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I saw The Formula before I ever saw The Matrix, High Fidelity or Jaws, which made for some interesting first viewings. You know the feeling you get when you see a movie that The Simpsons has parodied? I got that hard with these thanks to The Formula. I'm reminded of the time I first heard Baba O'Riley outside of the DLR theme tune and had this real feeling of disconnect, where the real world and my weird internet world merged together.

I also have a very cringe-worthy memory of (actually) 12 year old me asking Chris Hanel if I could do my own remake...

A movie that feels like a satire on Donald Trump's worldview, but (most probably) wasn't intended that way.

The first Rambo film was about something. Movies 2 and 3 delivered some silly action. I remember almost nothing about movie 4. Movie 5 was a chance to return to the serious tone and give some closure to the character. What we got instead is

Avoided this for years because I considered the novel essentially unadaptable, most specifically in its overwhelmingly repulsive violence. As it turns out, Harron agrees—rather than even attempting to translate the book's slaughterhouse depictions to the screen, she reduces them to the abstract in the crazed scribblings Patrick's secretary Jean discovers in his notes. That moment, while it lacks the horrifying power of the book's lengthy descriptions of brutality and mangling, is nonetheless absolutely chilling.

It also highlights Harron's choice to wander outside Patrick's point of view and into the skins of the women he victimizes, the one area in which her adaptation is definitively superior to Ellis's novel. American Psycho the book is Bateman's story, Bateman's monologue, Bateman's experiences, and while being trapped in his head makes for suffocatingly powerful satire, it also locks the reader into a world without remorse, without empathy. We are sickened by the descriptions of Patrick's rape and torture and mutilation, but those acts might as well be happening to pieces of meat—the women are voiceless bags of flesh that are violated and then disposed of.

In American Psycho the film, the viewer is allowed to slip outside Bateman at crucial moments. When he solicits Christie for the second time, we inhabit her fear, her reluctance, her ultimate decision to dissociate and turn off her emotions in the hopes that this man won't hurt her; later, as he chases her, our perspective is not that of the man who holds the chainsaw but that of the girl who runs. And in the lesser, verbal violence he commits against Jean, we're inhabiting not his mind but hers; Bateman's callous, deliberate negging of her, every compliment barbed with a twist of abuse just underneath, honestly feels more visceral than a good chunk of the murders he commits, because Harron's camera follows Jean's pasted-on smiles, lingers on the hurt welling under her skin. When she finds the truth of who Patrick really is, we're alone in his office with her, experiencing the revelation in all its horror as though for the first time.

Ellis's novel is an American masterpiece in spite of its author, who in the three decades since its publication has done his level best to prove that he was capable of producing it only by accident. Harron's film succeeds because of its author—because of the ways she's able to mold Ellis's unrelenting charnelhouse to her own ends, enriching and expanding it without betraying its heart.

Never ever sleeping again.

In many ways a spiritual successor to The Blair Witch Project—mockumentary format rather than found footage, but it takes that movie's idea of the camera as simultaneous buffer between you and reality and terrifying confirmation of horror as reality and progresses it into the realm of digital image-capturing. When reality is capable of being manipulated, the line between the artificial and the hauntological blurs—ghosts become digital artifacts and digital artifacts become ghosts. It becomes impossible to say whether the supernatural is always with us or whether we manufacture it into being.

The above philosophical wankery is wrapped around a core of tragedy and violation—there's absolutely zero chance the choice of "Palmer" as the family surname was coincidental—that tethers it to visceral horror where it could have wandered into the abstract. The two elements come together in a single shot that's one of the most unspeakably terrifying images I've ever seen, one that's gonna be burned into my brain.

So yeah, bed tonight will be fun.

Streaming for free on Prime. Watch it for Spooktober.

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Thanks, Teague!

Last edited by Abbie (2019-10-03 14:31:17)

SPOILERS!

Robert Forster, who looks like Lee Ermey (and is just as dead) is in it. Look-a-like Tommy Lee Jones lives on for now.

Anyway, it was alright. Bit like Truman Show - how can I leave town when each way is thwarted?

They're pushing the flashbacks - some as early as a decade ago. Meth Damon getting chubby. Some just nostalgia, some needed to make sense of what's happening. Maybe a bit too many flashbacks for the 120 minute running time. But no actual past footage was used I think.

Aaron Paul has struggled to establish himself as an actor in films after BB, which is a surprise as he was so strong in the series and would have had a mountain of scripts and offers before the series ended. Jesse Pinkman is one of the great TV characters of the 20-teens.

Some tense stand-offs!

Was hoping for a convergence of the Better Call Saul (post-BB) threads at Cinnabon.

Vince loves his time-lapses... a cool top-down apartment sequence.

In summary, recommended!