Day 265 of the challenge! Just 100 more movies! Celebrated with American Psycho, which seemed appropriate for this point of the challenge.
First off, I had no idea American Psycho was a comedy. Horror comedy? Horror comedy satire? Something along those lines. I always pictured it as a straightforward cerebral thriller. Actually, there’s an element of that too… What an insane movie!
So if I understood it correctly, American Psycho is an anti-80s movie in that it focuses in on the excess consumerism and greed of the era, but makes fun of it by making us see it through the eyes of an opulent (and unreliable narrator) protagonist that may or may not be an serial killer. And boy does this movie have fun with it all. The INCREDIBLY narcissistic “business card” scene in particular had me laughing pretty good, along with the running gag of how all these business men look the same. It’s a funny movie!
Christian Bale is scary good as titular psycho Patrick Bateman, and I was very pleasantly surprised by the inclusion of Willem Dafoe and Reese Witherspoon. My biggest gripe is that they weren’t featured enough in the movie, which might have also been about 20 minutes too long. There’s plenty more to think about in American Psycho (the gender dynamics featured in the film immediately comes to mind for example), but I’ll go ahead and end it here with a screaming 80s “ROCKIN ROLL!”