Word: clubbing
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...opening of Fight Club makes it clear that the movie's a satire. It's supposed to be a biting mockery of yuppie angst. When Norton starts attending testicular cancer and TB support groups to release his anger and built-up anxiety, we laugh (albeit uncomfortably, but we laugh). When he meets Marla Singer (Helena Bonham Carter), a fellow support group squatter, and they divide group therapy sessions between them, we laugh. But when blood starts flying, Norton starts crying, and buildings start frying, we stop laughing. (It almost reminded me of Showgirls, the way the movie just loses...
...problem, unfortunately, is that Fincher completely underestimates Edward Norton as an actor. If Fight Club is to be a successful satire, the audience can't fall in love with Norton's narrator. We shouldn't see him as the righteous crusader, the man who can do no wrong. Because when we take every punch Norton takes, we lose our sense of detachment. We lose that ironic distance--the distance that makes a movie like American Beauty such a compelling psychological portrait. There's no seeing the forest from the trees here because of Norton's intensity and ability to elicit...
...Tyler Durden and we care far too much about Norton's narrator. But here's the only recourse. I hope David Fincher sits in a crowded movie theater a few times over the next couple weeks to watch audience reaction to his film. Maybe he'll realize that Fight Club isn't as "funny" as he thinks it is. Maybe he'll realize that biting satire often blurs into the irresponsible. Maybe he'll realize he took the "traumatized male" theme one step too far. Or maybe he's still mesmerized by the sheer brutality of it all--the glistening...
...first glance, Johnny D's Uptown Restaurant & Music Club might be aptly dubbed a modern-day Globe theater. The privileged sit in posh faux-leather booths dining on Cajun delicacies while the rest are left standing like corralled groundlings demarcated by signs that separate the standing from the sitting (so that the seated "patricians" are able to see without over-zealous standers-by encroaching on their line-of-sight). Or perhaps it is only when the guitarist Bill Frisell is playing that this cozy Davis Square establishment deserves such a comparison--the manager assures me that the place is usually...
...genre in Hollywood that is threatening to flood out the competition from the tide of teen comedies: yuppie angst. Friday night at your local theater means choosing between American Beauty-in which a quiet suburb of yuppies cracks under the vacuousness of their up-and-coming lifestyle-and Fight Club, where nameless corporate yupster Ed Norton finds the only way to reclaim his micromanaged and overworked sense of self is to beat the living daylights out of other...