Tom Cruise = Patrick Bateman

Well, sort of:

And then one day [Christian Bale, preparing for American Psycho] called me and he had been watching Tom Cruise on David Letterman, and he just had this very intense friendliness with nothing behind the eyes, and he was really taken with this energy.

So I guess that settles that. The real question is why movies based on Bret Easton Ellis's books often tend to be better than the books in question. I'll admit that his most recent novel, Lunar Park, was a lot of fun and terribly well-written and I highly recommend it, but The Rules of Attraction was kind of a clunker as a book. It did, however, make for an excellent movie, with James Van Der Beek (!) turning in an astonishingly good performance as Sean Bateman, easily a career best for him and essentially the complete opposite of his Dawson shtick. Rules is a minor classic and nearly a masterpiece, and it's impartial in a way that Ellis's books often aren't, to their detriment. Of course, American Psycho really is a cult classic as a film, and it is a better-made film (though arguably less impactful because of the highly clinical approach Mary Harron uses) but after reading some of the book and hearing some of the other parts I decided not to read the entire book.