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My Decade in Movies - AMERICAN PSYCHO (2000) [Jan. 5th, 2010|01:09 pm]

urthstripe321
[music |Okkervil River - Love to a Monster | Powered by Last.fm]

Another film I reference endlessly in my daily life, and possibly one I’ve seen so much that it has lost what shock value it had for me the first time. Instead, it remains as an impossibly smart, endlessly funny satire of the culture of American excess and its inevitable downfall. Who knew a movie made in 2000 about the 80s could be ahead of its time?

Adapting a Bret Easton Ellis novel is no easy task, proven by pretty much every movie based on his work. Mary Harron was able to provide us with a very rich and successful movie by removing much of his superfluous squick and focusing in on the essence of what makes his stuff work. And that is a deeply cynical, harshly funny look at the decaying soul of American capitalist culture. Now, don’t get me wrong, I’m most certainly a capitalist at heart, but I’m not blind to its problems, nor to the way people have a tendency of twisting it to their less than noble purposes. What Harron was able to find in Ellis’s deeply flawed work is a man who is in a position to see the emptiness of his culture but is unable to escape the emptiness himself. And thus, the emptiness becomes him. The abyss stares back into you, indeed.

This film certainly wouldn’t work without Christian Bale’s fantastic performance. He plays the character perfectly. The emptiness, the doubt, the horror, the insanity. All of it is there. Unfortunately for Bale, he seems to have settled on glowering, raspy, shallow performances, but this movie shows his aptitude for incredibly nuanced and terrifyingly real psychological characters. Connecting to his future work, one can easily see that Bale’s Patrick Bateman is no other than a Bruce Wayne without a Batman to escape into. This is Dexter without offering the audience an easy way out to cheer for their hero.

And so we follow his descent into madness and the horrifying fantasies of narcissism, misogyny, and rape, borne from jealousy and sociopathy. It isn’t an easy movie, and it’s definitely a disturbing movie, but it’s also scathingly funny. And the whole movie isn’t made easier by its incredibly ambiguous and dark ending, in which we find Bateman spiraling deeper into the darkness that grasps his soul, only fed by the complete disinterest of his fellow man. At the end, he’s completely at a loss as to whether or not he has any control over himself, and if he actually did follow through on his darkest desires. So, did it happen or not? Does it matter? When it comes to killing a lot of people, isn’t it the thought that counts?

I didn’t even talk about the perfect touches like the soundtrack, the fashion, the incredibly clever, very quotable dialogue, the fantastic supporting performances, and the detail of 80s upper class culture. Heck, you can even spot the Club Kids in one scene. All of this makes the movie even better; a nightmarish look into a world that seems so far from ours, but is actually fighting for a hold on our souls. After all, it’s hard not to be jealous of the charmed life of Patrick Bateman.
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My Decade in Movies - SHAUN OF THE DEAD (2004) [Jan. 1st, 2010|06:55 pm]

urthstripe321
Was there ever any doubt that I would write about SHAUN OF THE DEAD first in a series of essays about movies from 2000-2009 that have influenced me the most? I’ve seen this movie more times than any other, and up with THE BIG LEBOWSKI, it’s one I most frequently quote.

If I remember correctly, SHAUN OF THE DEAD was the first Rated R movie that I saw legally in theaters. If that doesn’t make you feel old, I don’t know what will. I brought a group of skeptical friends into the theater for this flick, something I often did in my high school days. But this is a flick I wanted to see from the very beginning. I had no idea who Simon Pegg or Edgar Wright or Nick Frost were, and I had never seen SPACED before, but I knew my zombie flicks. So when I heard there was going to be a spoof/homage of Romero zombie movies, I knew I had to see it.

See, this movie had two things going for it. Me and zombie movies go way back. When I was but a young buck, I had returned from trick or treating on a Halloween night and went back to my room to enjoy my loot. Unfortunately (or fortunately) for me, I turned on AMC, which was doing its usual Halloween night horror movie marathon. I turned it on right at the beginning of one Mr. George A. Romero’s Night of the Living Dead. I was transfixed. I was terrified. I didn’t sleep for days, but some crazy part of me deep down loved it. I frequently cite this moment as not only my scariest movie moment, but the moment I fell in love with horror movies.

But besides that, I have always loved spoof movies. My dad practically raised me on YOUNG FRANKENSTEIN, but I loved AIRPLANE, the NAKED GUN series, and hell, I even loved SPY HARD and MAFIA!, although that has certainly waned over time. There’s something about a well done spoof flick that got to me. Sure, it’s usually an easy way to get a laugh, and as those antichrists Friedberg and Seltzer have shown, it can be twisted to incredibly evil purposes, the spoof as a comedic vehicle still holds a lot of weight.

SOTD is evident proof of that. So what does it do right? I think what makes a spoof most effective is actually two things: it has to stand well on its own, not reliant upon the references and callbacks to make it entertaining, and it has to have an honest, genuine love for the genre it’s spoofing. SOTD succeeds exceptionally well on both fronts.

As a comedy it works in spades. Most of its biggest laughs don’t come from callbacks, but from original gags that are simply made better by setting them up in a familiar universe. Think Shaun stumbling hungover to the local shop, indistinguishable and oblivious to the zombies that surround him. I laughed so hard that it hurt to breathe when I first saw that sequence. And the fact that the original gags work so well is what makes the obvious references also work, including the very obvious, but still very funny, “WE’RE COMING TO GET YOU, BARBARA!” And Edgar Wright’s direction serves the material very well, allowing for great camera gags, and easy recognition of callbacks from within the movie.

But even more impressive is how the movie works very well as a horror movie and a zombie movie. To be a proper homage, you need to be able to work the genre, and this film gets it exactly right. The film gets legitimately scary and very tense once they reach the Winchester, and they don’t take it easy on the gore either, rightly so. Unlike the more recent zombie spoof, ZOMBIELAND, SOTD doesn’t skimp on the claustrophobic dread of facing a zombie apocalypse. It just knows that it can be funny without compromising the horror.

The guys behind the film show an honest genuine love for the genre their spoofing, something that is obviously lacking in the Freidberg/Seltzer abortions. And that makes their movie that much better. It’s what makes their next spoof, HOT FUZZ, similarly successful. It’s this genre-mashing, movie loving, goofy go-for-broke spirit that made me love this movie, and makes me love movies in general. Deep down, this is a film for film geeks, for film lovers. It’s an unabashed adoration for movies, pulpy or not; a love letter to movies that make us scream and laugh and, most of all, have fun in the theater with a group of friends. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a movie that gets this formula as right as SHAUN OF THE DEAD. It was the perfect movie for that stage in my life, a movie me and my friends could call our own (because of course no one else we knew had seen it), and quote to absolute inanity. Yet, with each viewing, I still find it hilarious. Thank God for that.
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