re: the editing...
It's too bad we'll likely never see the movie as it was meant to be. If you read the Bret Easton Ellis interview, he says that the movie was doing fine, he liked it actually, but it ran too long and the powers that be decided to lop off 45 minutes off of the entire film.
I'm sorry, but cuts of that magnitude, that hardly leaves anything left of the original.
It's the same with "Kingdom of Heaven", except that that film fared a little better. The movie runs like...4 hrs on the director's cut(?), but the theatrical release is either 2-2.5 hrs. And it's a much better film, naturally, on its 4 hr runtime.