the book was ahead of its time**possible spoilers**

Rating: 5/10 (13 August 2005)

and the movie was a bit behind.
Although I try not to compare books and movies, because they are NOT the same medium, and for this reason don't occupy the same headspace, this movie made me realize all the reasons I enjoyed the book so much.
Bret Easton Ellis' novel was shocking for its time for a few simple reasons: mostly, in the movies if not in real life, the late 80s were perceived as a time of tremendous greed and affluence, but also of a strange kind of innocence, like little kids at play. Bateman's existence was one of endless consumption and of doing all the things that people watching beer commercials could only dream about. This led to a complete lack of morality or consequence, and his boredom led him to kill (at least in his own mind) because there really wasn't anything that he couldn't have or experience. He's the perfect textbook narcissist/sociopath, and at a time when psychology was still hanging onto the idea that killers are made out of abuse, not simply born to consume until something external takes care of them.
Next, the book was shocking because of its explicitness. The scenes of gruesome killings and the gratuitous sex were things that back then had only been around in the porn industry, but that was the point--if you have everything, where's the next kick? And in the late 80s (I believe the book came out in 1990 or 1991), when there wasn't nearly so much access to every kind of appetite imaginable, this concept still had the power to raise eyebrows. And turn stomachs.
The movie tries very hard, and it has its high points (particularly Christian Bale in the shower, whoot!)...but it was released a decade too late to really accomplish anything close to what the book did. And through the Nineties, with access to the Internet and sadomasochistic imagery on billboards, our access to the dark side of our own appetites has made Bateman's sex and killing kind of pedestrian, almost quaint. "Oh, look, he's videotaping himself f**king a hooker, how cute!" Even the D-I-Y spirit of the movie, casting Bale instead of a big Hollywood name draw, is just one in a long line of movies to take risks like that. ho hum. I was waiting to see the scene where he cuts off a head and screws it, and the only reference to that was the head in the refrigerator. What a letdown! And there were so many cruel yet comical scenes in the book that could have been in the movie without getting censored, like the scene where he dips a urinal cake in Godiva chocolate and feeds it to his girlfriend...where was that? Why was it cut in favour of his asshole friends yakkety-yakkety? At the end of the movie, you don't get the sense of relief that none of it was real the way you do reading the book. In fact, you only get the sense that it's another day, and for some reason, this doesn't bother you at all. I don't think that's quite what the director intended. It's not a bad movie by any means, and Bale is great eye candy, but it tries hard to remind us of the late 80s and we're made all the more aware that it's 2005. (or 2000, when the film came out)