More Unpopular Movie Opinions

[chonies]

Ahhh...thanks, bstewart. Unfortunately, the people around me at the time who thought it was the Best Movie Ever are the ones who identified with Tyler Durden. "Dude, you shop at IKEA and Starbucks," and used the word "sheeple" rather freely. The conforming non-conformists, if you will. I thought I was missing something. Is the movie more profound (for lack of a better word) if one reads the book, too?

It's unlikely I'll watch it again, but your analysis gave me something to think about.

[Deleted]

In his commentary to the movie (with screenwriter Jim Uhls), Palahniuk praises the film for emphasizing resonances not explored nearly enough in the book. As with "Tattoo", I think Fincher made the best possible movie from the material, but the book's a fast read if you're interested. The narrator and Tyler Durden meet on a nude beach in the book, not on the plane, which is pretty dang heavy-handed right there. But I don't mind art using a sledgehammer to break apart the reinforced concrete that is blind devotion to dogmatic causes.

I don't think the film could be profound, though. It doesn't say much more than "we're all seriously fucked and any attempt to unfuck things only makes it worse" but I do think listening to the various commentaries reveal how very successfully everyone involved accomplished what they set out to do.

[Hamatron]

Changed ending aside, it's probably the closet book-to-movie interpretation I have ever seen. At least, that's what I remember thinking when I saw it in the theater.

And I agree, bstewart. It's by no means a "deep" movie, which some dudes tend to think it is (when I ask them to elaborate, they can never go further than "consumerism sucks, yo. Be counterculturrrr!!11!!"). But I remember enjoying it and thinking it was fine for what it was.

Also, it got horrible reviews and bombed big time at the box office. In fact, I think the CEO at the company that put out the movie stepped down after it failed so miserably.

[Deleted]

Jan 15, 2012 16:37:03 GMT -4 @bstewart said:

The idiots who identify with the narrator or Tyler Durden have missed the point of the book and are mocked in the movie. As a cultural artifact it's unique in that it's been embraced by the very people it eviscerates.

I think the movie's two leads are a huge reason that point is missed. You've got Brad Pitt at his hunkiest and Edward Norton at his all-Americanest, the two whitest white guys ever both looking ripped and tough and macho, doing macho things and bringin' down the man, bro. With big explosions! It's a dude-fest and no amount of cultural critique can break through 50 years of antihero programming. Theaters full of young white guys are going to look at that movie and identify with the young white guys they've been trained to identify with. In the book, where the reader's not seeing the characters, the subtleties might come through but onscreen, visuals trump all.

[hamhock]

I like the movie but I LOVE the soundtrack.

[Deleted]

dguzpy, your analysis of how and why the Dude Army reacted to the movie is spot-on. And I don't argue that the casting and performance choices weren't tailored to elicit that response. But wasn't that entirely the point, that the need for Meaning in Young White Male Life leads inevitably to a spectacularly wrong-headed interpretation of why Narrator/Durden were beating themselves up, until they were chanting "his name is Robert Paulson" not as a understood reality but as a religiously fascist football pep-rally? We see it on the screen and we see Norton's dismay at how his cathartic punch-up with Pitt evolved into meaningless sloganeering. I think you'd have to be spectacularly stupid to embrace that which is mocked so obviously by the film.

And, yeah, I sorta just admitted that the majority of young white male moviegoers is spectacularly stupid. I mean, the majority of *people* are spectacularly stupid, but the young white dudes seem particularly intent on advertising that fact.

[thneed]

But what I don't get about Fight Club is there are tons of movies and books and so forth where pretty white people go one at length at how stupid the masses are for eating at Olive Garden and having a 9-5 office job. What about Fight Club makes it, rather than American Beauty or Wanted or Ayn Rand's books, or books by Dom DeLillo or Tom Wolfe or Catcher in the Rye, or or or.

There are MANY MANY artistic works with this theme. Fight Club is one of the worst ones. Why does a certain type of person (the same type that uses the term "sheeple" without irony) drawn to it, specifically? It it because it's part action movie? Because you don't catch all the little "Tyler is the narrator" parts the first time you see it so you feel it's a smart movie?

I remember a discussion somewhere about how FC appeals to that type of man more than that type of women. Why? Lost of women work in office jobs.

[Deleted]

I'm always at a loss to understand why stupid people are stupid, so I don't really have a good answer on that one. But I think part of the problem was that the media trumpeted FC as an expression of millennial zeitgeist and not a criticism of it. I got it when I watched it and it's certainly hammered home in the commentaries.

ETA: I was trying to think of a similarly, wildly-misunderstood film and followed a link at Gawker (a Marky Mark post) to a clip of the curbing scene from "American History X". And accidentally read the comments, missing the film's point so completely it might as well have been a football game. People aren't just stupid, they're evil-stupid.

[Deleted]

Jan 18, 2012 17:08:24 GMT -4 thneed said:

There are MANY MANY artistic works with this theme. Fight Club is one of the worst ones. Why does a certain type of person (the same type that uses the term "sheeple" without irony) drawn to it, specifically? It it because it's part action movie?

Yes. Dudebros can watch it without their friends thinking they're... you know... that way.

Jan 18, 2012 17:08:24 GMT -4 thneed said:

Because you don't catch all the little "Tyler is the narrator" parts the first time you see it so you feel it's a smart movie?

Yes, again. Dude! There's a twist ending! Did you see that coming?! I totally didn't see that coming! Duuuude!

My friend teaches screenwriting at a college and he's banned twist endings in his class assignments. His students think their crap magically becomes smart and Oscar-worthy if, after 90 pages, the Queen of England is revealed to be a Nazi cyborg from the future. You totally didn't see that coming!

[Hamatron]

Hah! I can so see a college student patting themselves on the back for coming up with a twist ending. But in terms of actual scripts that make it to the screen, it seems like they were a trend for a bit, thanks to M. Knight Shyamalan (and The Usual Suspects and Fight Club) having a moment and all, but are now passe.