 Which of the following terms DOES NOT describe the reviewer's tone toward the director and screenwriter of "Fight Club"?
Boys Do Bleed Fight Club is silly stuff, sensationalism that mistakes itself for satire, but it's also a brash and transporting piece of moviemaking, like Raging Bull on acid. 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. 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. Jack and Bob subscribe to a new form of male bonding: They cling to each other and sob. When Jack's apartment mysteriously explodes--along with his carefully chosen IKEA furniture--he moves into Tyler's squalid warehouse and helps to found a new religion: Fight Club, in which young males gather after hours in the basement of a nightclub to pound one another (and be pounded) to a bloody pulp. "Self-improvement," explains Tyler, "is masturbation"; self-destruction is the new way. 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. 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?
 confused
 confused  critical  unimpressed  condescending