 What is the author's least favorite film out of the four reviews?
The film opens with--literally--a surge of adrenalin, which travels through the bloodstream and into the brain of its protagonist, Jack (Edward Norton), who's viewed, as the camera pulls out of his insides, with a gun stuck in his mouth. He's going to tell you, breezily, and the director, David Fincher, is going to illustrate his narrative--violently. Fincher ( Seven , 1995; The Game , 1997) is out to bombard you with so much feverish imagery that you have no choice but to succumb to the movie's reeling, punch-drunk worldview. By the end, you might feel as if you, too, have a mouthful of blood. Fight Club careers from one resonant satirical idea to the next without quite deciding whether its characters are full of crap or are Gen X prophets. Tyler's manifesto calls for an end to consumerism ("Things you own end up owning you"), and since society is going down ("Martha Stewart is polishing brass on the Titanic "), the only creative outlet left is annihilation. Fincher and his screenwriter, Jim Uhls, seem to think they've broken new ground in Fight Club , that their metaphor for our discontents hits harder than anyone else's. Yes, the mixture of Johnny Rotten, Jake La Motta, and Jesus is unique; and the Faludi-esque emasculation themes are more explicit. But there's something deeply movie-ish about the whole conceit, as if the novelist and director were weaned on Martin Scorsese pictures and never stopped dreaming of recapturing that first masochistic rush. But onscreen, when Pitt announces to the assembled fighters that they are the "middle children of history" with "no purpose and no place"--emasculated on one hand by the lack of a unifying crisis (a world war or depression) and on the other by lack of material wealth as promised by television--he seems meant to be intoning gospel. "We are a generation of men raised by women," Tyler announces, and adds, "If our fathers bail, what does that tell you about God?" F ight Club could use a few different perspectives: a woman's, obviously, but also an African-American's--someone who'd have a different take on the "healing" properties of violence. Is it that he's a materialist or that the materials themselves (i.e., IKEA's lacquered particle boards) don't measure up to his fantasies of opulence?
 Happy Texas
 Fight Club  Boys Don't Cry  Mumford  Happy Texas