RTE Radio 1: The Ryan Tubridy Show

Another reason Taxi Drivers won't work nights Bryan is card payments as they prefer cash..............but let's not talk about that.

Tubs humblebragging about all the famous actors he's met.

The Elvis movie's FREE ADVERTISING ON RTE now tops €1m.

Tubs recently encountered a toxic customer at a retail shop. Did he confront them about their behaviour? Did he break their legs? No. He said and did nothing and left.

What happened to #BadEggsGetBrokenLegs?

Wasn't it his shoes that Rhys Ifans spotted before deliciously anointing him as the Dainty Little Bugger?

Tubs is going to tell us later about the Hollywood A Listers on The Late Late Show tonight.....oh, wait.

Taoiseach opens Pennys.............peculiar but joyful.

But....

Not very #woke is it?

SAOIRSE RONAN UPDATE!!!!!!!!!!!!

This is beginning to sound like a Lottie Ryan Show Biz Gossip Section at this stage.

Here's a challenge for you Tubs seeing as you're such a superfan - name 3 Aslan songs, and you can't include Crazy Wurldid.

Jesus Rita Oh-Ra (as Tubs pronounced her name), please stop.

Tubs criticizing someone for being patronizing. Can we have a GoFundMe to buy him a mirror?

Seeing as Tubs dumped on literary and cinematic classic American Psycho earlier this week, I decided to post a couple of reviews re. the moviue and how it aged on it's 20th anniversary in 2020. I think clear why he dislikes the film so much (I remain steadfast in my belief that he hasn't read the book) - the central themes I feel land a little too close to home for The Toyman. I've taken the liberty to highlight a few quotes in the reviews below in bold. You can make up your own mind as to their accuracy of course.

American Psycho at 20: a vicious satire that remains as sharp as ever

Christian Bale in American Psycho. The final joke is that nobody seems to notice that anything is all that wrong about him.

Mary Harron’s divisive adaptation of Bret Easton Ellis’s novel is a shrewd articulation of the source, with a star-making turn from Christian Bale

Scott Tobias

Tue 14 Apr 2020 08.50 BST

Three years after the Bret Easton Ellis novel American Psycho finally got made into a movie, after a production odyssey nearly as tortured and calamitous as its publication as a book, a documentary called The Corporation caused a mild stir among arthouse viewers and political thinkers. Inspired by a 14th amendment detail that allowed companies to be seen as individuals, the film asked a simple question: if a corporation were a person, what type would he be? In a little under three hours, the film concludes that he would be a psychopath.

It’s common to think about Patrick Bateman, the narrator and brand-conscious mass murderer of American Psycho, as representing certain 1980s themes: the greed and rapaciousness of Wall Street, the emptiness of consumer culture, and a Reagan era where old-fashioned values covered the whole Darwinian bloodbath in the sharp, piney scent of Polo cologne. But both book and film, craftily adapted by director Mary Harron and her co-screenwriter Guinevere Turner, are not thinking about him as a symbol per se. They’re thinking of him like the maker of The Corporation: what if the era manifested itself as a person? How would he feel? How would he behave? The conclusion is more or less the same, right there in the title.

“There is the idea of a Patrick Bateman,” he says in the early in the narration, “some kind of abstraction. But there is no real me: only an entity, something illusory.” In Ellis’s book, Bateman has a fraught relationship to his brother and senile mother, but Harron and Turner wisely excise those characters from the film, to where he seems like someone who has no family and no past, as if he simply appeared in the world in a pinstriped Valentino Couture suit. It’s impossible to imagine anything like the organic process of childbirth creating a monster like Patrick Bateman, which may explain why he likes to splash around in human viscera. He’s like an alien, only with a knife instead of a probe.

