Friday 12 November 2004

Fight Club (1999) - ickleReview (DVD)

The first rule of Fight Club is: You do not talk about Fight Club.
The second rule of Right Club is: You do not talk about Fight Club.
The third rule of Fight Club is: You do not quote these lines.

(I'm sure those rules were created just to make the trailers sound cool; or to prevent spoilers. Hence, I won't talk about Fight Club and ruin the plot.)

It's a while since I've seen this. Movies like this (and Memento, The Usual Suspects, The Shawshank Redeption, The Sixth Sense) lose their impact on a second viewing. But it's still a stylish and well made film; and Brad Pitt is on form, even if he doesn't have to do much because his character is so cool already.

Edward Norton plays an office bum (like Neo in The Matrix, except not as gay) who is bullied by his boss, unhappy and insomniac. He goes to group therapy for testicular cancer so he can cry on Meat Loaf's bitch tits (contrary to reports, he was not wearing a fat suit: those were real). The plot has the appearance of being all joined up: "It all started when I met a girl called Marla Singer..."; but it's more like a blind person is playing dot-to-dot on a bumpy bus ride.

The best parts of this film are the little things: like the airline safety card that shows the passengers' true emotions during a sea-landing (panic); the line about making expensive soap from liposuction fat: "It was beautiful. We were selling rich women their own fat asses back to them"; or the bit when Norton says if he could fight any historic figure, he's fight Gandhi. On the whole, there's some great writing (most of it, I suspect, in Chuck Palahniuk's novel), like when a cancer patient gets up to talk about her experiences: "Chloe looked the way Meryl Streep's skeleton would look if you made it smile and walk around the party being extra nice to everybody."

Nugget: The fourth rule of Fight Club is: Shut up already!

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