1999 movie Rating: 18/20
Plot: An office worker befriends a soap maker on an airplane. Love triangles and fisticuffs ensue. They form the titular club, something that I’m probably not even supposed to be typing about. It’s all fun and games until somebody suggests blowing stuff up, and a guy with man tits gets a hole in his head.
Oh, man. This one’s so dense! Dense and endlessly entertaining, a film with the substance to match its bombastic style, one that just shimmers. I remember watching this for the first time back when I lived in a yellow house. It shook me, and I thought about the movie for days and days.
I even lost sleep because of the movie. Of course, it did completely ruin Chuck Palahniuk’s novels for me because they suddenly all had the same exact narrator—Edward Norton. Ah, Edward Norton. I don’t know if I want to even like you since my wife’s got a thing for you, but you’re just so good in every movie you’re in. And anytime an actor can make me not hate narration, that’s a plus. The way he screams, “The first person to come out of this fucking door gets a lead salad, you understand?” or explains that “This chick Marla Singer did not have testicular cancer” and was a liar The way he catches a giant bag of liposuctioned fat The way he stares at a CGI penguin But mostly that fight he has with himself in his boss’s office? That scene is off the hook (as the kids would say). And Brad Pitt is just electric, always about a scream and a point-at-his-own-head away from transforming right into Nicolas Cage right on the screen.
The performance is so good that you just can’t imagine anybody else rocking that ironic (iconic?) bathrobe or swinging those nunchucks. Both performances bring out the subtle and not-subtle dark comedy in this story. And the movie is very funny. Just listen to Helena Bonham Carter (she’s about perfect, too, and very sexy in kind of a filthy way) and Pitt’s orgasmic outbursts, or better yet, just try to figure out what’s going on when Norton interrupts a love-making session of theirs and Pitt comes out of the room with giant rubber gloves. A personal favorite bit of comedy is the look the woman at the thrift store gives when Norton announces, “I want bowel cancer.” And meat loaf is in this! With tits! Tom Waits also gets a song in there, the delirious “Goin’ Out West,” and did I hear it incorrectly or was there a Wilhelm during the plane crash fantasy? Fight Club is a movie that begs you to watch it again and again, one of those in which you might pick up a little something new during subsequent viewings.
Did I notice the Tyler glitchiness the first time? That first non-glitchy shot of Tyler at the airport—what a line there! This is a movie about the balance between accepting life as it is and complete nihilism, about people—especially men—actually feeling something. You know, like a punch to the nose.