Word: fincher
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...Director David Fincher has a wicked sense of humor. "A David Fincher film" deliberately takes one character on a (unnecessary?) roller-coaster and then leaves them strandedto deal with the traumatic aftermath. In Seven, Brad Pitt undergoes torture after torture and finally ends up on a desert road with his wife's head in a box. Pitt's detective had everything stacked so high against them that Fincher gleefully waits until 10 minutes before the movie ends to let everything collapse upon his hero.It's a sadistically amusing abuse of power. The Game is even better. This time...
...Fight Club is supposed to be "A David Fincher film". In an interview last week, he decried all the supposed motives and themes and controversy plaguing Fight Club and blurted out, "I just wanted to make a good, funny movie." The reporter flinched and Fincher noticed. "What? You didn't think it was funny...
...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...
...Perhaps if Pitt and Norton had switched parts, it might have worked. After all, we don't feel anything for 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...
...also puts viewers in touch with director David Fincher's preferred mise-en-scene, which is almost always dark and, more important, damp--with rusty water, gushing blood and other bodily fluids of less determinable origins. It's definitely a style--see his Seven of a few years ago--and it enforces the contrast between the sterilities of his characters' aboveground life and their underground one. Water, even when it's polluted, is the source of life; blood, even when it's carelessly spilled, is the symbol of life being fully lived. To put his point simply: it's better...