. textbook about serial killers to come up with some of this stuff. I sometimes had to read between my fingers. Yet there’s also a comic book texture to the literal and figurative overkill.
Here again, Mr. Ellis was racing ahead of the culture. Something has happened since 1991 to our response to violence, especially when it is seasoned with a shake of wet or, especially, dry humor. Increasingly inured to the mess, we’ve learned to savor the wit.
The catharsis that horror can provide now travels on a second and more intellectualized rail. Whether this fact will save or sink us, morally, we do not yet know.
Shortly after the book’s publication, Mr. Ellis spoke words to The Times that he shouldn’t have had to speak: “I would think most Americans learn in junior high to differentiate between the writer and the character he is writing about. People seem to insist I’m a monster. But Bateman is the monster. I am not on the side of that creep.”
The writer Donald Barthelme once put this same idea more memorably: “Don’t confuse the monster on the page,” he advised, “with the monster here in front of you.”
The writer Donald Barthelme once put this same idea more memorably: “Don’t confuse the monster on the page,” he advised, “with the monster here in front of you.”
“American Psycho” is, in its way, strangely moving. The novel is streaked with Bateman’s attempts to confess his crimes. He lusts for genuine contact. He tells one woman to go home because he thinks he might harm her. “I think,” he says, “I’m losing it.”
Writing in Town and Country, Mr. Ellis said recently that if he had composed the novel in the past decade, Bateman might be “palling around with [Mark] Zuckerberg and dining at the French Laundry, or lunching with Reed Hastings at Manresa in Los Gatos, wearing a Yeezy hoodie and teasing girls on Tinder.”
Swipe left, young ladies.
Alive today, Bateman would also probably stand at the back of a Trump rally and — if he could find a designer version — pull on a red cap that reads: “Make America Great Again.”The cover referenced in the article:
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Post by RhodoraO on Mar 8, 2017 19:47:30 GMT
From a think-piece on how the novel would have been received if it would have been published in 2000: www.nytimes.com/2000/04/09/style/american-psycho-sliced-diced-back.htmlPatrick Bateman gets himself in the mood for many of his torture and murder sessions by reciting long, inane exegeses on 80's pop music: Huey Lewis and the News, Phil Collins, Whitney Houston. Imagine Casey Kasem on VH-1.
In the movie, those are some of the sickest and funniest scenes. In many ways, Ms. Harron's movie may prove palatable, even enjoyable, to people who hated or couldn't read the book. It plays up the 80's satire, now very timely, and minimizes the violence. Christian Bale ... infuses it with equal parts comedy and horror. He also looks uncannily like a young George W. Bush.***
There has been surprisingly little outcry about the movie. Having a female director no doubt helped calm feminist fears.
Ms. Harron said she recently screened her movie for the group Women in Film. ''It went down well,'' she said. ''Men have been more hostile. It has been accused of being anti-male.''________________________________ Does he really? Was this similarity the reason why Oliver Stone cast him first in W?
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Post by RhodoraO on Mar 8, 2017 19:52:15 GMT
Regarding Curetti the designer who furnished Patrick Bateman's costumes: Mr. Cerruti's clothes have appeared in more than 70 films, including ''Fatal Attraction'' and ''Wall Street,'' which embodied the selfishness and greed associated with the 1980's.
This week, Cerruti clothes will be seen again in another film featuring 80's greed, ''American Psycho.'' In the movie, based on the Bret Easton Ellis novel, which reads like a goofily scary guidebook to Madison Avenue retail, the actor Christian Bale wears a series of striped Cerruti suits that scream, ''I want you to think I'm quietly tasteful but know that I have reams of money.''
For the movie, Mr. Cerruti went back to his archive and recreated suits he made in the mid-80's. Isis Mussenden, the film's costume designer, said that most fashion designers simply want to show off whatever it is they are producing at the moment. Mr. Cerruti's willingness to make clothes that are not salable is rare, she said, and one of the reason's for his sustained success in film.
Mr. Cerruti said, ''A movie is not an exhibition for your collection.''
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Post by RhodoraO on Mar 8, 2017 20:00:34 GMT
Stephen Holden's NYtimes review is very positive:
- In adapting Bret Easton Ellis's turgid, gory 1991 novel to the screen, the director Mary Harron has boiled a bloated stew of brand names and butchery into a lean and mean horror comedy classic. The transformation is so surprising that when the movie's over, it feels as if you've just seen a magician pull a dancing rabbit out of a top hat.
- The trimming demonstrates once again that less is often more. What remains of the story is a sleek, satirical, yuppie-era ''Jekyll and Hyde'' that blithely tap dances along the fault lines separating movie genres.
On Bale:
At the heart of the film is a star-making performance by the handsome Welsh actor Christian Bale (adopting an impeccably snooty pseudo-preppie American accent) that softens the novel's portrait of a serial-killing Wall Street hotshot just enough to force us to identify with this ultimate narcissist. Mr. Bale's portrayal of 27-year-old Patrick Bateman, a budding master of the universe by day (he works in mergers and acquisitions, which he facetiously refers to as ''murders and executions'') and homicidal maniac by night, is alternately funny, blood-curdling and pathetic.
As this character metamorphoses from preening, wolfish yuppie to chain-saw wielding maniac to whimpering crybaby, Mr. Bale makes us feel the underlying connections between these multiple personalities. One minute Mr. Bale's Patrick is a cowering corporate geek and self-described empty shell, the next an arrogant, name-dropping smoothie, the next a hysterical wimp unable to distinguish reality from fantasy.
He's also a serial killer, or at least he is in his imagination. The movie plays adroitly with the notion that his violent spasms are merely the revenge fantasies of a repressed corporate toady. The fluidity with which Mr. Bale moves from one state of mind to the other makes for the kind of tour-de-force performance you'd expect from Sean Penn, another master of throwing tear-stained tantrums.
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Post by RhodoraO on Mar 10, 2017 4:51:44 GMT
From the New York Mag review by Peter Rainer: Less Than Psycho. He mostly thinks that the time to have made this movie was early 90s: Clearly, Harron is sold on the Bateman-as-metaphor bit, and, like Ellis, she overconceptualizes everything: Bateman, played by Christian Bale, is all of a piece with his off-white Upper West Side apartment and his deep-cleansing face mask. He's a buff hologram inside a product-placement universe (although, for obvious reasons, the actual products being placed are, by current movie standards, relatively few -- a great inadvertent joke). Bale is a good choice to play Bateman, because his florid, sharply cut handsomeness already has a jolt of the sinister about it. When Willem Dafoe turns up playing a private investigator, he looks so much like Bateman that the film begins to resemble a convention of gargoyles.
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Post by RhodoraO on Mar 14, 2017 8:38:21 GMT
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Post by RhodoraO on Mar 19, 2017 1:48:34 GMT
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Post by RhodoraO on Mar 21, 2017 17:10:54 GMT
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Post by RhodoraO on Mar 23, 2017 5:02:14 GMT
Did Mary Harron ever acknowledge the influence of art in her film? These coincidences really strike:
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