Quote: (01-13-2014 03:38 AM)j r Wrote:
Off topic, but the American Psycho movie is better than the book. It does a much better job of capturing the absurdity of the character and his life. Easton Ellis is a good writer, but he's generally to in love with the things that he's writing about to do good satire.
Highly disagree, but to each their own.
First off, the book is WAYYY more graphic. There's no way they could have made an honest conversion without an NC-17 rating.
Second, I enjoy Ellis' indulgent and repetitious tirades about Huey Lewis, Genesis, and all the fashion stuff. He builds a pretty stark landscape of monotony punctuated with these insane and gruesome events. You don't get the same effect in the movie.
To make a true carryover of the book, the movie would have had to be much longer, and frankly not the type of thing anyone would want to sit through. I do enjoy it and thinking Christian Bale did a fantastic job, but I still like the book better.
I haven't read "The Way of Men" but long ago I had to accept that some of our greatest cultural works are produced by gay men or otherwise deviant individuals. You can go through the annals of time and many of our best philosophers, composers, painters, sculptors, authors, etc have either had a screw loose, been suicidal, schizo, gay, pederasts, transvestites, you name it.
Does that make their work any less great? I would use the example of Tchaikovsky, who happens to be one of my favorite composers. Go listen to his Symphony no. 6 "Pathetique" over and over until you really start to get it. It's fucking tragic, and a truly awesome work. He was a closet homosexual, does that make him less of a composer?
Okay so the gripe is that gay men shouldn't be an authority on masculinity. I won't argue that here nor there but the analogy of listening to Lindy West for game advice is ridiculous.
Lindy West is:
-Fat
-American female
-Feminist.
Any one of those three things would automatically disqualify her opinion on anything, but all three just takes it over the edge. Gay men are still men, who have superior reasoning skills and a higher capacity for intelligence. Being gay doesn't suddenly make them stupid.