For the screen version of American Psycho to come from two women helped short-circuit the charges of misogyny that dogged the book so persistently, though producer Edward R Pressman wasn’t concerned enough to settle quickly on Harron and her star, Christian Bale. The film went through multiple iterations that had Johnny Depp, Edward Norton, Leonardo DiCaprio and Ewan McGregor in the lead, paired with directors like Stuart Gordon, David Cronenberg and Oliver Stone; Harron and Bale spent four years attached to the project like barnacles before Lionsgate acquiesced, albeit on a less-than-generous budget. One of the funnier footnotes of the film is that Gloria Steinem, the most prominent of the novel’s critics, happens to be Bale’s stepmother.

It would not be accurate to consider Harron and Turner’s American Psycho a feminist critique of Ellis’s novel so much as a clever and shrewd articulation of it, with less potential for being misunderstood. (Ellis himself has expressed mixed feelings about the film, but seems grateful to it for clarifying his satirical intent.) Where the book’s deranged first-person style juxtaposed graphic scenes of violence with equally long and pornographic descriptions of high-end consumer items, the film’s voiceover narration integrates them more smoothly, as blood-streaked black comedy. Some of the intended ambiguity may be lost, especially in a finale that’s chaotic and confusing, but the film still feels like an adaptation problem Harron and Turner have solved. They sharpened the implement.

Twenty years later, American Psycho hasn’t left the culture, because the culture hasn’t left American Psycho. The only difference is that Bateman seems more electable now than he might have been then. Not that he’d be interested in politics: when he goes off on an enlightened disquisition to his Wall Street buddies on apartheid, the nuclear arms race, the fight against world hunger, equal rights for women and the return of traditional values, Bateman echoes whatever popular sentiments he’s pulled from the ether. It’s no different later when he and a Valium-addled second girlfriend work catchphrases from Saturday Night Live characters like Fernando Lamas and The Church Lady into casual conversation. He’s crudely approximating what a human might say.

What Bateman truly cares about are beauty, order and conformity – being the perfect consumer. Before slaughtering his guests, he expresses admiration for the professionalism of Huey Lewis and the News, the late-period Genesis record Invisible Touch, and the string of No 1 hits on Whitney Houston’s debut. He wants to go to the most exclusive restaurants, and quotes from reviews (“a playful but mysterious little dish”). He wants to have the nicest suits, the best apartment, the most refined font and coloring on his business cards. He has moments when he’s soothed by optimal restaurant seating or the aesthetic marvels of his own body – he arranges a threesome to get off on himself – but he can’t sustain the feeling for long. His obsessions are hollow and the world too flawed to satisfy them.

The ugliest violence in American Psycho usually chases the pettiest itch, like Bateman getting the worst of an Old West-style business-card quickdraw and taking it out on a homeless man, or his rage over a rival’s access to an impossible-to-book restaurant leading to an ax attack set to Hip to Be Square. Harron and Turner’s script makes a running joke of Bateman’s fussiness, like the spoon from a sorbet pint nearly touching his living-room table or blind panic that grips him when he walks into a more expensive apartment overlooking Central Park. The only instinct stronger than his narcissism is his sense of entitlement, and the impossibility of Bateman ever finding satisfaction on either front is a route to madness.

As Bateman, Bale exudes just the right kind of anti-charisma. It’s hard to play a character without a soul, so Bale focuses on giving a face to the void within. He disappears into the role in all but the most literal sense, and when his eyes aren’t completely vacant, they’re filled with a panic and fury that Bateman only knows how to extinguish through violence. Bale doesn’t want the audience to pity his Bateman, but as he becomes completely unmoored from reality, his misery comes through as strongly as his sociopathy. Bateman wants so badly to be the prototypical capitalist douchebag, but he’s getting worse and worse at faking the human part.

Watching Bateman try anyway makes American Psycho endure as a straight-up comedy more than a macabre provocation or a serial-killer thriller. Here’s a man who tries to slip the inquiries of a private detective by ducking out for lunch with Cliff Huxtable, and says on three different occasions that he was out returning videotapes. He thinks it’s normal guy talk to quote Ed Gein on women, or entertain a date with a fun fact about the name of Ted Bundy’s dog. The final joke of American Psycho is that nobody seems to notice that anything is all that wrong about him. They weren’t really listening anyway.

