After not being able to decide what movie to watch tonight, I took to Twitter. I asked whether I should watch 2009's Cracks or 2008's The Informers. General audience members will be unfamiliar with both, but I got a response. I ended up watching The Informers. It was only after that I remembered it was written by the same guy who wrote American Psycho.
In case you can't remember, my thoughts on American Psycho can be summarized by one sentence: I didn't like that movie. And that's putting it gently. I remember taking a lambasting once I posted that review; people were outraged that I didn't like their little satire of 1980s Yuppie culture. I know it wasn't a universally lauded film, but that didn't matter: I was wrong for not liking their movie.
What strikes me as odd is not that, but that The Informers -- a film set in the 80s involving a bunch of unhappy people having sex and doing drugs -- is perfectly okay to hate. Tonally, the films are similar, and I suspect that some sort of social commentary was intended with both. After watching them, I think I liked Psycho more if only because Christian Bale's performance was better than anyone in The Informers by a long shot. But the films are so similar that it makes it hard for me to grasp the idea that one could be so loved, while the other was perfectly okay to dislike.
I would love for someone to explain this disparity to me, but I doubt that'll happen any time soon.
Ciao,
Marter
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