Why Christian Bale is my all-time favorite rock music critic

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Christian Bale's critique of Huey Lewis and the News albums Sports and Fore! in American Psycho is most brilliant and hilarious music review in history. What's your favorite musical comments or scene in a motion picture? I can think of many films where actors or actresses made comments about music. And I'll post a few more of my favorites later.
 
American Psycho is the most brilliant film released since 2000 and it's largely misunderstood by it's critics. The 1991 book by Bret Easton Ellis was considered to be largely un-filmable because of the grapic violence and sexual content of the book. It only got filmed because of writer and director Mary Harron's relentless efforts to put the Ellis novel on the screen, despite the conventional wisdom that any film of the book was DOA at the box office.


Here's two connected scenes from American Psycho that demostrate Bale's amazing talent.

In the first scene, Christian Bale runs to hide in his office to flee a police dragnet after a killing spree. Bale leaves a message on his attorney's answering machine in the middle of the night to confess that he's a serial killer:

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The sencond clip unfolRAB on the following day when Bale runs into the same attorney he confessed to the previous night at a Harry's Bar. Bale gets this darkly comic reaction to his confession from his attorney:

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oh yeah and realising this has veered off-topic but didn't the movie completely disregard the novel anyway with the twist at the end? Or did the novel have that too and i'm just going senile?
 
i would say both the novel and the film are intended and delivered as black comedy, that's not to say that there isn't a serious message.

Other musical highlight of the film for me was the cassette walkman Bateman carries around with him, listening to 'Walking on Sunshine' on the way to work. The club scene with New Order blaring out too, very late 80s :D
 
Phil Collins is a pretty easy guy for anyone who isn't tone deaf to hate. I can't say enough bad things about his music. To be fair to the talentless bald-headed little gnome, I've heard he's a nice guy who pretenRAB to be nothing more than what he is. I worry more about those success driven musical hacks who willfully pass off their cliched product as high art. There is nothing more annoying than a stupid person who has convinced himself that he's brilliant artist.

The satrical subtext Christian Bale's over-the-top reviews of Huey Lewis and Phil Collins music was this: Only a sociopath is capable of finding deep meaning in music as vacuous and contrived as the music of Huey Lewis or Phil Collins.

I thought most folks were astute enough to catch the double edged message of Bale's histronics in that scene but perhaps I expect too much from people.

I have a nasty habit trying add nuaunced meaning into that which is best understood as random madness. Its quite possible that I haven't come to grips with the absurd nature of my own loosely connected associations with reality, in precisely the same demented manner as Christian Bale's character in American Psycho. Of course that would put me in the precarious position being criminally clueless a serious charge, which I'll never cop a plea to, even if I'm deemed mentally unfit to stand trial for being dead wrong about everything.

Your unrepentant hatred of Phil Collins has provoked me to erabark upon my own fearful pilgrimage up the winding river, and straight into darkest regions of my subconcious mind to do mortal corabat with my demonic Kurtz alter-ego. If my mission is successful I will not simply hate Phil Collins, but I will also hate Phil Collins for all the right reasons. The horror...the horror of it all.

It's my own frivolous yet stubborn conviction that Bale was making brilliant statement about the insipid mediocrity of corporate "rock and roll." Somebody out there must be buying all those millions of Phil Collins recorRAB, and yet I've never personally known a single Phil Collins fan and there's a damn good reason why don't know any Phil Collins fans. It's the same reason I'm not aquainted with a single person who is a faithful viewer of American Idol.
 
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