Bret Easton Ellis’ American Psycho is a nasty, tedious novel—forty pages of decent social commentary prolonged for almost four hundred. Mary Harron’s 2000 film vastly improves on its source material, skillfully balancing comic violence with Wall Street satire, with an over-the-top performance from Christian Bale and a rocking ‘eighties soundtrack adding a vibrancy that was missing from Ellis’ extended prose descriptions […]
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“You’re my kidnap victim!” shrieks the hot-blooded Treat (Ben Forster) halfway into Lyle Kessler’s Orphans. He is addressing Harold (Alec Baldwin), a big-time Chicago gangster who spent the previous scene casually untying the knots around his wrists while chatting with Treat’s younger, retarded brother, Phillip (Tom Sturridge), about Houdini—a “Yiddisha boy … don’t let the […]
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2012 has been a year of great Broadway revivals—first Death of a Salesman, followed by Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?—and now David Mamet’s masterpiece Glengarry Glen Ross, likely the best American play of the last thirty years.
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Gore Vidal’s The Best Man may have been a scathing indictment of American politics when it premiered in 1960, but compared to today’s climate it just feels cute. In Philadelphia, two presidential candidates vie for their party’s nomination: the erudite and earnest if indecisive and personally flawed Secretary of State Bill Russell (John Larroquette) and […]
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