I finally watched this last night. I’ve been meaning to for years in a not-very-urgent way, since I often come across references to it (references that I sort of get but not quite), and then the other day someone posted a small clip as part of an Internet comment, and I decided to just get it over with. So while Anne was at ukuleles (she’s really not into these kinds of movies) I went online and rented it.
I paid for the movie, pressed play, and got nothing but cryptic error messages from Amazon. D’oh! I upgraded Firefox and re-loaded the necessary plug-ins, turned the machine off and on, all the usual suggested fixes — nothing. (I also tried Netflix and Hulu, they were similarly borked.) Finally I noticed that I had a plug-in installed that I’d forgotten about, one that blocks video auto-play. I was pretty sure it’s obsolete at this point so I just disabled it, and suddenly everything worked.
(By this point a good chunk of my “alone time” had been used up, so Anne came home just at the violent, climactic ending…)
All that troubleshooting was the highlight of the experience; the movie itself was strangely …dull. Everyone in it seemed like a coked-up, hyperprivileged Eighties-era sociopath, which is what they all turned out to be. I found none of them sympathetic — I would not have minded if they were all murdered, and would not have been surprised if they all were murderers. The actual psychology of the main character seemed to come more from a book than anything else — he even used the phrase “mask of sanity” at one point in his internal monologue. In terms of tension or suspense, there didn’t seem to be any, and the ending (no spoilers!) would have seemed less trite if it had been just a little more ambiguous.
Anyway, there it was — I finally saw American Psycho. It was worth seeing, and worth paying $3.99 or whatever, but that’s about it.
