Lion Gates Films
American Psycho is the perennial favorite about a psychopathic yuppie in 1980s New York who may or may not be a serial killer, depending on how you interpret the film's vague third act. It's easily Christian Bale's second-most-famous role, after his work in Newsies.
Columbia Pictures
Tied with Little Women.
But for Bret Easton Ellis, the author of American Psycho, the movie falls short for two reasons: it's simply not ambiguous enough, and the director didn't have a penis.
In Ellis' opinion, his book is unfilmable because its stream-of-consciousness narrative can't be faithfully adapted into a visual medium (and to be fair, the book is done in the style of a rambling and incoherent revenge fantasy of the kind typically found scribbled in a notebook in a bus station locker). Ellis thinks that the story's central ambiguity is ruined by physically seeing a naked Christian Bale chasing a prostitute down a hallway with a chainsaw, because seeing it forces the viewer to conclude that it actually happened as opposed to happening only in the character's mind. According to Ellis, there's just no ambiguity or metaphor in film, which seems to indicate that he has never seen a David Lynch movie.
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"I only enjoy backwards-talking dwarfs in erotic stories."
But the other problem with the movie, according to Ellis, is that it was directed by a woman. When asked for his opinion about the director, Mary Harron, Ellis said, "I think it's a medium that really is built for the male gaze and for a male sensibility. I mean, the best art is made under not an indifference to, but a neutrality [toward] the kind of emotionalism that I think can be a trap for women directors." He also infamously claimed that Academy Award-winning director Kathryn Bigelow has a career only because she's a "very hot woman."
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