I’ve started another movie night, which is cool and all, but I now face the challenge of reviewing American Psycho, it being redoubled by my failing to plan for it as I watched. (I think it would not have been easy to review if I’d planned for it in the first place, so.) The weird thing is that although I would have sworn I’d seen it before, I only remembered bits and pieces and nearly nothing related to plot and outcome. I wonder if I forget so much, or have merely fooled myself this time?

Anyhow, the Christian Bale of a decade or so ago portrays a Wall Street tycoon of another decade or so earlier who, in addition to his penchant for popular musical criticism and banal interactions with his even more banal circle of acquaintances, is, well, murderously insane. And the movie explores that insanity, mostly through the lens of his interactions with a private detective hired to find one of his missing banal acquaintances, whose fate I expect you can deduce from the rest of the premise as I’ve laid it out.

I was never able to discern that there was a particular theme I was meant to draw from the film, nor that a particular moral judgment was being pushed; or perhaps the problem was that there were too many options for these lines of inquiry. At any rate, I was left with more questions than answers at the higher levels of thought, and with a plot I do not feel right revealing any more than I already have at the lower levels. But to apologize my inability to commit to much of anything so far, I will say that the movie was a decently acted and sharply funny blood-soaked satire of ’80s excesses. You probably know if you’d dig that or not?