Is there a Rambo movie in which Stallone doesn't bleed, or get himself dipped in pig excrement, or electrocuted half to death, without flinching? In the stockade, in James Jones' "From Here to Eternity," the guards treat the inmates with unspeakable brutality. So what do the prisoners do to prove their transcendance of authority? They beat hell out of each other, in games, in ways that the guards wouldn't have the imagination to dream up.
The punishment within the group is only part of the story, of course. It leads to a consideration of secret cults and their desire to rid the world of credit cards. And if Tyler Durden is going to insult the narrator by calling him "Ikea Boy", and if the group is going to assault society by demolishing icons like Starbucks, don't they have some kind of obligation to provide more constructive icons? Shouldn't they have some sense of beauty, truth, and logic that takes them beyond moral nihilism?
The film is ugly to watch, partly because the message itself is so banal, and partly because the imagery is so repulsive. The back of somebody's head is blown off. Human fat is boiled down to make soap. Fight Club members lives in an abandoned house near a toxic waste dump amid unutterable squalor. They don't seem to change clothes. The narrator shows up for work at his office with his own blood on his shirt.
They don't bathe. Brad Pitt shuffles around in a filthy bathrobe wearing a pair of lady's slippers with clotted fur around the tops, as Doris Day might appear during a trip on battery acid. It isn't that I find such voluntarism necessarily bad. I'm sitting here writing this, wearing only a sarong and a pair of eyeglasses in the middle of the desert.
But doesn't bodily filth reach a point at which it becomes intolerable to the self, never mind the person you're trying to sell your homemade soap to? Mostly, though, what a beastly message.
If you want to swagger around, a member of a cult, dealing out summary punishment to those whose values aren't your own, why not join Blackwater or some other mercenary group and at least get paid more than one thousand dollars a day. Or if you really want to get in your face with respect to bourgeois verities, give away everything you have and serve soup to the homeless at St.
Anthony's Dining Room. Or vote Libertarian? Or become a Theravada Buddhist monk, earning merit and living on alms? I guess, though, that nothing like that is going to get your testosterone pumping and that's what concerns this movie. Know when blood testosterone levels peak in men? During late adolescence, when our fantasies are even more limited than our brain power.
After whinging to his doctor about his insomnia, a frustrated office worker Edward Norton, whose character is simply called The Narrator is advised to attend a support group for testicular cancer to see what real suffering is like; there, he experiences an emotional release that finally allows him to get some much needed shut-eye.
Consequently, The Narrator becomes addicted to support groups, feigning illness to attend, but the appearance of another such 'tourist', Marla Singer Helena Bonham Carter , makes him feel awkward about his dishonesty, and he once again struggles to sleep.
While flying home from a business trip, The Narrator strikes up a conversation with travelling soap salesman Tyler Durden Brad Pitt. The pair part company at the airport, but when The Narrator discovers that his apartment has been blown up in a freak accident, he calls the number on Durden's business card. The guys meet up and strike up an unlikely friendship which sees The Narrator discovering another solution to his sleep issues: bare knuckle bouts with Durden.
Eventually, other guys looking for a release from their mundane existences join in the fun, and Fight Club is born. I loved the dark humour and the brutality of the fight scenes although cannot accept for one minute that men would line up to be beaten to a pulp , but I hated director David Fincher's showy approach to the rest of the film, which is over-reliant on slick CGI trickery that actually looks very dated by today's standards.
I hated the silly twist that could be seen a mile away, but was amused by the subliminal image that appears seconds before the end, and enjoyed hearing The Pixies over the closing credits. The film is tough and unyielding in its machismo, and although it is occasionally off-putting, I was never bored watching it.
The acting, by Brad Pitt and Edward Norton in particular, is quite good; the two stars have obviously been put through the wringer in their roles, and director David Fincher keeps cranking up the tension and puts us through the wringer as well.
But I felt the filmmakers slipped at the final gate, wherein the script concocts a major plot-twist that just doesn't jell, leading everyone to look a little foolish. TxMike 11 August For the first 1 hour and 51 minutes I found this movie very difficult to watch or enjoy. I kept wondering why Ed Norton's character continued to put up with Brad Pitt's out-of-control character.
To me the movie seemed to be one big mess. However, my patience, and trust in the director, paid off and I had to watch much of the movie twice to really appreciate how good it is.
I rate it 9 of 10 and predict it will be one of those ground-breaking films that viewers and critics refer to for years, much like "The Matrix" and "The Sixth Sense.
This film is definitely meant to be a funny and absurd take on life, but with a very dark tone to it. It isn't really about "fight clubs", although the fighting is presented as an avenue for characters to deal with their inner conflicts. It is not intended to represent reality, nor to suggest that fighting is good. It's closest prior film is perhaps "Doctor Strangelove. The sound is perhaps the best I've heard so far. There are several crashes and explosions throughout the movie and the realism is just so good it made me cringe.
But you have to have a good subwoofer to enjoy it all. However, I think most people will enjoy the movie more, on first viewing, if they understand the total concept. So here it is. Norton plays the "narrator", and in the introductory scenes we find out he has a conventional existence, a traveling job as a "recall coordinator" for a major automobile manufacturer. But, deep in his subconscious he hates what he is becoming, and if he were to die now his life will have been meaningless.
Brad Pitt's character, Tyler Durden, is Norton's alter-ego. They are one and the same person. In opening scenes you see various single-frame flashes stop-action on DVD helps see this clearly of Pitt's 'Tyler', we assume still in Norton's subconscious as he first begins to realize he hates his existence.
Then, on a buisness flight, while talking to the lady seated next to him, Norton thinks "I pray for a crash or midair collision", which is quickly followed by a highly realistic "dream collision", then Pitt's Tyler Durden the rest of the trip is actually sitting next to Norton, conversing with him.
