Thursday, April 17, 2008

Fight Club (1999)

How do I feel about this movie? I love it. Just to prove I'm not dumb I'll note right now that the movie's premise is absurd: it's about a bunch of guys so totally anti-corporate and primal that they want to...look like Brad Pitt! And impress chicks with how good they are in bed! How very punk rock. If you let go of that, though, there is a lot of fun to be had and mostly it's because Brad Pitt never, ever, looked cooler. Right there at the center of a movie all about rejecting consumerism and destroying its major outposts is Pitt, whose major effect on everyone I know who saw the movie was to make them want to hit the gym and go shopping. Whoever did his costumes should have gotten an award. Ed Norton is also, as always, I'm coming to think, a joy to watch. But the real thing is David Fincher, a man with all kinds of visual ideas (and an abiding love of filth and rot) and the smarts to use them well and understand actors at the same time. I'm the only person I know who saw, and liked, "The Game," so deep was my Fincher loyalty at one point. Seeing this movie again reminds me why.

Incidentally, it's also fun to see it knowing the plot twist in advance. I wish I could report that I saw that twist coming a mile away the first time around, but I didn't at all. I never do. I think the only plot twist I ever predicted was in that M. Night Shamalyan movie about the people in the forest surrounded by monsters.

2 comments:

Naunihal said...

Did you read the book too?

avb said...

Incidentally, am reading this book right now.