‘American Psycho’ at 20: Why Christian Bale’s Movie Monster Is Relevant as Ever

'American Psycho' offered a chilling look at '80s yuppie culture and cemented Christian Bale's transition from child star to one of Hollywood's greatest contemporary actors.

BY RICHARD NEWBY

APRIL 14, 2020 9:34AM

“Do you like Huey Lewis and the News?” Patrick Bateman (Christian Bale) enlightens a drunk and unknowingly captive Paul Allen (Jared Leto) on the genius of the band. Still talking, with a high-energy affectation that smacks of snobbery and pretension, Bateman briskly moves to the bathroom, puts on a clear raincoat and picks up a gleaming ax. Paul notices the newspaper on the floor and the sheets covering the furniture as Bateman dances back into the living room and over to his stereo. He plays what he considers to be the band’s “undisputed masterpiece,” “Hip to be Square.” Dancing in step to the music and grinning, Bateman picks up the ax and hacks into Paul Allen, blood spattering his perfectly moisturized face and clear raincoat, blood staining the whites of his luxury apartment, and blood spilling outside the lines of his boxed-in world.

Twenty years ago, Christian Bale delivered an iconic 21st century movie monster. Mary Harron‘s adaptation of Bret Easton Ellis’ controversial 1991 novel, American Psycho, offered a chilling look at ’80s yuppie culture and cemented Bale’s transition from child star to one of Hollywood’s greatest contemporary actors. At one time a vehicle for director Oliver Stone and star Leonardo DiCaprio, before the actor was deemed too youthful-looking for the role, Harron and Bale were both surprising choices in 2000. Yet the director and actor managed to take challenging material and provide it with a distinct voice that makes it an exceptional entry in the horror canon at the turn of the century, and a prescient look at the consumer and political culture we’re grappling with 20 years later.

In a 2009 interview with Harron, the director discussed the process of finding the character of Patrick Bateman with Bale, describing his alien-like nature and his careful study of human behavior. Bale adopted a similar study, one focused on a movie star who served as Bateman’s neighbor in Ellis’ novel. Harron noted that Bale was very taken with Tom Cruise’s energy, specifically an appearance on Letterman, which he described as “a very intense friendliness with nothing behind the eyes.” There’s a Cruise-esque quality in Bateman in that he lives to perform. While Cruise’s energy comes across as an eagerness to please, to be the consummate movie star, Bateman is possessed by an eagerness to have the upper hand, to promise comfort to those around him while ultimately calculating moments to deny that comfort.

The foundation for Bale’s most famous role, that of Bruce Wayne in Christopher Nolan’s Dark Knight trilogy, can be seen in his portrayal of Patrick Bateman and the masks he adopts in the film. With his utterly convincing line delivery, a face that suggests a tortured existence even through seeming calm and pleasureful, and body language that is punctuated by physical comedy, Bale is likely one of the few actors who could excel at playing both Batman and the Joker. But American Psycho provides a complex protagonist whose existence is more indebted to the dire strife of reality than the comic book characters and Cruise-tier movie stardom Bale would later become associated with, even as Harron’s film descends into the unreality of a broken mind.

“I am simply not there,” Bateman says in voiceover narration early in the film. Much of American Psycho is concerned with identity. And while audiences associate Bateman as the film’s as the titular “American Psycho,” it isn’t that simple. There is an attempt made by Bateman to distinguish himself among his peers, the other Wall Street brokers who exist within this hermetically sealed world of high-rise offices, designer suits, cocaine and nightclubs. There is an effort made by Bateman and his peers to be an individual within the confines of a culture built on mistaken and traded identities, and signifiers of wealth, which manifests in masturbatory discussions of dinner reservations and business cards. These trivial assets, used as a means to form something resembling a personality, are so banal and meaningless that they can’t be anything other than comedic. But any effort to break away from the yuppie pack is quickly shunned, like closeted homosexual Luis Carruthers (Matt Ross) and his bow ties. There is a box these yuppies must fit into, because it is the only means to validate their existence. As Huey Lewis and the News said, “it’s hip to be square,” but Bateman isn’t square. He doesn’t fit into that box, despite his best efforts otherwise. Patrick Bateman is a shapeless mass, a black hole devouring the traits and habits of an insular culture, trying to build a box around himself, but he cannot be contained.

