Review – American Psycho

Stay away from me. Here’s a faithfully empty-headed cinematic retelling of Bret Easton Ellis’ tale of a yuppie driven to ultra-violence by 80s excess and ennui. Snore. I guess this is supposed to be Rand-ism taken to its unseemly nth degree. But if most irony falls flat because it requires viewers to be able to hold two ideas in their heads at once, then this feeble offering flops because it requires the audience to hold no ideas in their heads for the 90-some-minute running time. References to cultural background material ranging from Dostoevsky to The Texas Chainsaw Massacre likewise fail to impress. The production is slick, but the acting is wooden (though I concede this approach is at least appropriate to the plot). And though I think women should get more jobs directing mainstream Hollywood movies, this time around it just reeked of see-it-isn’t-anti-feminist-backlash-because-a-woman-directed-it, or at the very least couldn’t-get-anyone-else-to-touch-this-leper-of-a-movie-with-a-ten-foot-pole. See if desperate