Killing Paul Allen, from "American Psycho" (2000), directed by Mary Harron
We embark now on what I'm calling the "Pariah Club" of classics. And finally we have a woman director -- Mary Harron, who took on the unenviable task of adapting Bret Easton Ellis's supposedly unfilmable novel, vilified as misogynist, shallow, and ridiculously excessive in its violence. (I thought it was brilliant.) In doing so, Harron created a cult hit that has o nly grown in stature over the years. Here we have the infamous scene where the titular Patrick Bateman (Christian Bale) spouts his pearls of wisdom about Huey Lewis & the News (hilariously spoofed by Huey with Weird Al -- see video below), as he prepares to take an axe to his colleague Paul Allen (Jared Leto), who has committed the unpardonable sin of getting a reservation to a restaurant that's rejected Patric. In the light of their subsequent careers, as a couple of commentators on this clip point out, we have the old Batman/Bateman (Bale) killing the new Joker (Leto) -- unless you buy the theory...