There are obvious parallels to be drawn between “American Psycho” Patrick Bateman and “Psycho” Norman Bates, right down to their surnames and monikers. But Robert Bloch’s character, an overweight middle-aged bachelor, popularized as boyish and slim by Anthony Perkins in Alfred Hitchcock’s 1960 film, is just one horror ancestor to Harron’s film. Patrick Bateman’s closest movie monster relative is Leatherface (Gunnar Hansen) from Tobe Hooper’s The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974), a film Bateman watches while doing ab crunches. Aesthetically, Hooper and Harron’s films couldn’t be more different. While American Psycho depicts a world of clean whites and perfect, mostly empty cubical spaces, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre presents a world of yellowed grime and filth, overcrowded rooms and handmade furniture bursting at the seams. Hooper’s film is one of spatial assault, where every room is confrontational, creating sensory overload and unease. As an audience member, it’s nearly impossible not to smell the dust, rancid meat and kerosene fumes of Hooper’s world. But as hostile as Hooper’s film is, it’s largely devoid of blood, despite its reputation, and that’s something that Harron makes up for plenty.

The differences in Hooper and Harron’s directorial styles are what make the ties between Leatherface and Patrick Bateman all the more fascinating. There is, of course, American Psycho‘s famous scene featuring a naked Patrick Bateman chasing down a prostitute with a chainsaw, leaning over the stairwell bannister, his mouth opening and closing in anticipation like some kind of ancient, sea-dwelling creature, before dropping the chainsaw with impossible aim and halving the woman on the bottom floor. But beyond their instruments of destruction, both Bateman and Leatherface act as voids who grasp at existence through masks. Leatherface dons masks in the literal sense of carving off victims faces and wearing their skin, cutting through supposedly defined edges of personality and gender with each new mask. Bateman dons masks in figurative sense, using the case of mistaken identities in his firm, the idea that none of these yuppies are unique individuals, in order to assume the mantles of co-workers to provide alibis for his crimes. A further tie between Bateman and Leatherface is the serial killer Ed Gein, who served as the inspiration for Hooper’s killer and to whom Bateman misattributes a quote. “When I see a pretty girl walking down the street, I think two things. One part of me wants to take her out, talk to her, be real nice and sweet and treat her right,” Bateman says. “And what did the other part think?” David Van Patten (Bill Sage) asks. Bateman responds, “What her head would look like on a stick,” before bursting into laughter. The quote actually belongs to the Co-ed Killer, Ed Kemper, later popularized in Netflix’s Mindhunter. But Bateman’s misattributed quote, whether intentional or a script mistake, serves to further American Psycho‘s idea of interchangeable and mistaken identities.

Despite the violence at the root of Bateman’s persona, it’s interesting how Harron and co-writer Guinevere Turner handle his violence and sexual abuse. There’s a surprising lack of exploitation in American Psycho. We see Bateman walking step and step with a lone woman at a crosswalk at night, we see him playing with a blonde lock of hair, we see a head in the fridge, we see his box of “tools,” a hanger, a chisel, and hear his command to his sexual partners, “We’re not through yet.” And we see those women leave visibly shaken, mascara running down their faces. But the specifics of each incident are left to the imagination, something the novel doesn’t do, to say the least. Much of the film is built around the suggestion of violence and cruelty, which makes the question of whether Bateman actually murdered anyone at the film’s end all the more justified. American Psycho in turn is not a condemnation of violence itself, but the consideration of how it becomes diversified and fetishized as an identity among the ranks of social class. Bateman’s mockery and murder of a homeless man (Reg E. Cathey) in an alley is no different from his of Paul Allen or “Christie.” They are rooted in his disdain for poor people and the insecurity of his own wealth. The fact that the film was written by women and directed by a woman allows it to take a pointed look at yuppie masculinity, lacking the self-consciousness needed to make any of it redeemable or charming a la Martin Scorsese’s The Wolf of Wall Street (2013), a great film, but obviously a different lens into the kind of depravity money permits.

