Monday, July 26, 2010

Fight Club Was The Best Movie Of The Nineties

By Kathy Hendrix

If you haven't seen it yet, Fight Club was, in fact, one of the most culturally and artistically important films of the last ten or twenty years. Just as movies like Pulp Fiction and Goodfellas started the decade off with a bang, Fight Club finished it off with an even bigger one. It's definitely one of the must download movies of the last thirty years or so.

The story follows an unnamed narrator portrayed by Ed Norton. There's a lot of "Office Space" type humor as he disparages his corporate white collar job, but there's an ugliness to it here, a darkness not present in Office Space. The movie is very deep and brooding and twisted, while at the same time sarcastic and nonchalant about the whole thing.

The narrator meets Tyler Durden, and the rest is history. Durden is a character who is completely free of the boundaries of society placed on most people. You know Kramer, from Seinfeld? He's kind of like that. Just, imagine how dangerous, frightening, and at the same time, inspiring, Kramer would be if you took him out of the sitcom setting and put him into a world where his actions could result in serious consequences.

Tyler Durden is really the heart of the film in.. Many more ways than one. He and the narrator together found the Fight Club, which begins as simply a place where lonely white collar men can fight so as to reaffirm their manhood, but soon grows into something deeper, more frightening, and which has a much greater impact in the grand scheme of things.

The way it grows is fascinating to watch. You can see that, while some parts of the film are outlandish, the suggestion that this sort of a concept would catch on is probably entirely believable and plausible. It hasn't yet, but the impotent rage hiding in many men still has the potential to become potent. It's frightening to think about, but sooner or later, something's got to give.

The way it ties everything up is fascinating and was, at the time, an incredible and unpredictable plot twist. Since, it's become sort of cliche. This movie and the Sixth Sense both created their own style of "surprise endings", and created trends that would eventually get a little tired but which, at the time, were exciting and interesting.

In the years since Fight Club, Ed Norton has become... Well he can be predictable. You always know exactly how he's going to act from minute to minute. Interestingly, it's Brad Pitt here who gives one of the best performances, and who would then go on to top it, over and over again, throughout the next several movies of his career. He tops this role in the Coen Brother's Burn After Reading, and again in Tarantino's Inglourious Basterds. However, this role, and 12 Monkeys, were probably the two that really showed that he was a real actor, and not just a pretty boy.

The movie is violent and surreal, and winds up making an interesting statement on what it really means to be a man in the modern world. Many viewers misunderstand what the movie is really about in that... Well, it doesn't provide answers, as many fans think. It only provides the questions.

About the Author:

No comments:

Post a Comment