This "prayer for a crash" is the consciousness that first makes Pitt's Tyler totally real to Norton. The rest of the movie has many scenes with both Norton and Tyler but, we see later, no one else ever sees Brad Pitt's "Tyler", they only see Norton as "Tyler. You could not do this on your own.
All the ways you wish you could be - that's me. I look like you want to look Little by little you're letting yourself become - Tyler Durden.
One line by Norton, "This kid from work, Ricky, couldn't remember if you ordered pens with blue ink or black. But Ricky was a 'god' for 10 minutes when he trounced the maitre d' of the local food court", explains the gist of why they fight. It symbolizes the one area where they are in complete control of their pleasure and pain. That last comment, "maitre d' of the local food court" illustrates the comedic approach to much of the movie.
Who ever heard of a food court having a maitre d'? How much lower in the food chain could you get? Or Ricky supplying ink pens at work? One of the fight club "assignments", to pick a fight with a stranger, then lose", has a number of very funny sequences in it. The movie turns very dark when the fight club kicks itself "up a notch" and begins to plot the destruction of all major buildings housing credit card companies.
The rationale - destroy them and all their records of debt, and everyone can start again at ground zero. When Norton's Tyler finally at 1 hour 52 minutes into the film finally figures out what he had done, he tries unsuccessfully to twarth the plan. The final scene shows him and his girlfriend standing before a window in a high-rise, and sequentially all bombs go off and the buildings crash into various piles of rubble.
Reminiscent of the final scene of "Doctor Strangelove", where all the nuclear bombs are going off, destroying the world. The closing line, Norton says, "Everything will be alright.
You met me at a really strange time in my life. The genius of this film, if there is any, resides in the premise that the two main characters represent the two extremes of the same person, and in the end the "real" Tyler Durden meets them in the middle. Once you know this premise, and can watch the whole movie in this context, I found it much more enjoyable, made much more sense, and every scene with both Tylers is done completely in character with the premise.
The DVD also has a second DVD which is devoted to extras which are in themselves very interesting if you like to study the art of film-making. However, plan to spend a minimum of 5 hours total in viewing and studying this film to get its full impact.
What's fascinating in David Fincher's work,is that it seems we deal with an auteur. He created his own universe,a nocturnal and filthy one,and a bit misogynous too:it's glaring in this movie;outside Bonham-Carter-made look ugly and dressed as a punk-,only a black woman has a line to say.
Almost everywhere,it is a man's man's world where no women appear even in the settings. This movie was influenced by famous and not-so-famous predecessors:of course "Dr Jekill and Mister Hide" to which Bonham Carter hints at in the restaurant,"a clockwork orange" ,"rebel without a cause" "bad influence" and Joel Schumacher's "falling down",the latter seems with hindsight to have been overlooked and underrated.
So why does this movie seem so original? Norton more than Pitt who had already overshadowed R. Gere in "primal fear". Here he plays a very strange kind of peeping tom:watching mental suffering therapy groups ,dealing almost essentially with male problems ,then physical sufferings,eventually enduring them. Does he do that as he would opt for yoga,Buddhism or psychotherapy,to escape from a routine work? To get free from the material world? As Pitt says "the things you At first,he may be, when he's only a simple spectator-and the scenes in the restaurant and in the projection room are peaks of black humor-,but,he's potentially a Stevensonian hero.
Of course I won't reveal it,but I think it's the biggest flaw of the movie. Unlike the three mentioned works,this does not seem logical,because of the lack of "clues":the only one ,regarding Bonham-Carter, is not really convincing. The last picture seems now terrifying. If jumping from one movie to another were possible, he would be a great candidate for Project Mayhem.
The bandmates Julien Ehrlich and Max Kakacek discuss how to make music that transcends the Spotify playlists that dictate how people discover them. By Peter C. Immersing yourself in silent films offers another level of imagination and escape, one of the few remaining silent-film accompanists says. Peter C. Baker is a writer based in Evanston, Illinois. The New Yorker Recommends What our staff is reading, watching, and listening to each week.
Enter your e-mail address. It shows the bipolar nature of the male psyche, being torn between the sensitive, fashionable and demure qualities of the Narrator, and the macho, impulsive Tyler Durden.
It nourishes our desire to break things, create havoc and revolt against perceived oppression. Yes, there's a mysoginist tone to Tyler, but like violence, moral apprehension against an idea doesn't mean it ceases to exist.
The brain of man is a complicated, messy tangle, and "Fight Club" reflects it. So sayeth Tyler: "All the ways you wish you could be, that's me. I look like you wanna look, I bleep like you wanna bleep , I am smart, capable, and most importantly, I am free in all the ways that you are not. It's smart. It's dumb. It's funny. Project Mayhem sets its sights on destruction. The movie is rife with Easter eggs, including cigarette burns and sudden phallic flashes that are often too quick to see.
Fincher watched UFC fights to study the blood and the movement of broken bodies. Norton and Pitt took tae kwon do—and they really learned to make soap. Cinematographers played up the grit with cheap lighting. Designers created sets with holes, smoke, and leaks, making the grungy, dripping, shadowy, disgusting places that seem like the grossest parts of our own subconscious rendered on the screen.
Combined with the fractured cinematic techniques, the flashbacks, spliced-in images and imagined scenes, the film feels like a slow descent into madness, a fever dream with Durden at the wheel. For a rallying cry against capitalism, Fight Club had appropriately humble beginnings.
Chuck Palahniuk wrote the novel in snippets while on the job at a truck manufacturer. The meager first printing sold just under 5, copies. Fight Club was a flop at the box office.
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