Patrick Bateman is an idea. He admits this himself. He’s an idea born out ’80s consumer culture and Reaganomics. While the ’80s has become a time of nostalgia for our contemporary pop culture, American Psycho is a reminder that it was a root of so many of the evils that affect the country today, and that the neon was all a distraction. Timothy Bryce (Justin Theroux) arrives at a similar notion at the end of the film when discussing Ronald Reagan, “He presents himself as this harmless old codger, but inside …” Bryce trails off, but his point lingers, and the idea that the president is a psychopath is broached. Bateman and his yuppies are symptoms of a larger pattern of behavior, one that has permeated New York at this level of existence. Bateman makes two references to Donald Trump in the the film. The first, “Is that Donald Trump’s car?” and second, “Is that Ivana Trump?” Bateman uses Trump as a measure of his own success, the idea that if they are in the same circles, then he must have landed on a successful identity. But in terms of a contemporary viewing, it’s revealing and chilling, that even in this fictional world, Bateman and Trump walked in the same circles.

As Bateman’s “mask of sanity” slips and his murderous escapades are called into question, the audience, like Bateman, is left to question what he’s done and who he is. Bateman’s only singular trait among yuppies was that he was a murderer, and even that is potentially untrue. The same questions the film began with, it also ends with, which Bateman admits through his final line, “This confession has meant nothing.” But is that true? Even if all of his murders were fantasies, doodles drawn in notebooks, there is still a dangerous psychosis in play, and the threat of action hanging over him. Does the meaninglessness of his confession mean that he’s still a monster even if he hasn’t acted on his impulses, or does it mean that because there are no consequences within his place in society, that his actions, whether real or imagined, simply do not matter? Perhaps both are true. Perhaps Bateman, within his social scene, is even less unique than he imagines himself to be, and is surrounded by men driven by similar desires and designs, with murderous impulses flickering in their brains, and the sound of pop music barely masking the sound of revving chainsaws.

So what is Patrick Bateman? He’s the worst aspects of American culture, greed, commercialism, addiction, hedonism and bloodlust, popularized in the ’80s and allowed to flourish into the ’90s and 2000s, all fighting for superiority in an individual and manifesting in murderous rage. Bateman’s American psychopathy isn’t a rarity, it’s shared, traded and bought like stocks. Christian Bale managed to create a lasting 21st century movie monster, born of the ’80s, because Bateman’s American psychopathy is an epidemic, and it’s still spreading.

You Can’t Say American Psycho Didn’t Warn Us

By Lila Shapiro@lilapearl

Friday Night Movie Club

Patrick Bateman told us in the starkest terms that we were living in a world of murderous greed and indifference.

Every week for the foreseeable future, Vulture will be selecting one film to watch as part of our new Friday Night Movie Club. This week’s selection comes from our staff writer Lila Shapiro, who will begin her screening of Mary Harron’s American Psycho on April 24 at 7 p.m. ET. Head to Vulture’s Twitter to catch her live commentary, and look ahead at next week’s movie here.

Patrick Bateman, the status-obsessed Wall Street investment banker who moonlights as a serial killer in American Psycho, has three heroes: fellow mass murderers Ed Gein and Ted Bundy, and Donald Trump. In Bret Easton Ellis’s 1991 novel, Bateman keeps a copy of The Art of the Deal on his desk and gazes longingly at Trump Tower — “tall, proudly gleaming.” Then he shifts his gaze to the black teenagers standing in front of it and contemplates murdering them.

