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Fight Club |
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In Fight Club young urban
professionals are just empty, white-collar
drones desperate to find meaning beyond
cubicle walls. One (Norton) embarks on a
deranged personal odyssey when he learns
he can get an adrenaline rush by engaging in
bare-knuckle brawls.
His mentor on this journey is Tyler
Durden (Pitt), a philosophizing psychopath
who denounces consumerism and
individualism in favor of pain. A rebel, he
splices pornographic images into family films,
urinates in people's food and sells soap
made in his kitchen from liposuctioned fat.
He's also a budding terrorist.
The friends start Fight Club, a secret
society of men who meet in the basement of a
bar and beat each other to a pulp. It is
described as a religious experience.
"Homework" includes picking fights with
strangers, vandalism, arson and leveling
high-rises. Norton plays Jekyll to Pitt's evil
Hyde. But in the end, we realize they're really
just two sides of the same person.
The film is visually intriguing, but
squanders any style points by fixating on
diseased material. For nearly two and a half
hours, Fight Club pummels audiences
with brutal violence. There's explicit, callous
sexuality. Nudity. Alcohol. Obscene language
(over 60 f-words). But the greatest threat to
young viewers may be its portrayal of
self-inflicted pain as a worthy high.
Teen idol Pitt fights, blows things up,
brands a man with acid and crashes into
another car ... for thrills. Even putting a gun in
one's mouth and pulling the trigger
adopts a glamorous veneer. This dangerous
Hollywood head trip could inspire similar
machismo among distraught males
convinced they have nothing to lose.
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