Bovie Movie

Bret Easton Ellis’ dark and violent satire of America in the 1980s is brought to the screen in this unsettling drama with black comic overtones. Patrick Bateman (Christian Bale), the son of a wealthy Wall Street financier, is pursuing his own lucrative career with his father’s firm. Bateman is the prototypical yuppie, obsessed with success, fashion, and style. He is also a serial killer who murders, rapes, and mutilates both strangers and acquaintances without provocation or reason. Donald Kimble (Willem Dafoe), a police detective, questions Bateman about the disappearance of Paul Allen (Jared Leto), whom Patrick murdered several days earlier. As Kimble stays on Bateman’s trail, Bateman’s mask of studied, distant cool begins to fall apart. American Psycho also features Reese Witherspoon as Bateman’s girlfriend, as well as Samantha Mathis, Chloe Sevigny, and Guinevere Turner; the latter also co-authored the screenplay. Controversy followed the production from the start, when speculation that Leonardo Di Caprio would play Bateman sparked concerns that he would lure preteens to an R-rated movie. Di Caprio soon bowed out of the project, and original leading man Bale was reinstated. Later, a group of Toronto residents attempted to block filming in that city after Canadian serial killer Paul Bernardo claimed that Ellis’ novel inspired his murder spree.

In this elliptical ensemble piece, which marks the directorial debut of indie bad boy Harmony Korine, the teens of tornado-scarred Xenia, OH, kill cats, tape their boobies, arm-wrestle, bathe, cross-dress, huff glue, avoid perverts, pay to have sex with retarded girls, lift makeshift dumbbells to the strains of Madonna’s “Like a Prayer,” fight, cuss, shave their eyebrows, undergo cancer treatment, euthanize senior citizens, and pee on passing cars. A hallucinatory barrage of images and scenarios with little in the way of traditional plot, Gummo has been variously described as a surrealist joke, a visual poem, and a worm’s-eye view of white-trash suffering. The main characters include Solomon (Jacob Reynolds), who sells cat carcasses to a middleman who procures them for use at a local Chinese restaurant; his mother (Linda Manz), who teaches him to tap dance while reminiscing about her dead husband; Tummler (Nick Sutton), a mullet-haired local sex symbol; a midget (Bryant L. Crenshaw); a pair of boy-crazy, bleach-blond sisters named Dot (Chloe Sevigny) and Helen (Carisa Bara); a slut with a lump in her breast (Lara Tosh); a group of drunken louts; and Bunny Boy (Jacob Sewell), who wanders the town enigmatically in a pair of long pink ears. In between scenes of these characters enacting their bizarre routines, Korine intersperses impressionistic and quasi-documentary scenes with voice-over narration that ranges from incest memoirs to arty dialogue along the lines of “He’s got what it takes to be a legend: He’s got a marvelous persona.” Shot just outside Nashville, TN, Gummo includes costume designs by Korine’s then-girlfriend, Chloe Sevigny, who also plays Dot and who previously starred in the Korine-scipted, Larry Clark-directed Kids. Jacob Reynolds would go on to appear in Getting to Know You, though few of the director’s other discoveries have appeared on film since.

After profiling Monica Lewinsky, Billy Haynes, and Tammy Faye Bakker, documentarians Fenton Bailey and Randy Barbato make their feature debut with this true-life tale of the rapid climb and lurid demise of a flamboyant young club promoter in late-’80s/early-’90s Manhattan. Based on James St. James’ nonfiction account Disco Bloodbath as well as on the writer/directors’ own 1998 documentary, Party Monster features former child star Macaulay Culkin as Michael Alig, a Midwestern teen determined to forget his past amidst the bright lights and throbbing house music of New York City’s nightlife. Introduced to the club scene by St. James (Seth Green), Alig quickly becomes an event promoter himself, dreaming up bizarrely themed dance parties in such unlikely venues as fast-food restaurants and subway cars. But this archetypical “club kid” orchestrates his own downfall when, stoned on designer drugs, he and accomplice Freez (Justin Hagan) brutally murder their small-time dealer friend Angel Menendez (Wilson Cruz). Party Monster had its world premiere in the Dramatic Competition at the 2003 Sundance Film Festival.