In Mary Harron’s cruel and glittering adaptation, which came out 20 years ago this month, Trump is referenced only sparingly, but his shadow lies over every scene. When Bateman admires his biceps in the mirror while having sex, when he silently rages with envy over the sight of a colleague’s new business card, when he tells a date that she will be ordering the peanut-butter soup with smoked duck (before quickly adding that “New York Matinee” called it a “playful but mysterious little dish”), he is conjuring a certain type of man — vain, jealous, absurdly petty, materially wealthy but culturally bankrupt, and above all else, obsessed with what other people think. In the New York of the 1980s, that personality reached its apotheosis in the form of the young, glamorous Donald Trump. Yes, glamorous. Before he was an overripe orange spewing conspiracy theories, he was “tall, lean and blond, with dazzling white teeth,” a playboy who belonged “to the most elegant clubs,” as the New York Times gushed in 1976.

American Psycho’s relationship to Trump doesn’t end with Bateman’s emulation of the man. Over the years, as Trump’s stature has risen to previously unimaginable heights, so has the film’s. At the time of its release, it polarized critics, earning a few positive reviews but also wide condemnation. “Even people who liked it wouldn’t have considered it an important film,” Harron told me in a recent interview. Now it regularly appears on lists of the greatest horror films of the 21st century. Looking back, it can be seen as an eerily prescient skewering of the social conditions that allowed Trump to get to where he is now. Throughout the movie, Bateman is desperate to confess his crimes, but no one will listen. When he tells a model at a nightclub that he works in “murders and executions,” she tells him, eyes glazed over with boredom, that the guys she knows who work in “mergers and acquisitions really don’t like it.” When he tells his lawyer that he’s killed 20 — or maybe 40 — people, the guy thinks it’s a joke. (The real punch line is that Bateman’s lawyer doesn’t recognize him, confusing him for one of his look-alike colleagues — a pervasive face-blindness that seems to afflict most of the characters in the story.)

In the end, even the detective investigating one of the murders, played with brilliant ambiguity by Willem Dafoe, is cheerfully determined not to finger Bateman as the suspect. Bateman is psychotic, but so is the culture that surrounds him. Every person he encounters is so insanely self-absorbed, so consumed by their own quests for status and wealth, that they aren’t just indifferent to his murderous rampage; they refuse to acknowledge it. Rewatching the film, you may find yourself thinking of a claim Trump made while he was running for president: “I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody and wouldn’t lose any voters, okay?” (Trump was making a point about loyalty, which is where the similarities between Trump and Bateman end. No one pretends to be loyal to Bateman; most people can’t remember his name.)

But the fanatical self-absorption that Trump represented in the ’80s has only strengthened its grip on American life since then, a fact that’s never been clearer than in recent weeks, as Trump and his friends, many of them products of the very institutions that gave rise to Wall Street’s culture of unfettered greed in the 1980s, have used the greatest crisis of our time to funnel staggering sums of money into the coffers of the world’s wealthiest companies. Meanwhile, the body count is rising. But you can’t say that we weren’t warned. Bateman told us in the starkest terms that we were living in a world of murderous greed and indifference. Of course we were incapable of hearing it. That was Harron’s whole point. “This confession,” as Bateman concluded at the end of the film, “has meant nothing.”

This Friday, beginning at 7 p.m. ET, let’s all revisit Harron’s film for Vulture’s latest Friday Night Movie club. I’ll be livetweeting, but first, I’ve got to return some videotapes.

Deliciously so.

I'm hoping The Toyman's kind words help me get through the Queen's funeral today............🙄

Tubs show sponsored by Centre Parcs - no mention of them trying to kick their guests out last week? Intriguing.

"My friend Ruslan - who looks like us"

"And then some Ukranian children came up to me and said their upheaval and displacement was completely worth it to be in the home of The Toyman"

Toyshow mention within 45seconds.