Fight Club

[Maithanet]

6 minutes ago, Gaston de Foix said:

Good point.  But doesn't Tyler (in his Brad Pitt avatar) also have a bunch of low paying jobs? He's selling soap, peeing in soups etc.  Aren't there three pysches at play?

there's Tyler as he was before these personalities split off.  

I thought there was a different fight club member who actually worked at that restaurant, and Tyler was just being Tyler peeing in the soup.

Tyler's soap business presumably started while Narrator was unaware, but it's not like that would require a ton of time.  He would just need to charm the sellers at high end stores that his soap was the best, and given how charismatic Tyler is capable of being, that seems quite doable. 

EDIT: I see your edit.  I guess you could look at Narrator pre-Tyler as one person and Narrator post-Tyler as another.  But Narrator post-Tyler isn't aware of any change at the time, so to me it's just Narrator all the way down. 

[Wilbur]

If you enjoyed Fight Club, a couple of other contemporaneous movies that have similarly challenging premises or psychological puzzles include Memento and Se7en.

[Gaston de Foix]

21 minutes ago, Wilbur said:

If you enjoyed Fight Club, a couple of other contemporaneous movies that have similarly challenging premises or psychological puzzles include Memento and Se7en.

After the SW Holiday special, mate.  Will try to watch that in the next few days. 

My theory is that movies that have twists in storytelling (as Fight Club does) make for good live-blogging because you guys get to see me blunder around formulating and discarding theories.  

[Kalbear]

2 hours ago, Gaston de Foix said:

Good point.  But doesn't Tyler (in his Brad Pitt avatar) also have a bunch of low paying jobs? He's selling soap, peeing in soups etc. 

I would suggest there are three pysches at play: there's Tyler as he was before these personalities split off.  There's Tyler in his Brad Pitt avatar. And there's the Narrator. Doesn't  it make sense to analyze them separately?

He's doing the bare minimum to get by. And mocking it and fucking with it endlessly. It's in contrast to the narrator's idea of his perfect Ikea nesting lifestyle. And as soon as he can - as soon as Project Mayhem is done - he knocks that off completely, because he's doing what is actually valuable to him. 

[Kalbear]

28 minutes ago, Gaston de Foix said:

After the SW Holiday special, mate.  Will try to watch that in the next few days. 

My theory is that movies that have twists in storytelling (as Fight Club does) make for good live-blogging because you guys get to see me blunder around formulating and discarding theories.  

It does! And Memento is both very similar in style and very similar in twistiness. I think, honestly, it's the best of Nolan's movies.

Fight Club is a masterpiece in misaimed fandom. The biggest flaw of the movie is that it makes what Tyler is doing so incredibly sexy and cool instead of the pathetic loserness that the book went to. That it makes authoritarian nihilism popular and sexy is both a major win and a major fail of the movie. But it put a massive, happy pin on the idea that modern men are simply not getting what they need from the world. That the only way that they can feel things and be with other people emotionally is with faking terminal diseases, or literally beating themselves up, or causing massive destruction. 

But most people were all 'woo let's go punch someone' including me, because that was at least something we could do right now, and it was socially acceptable. 

[DMC]

9 minutes ago, Kalbear said:

The biggest flaw of the movie is that it makes what Tyler is doing so incredibly sexy and cool instead of the pathetic loserness that the book went to.

Obviously not going for the latter when you cast late 90s Brad Pitt.

[Kalbear]

1 minute ago, DMC said:

Obviously not going for the latter when you cast late 90s Brad Pitt.

And Ed Norton, honestly. And the Dust Brothers, and really David Fincher, who can't make things not look super fucking cool. 

[Soylent Brown]

24 minutes ago, Kalbear said:

It does! And Memento is both very similar in style and very similar in twistiness. I think, honestly, it's the best of Nolan's movies.

Such a good film, and the DVD had an Easter Egg where if you pressed a button at the right time in the menu you could watch the film *special style*, which I thought still worked really well.

[Kalbear]

memento is also possibly the most Nolan movie. once you see it, you'll see how it influences and drives basically every single movie he's ever made. 

[Vaughn]

but is Memento the best Guy Pearce movie and why is it either 'LA Confidential' or 'Priscilla Queen of the Desert'?

I don't fault people for getting paid to do movies but I would love to see Pearce in more, better movies and less like that Prison Break: Space Station movie and 'Bloodshot'. Definitely from the Michael Caine, not the Day-Lewis, school of acting.

The summary of 'Fight Club' given by Kalibear is spot on. 'Fight Club' bro-fandom is a bit like the Punisher logo being adopted by people who don't understand the source material.

[DMC]

20 minutes ago, Vaughn said:

The summary of 'Fight Club' given by Kalibear

I am totally calling him Kalibear from now on.

[Soylent Brown]

Stuff his films, for real fans of Guy Pearce, I would definitely recommend watching all 349 of the episodes of Neighbours he was in.

[Kalbear]

43 minutes ago, DMC said:

I am totally calling him Kalibear from now on.

what do you mean?

[Ramsay B.]

1 hour ago, Vaughn said:

but is Memento the best Guy Pearce movie and why is it either 'LA Confidential' or 'Priscilla Queen of the Desert'?

I don't fault people for getting paid to do movies but I would love to see Pearce in more, better movies and less like that Prison Break: Space Station movie and 'Bloodshot'. Definitely from the Michael Caine, not the Day-Lewis, school of acting.

I’ve always thought he deserved way better, especially lately. He’s in 2 of my favorite movies ever- The Proposition and Animal Kingdom, and was great in both. 

[Wilbur]

4 hours ago, Gaston de Foix said:

After the SW Holiday special, mate.  Will try to watch that in the next few days. 

My theory is that movies that have twists in storytelling (as Fight Club does) make for good live-blogging because you guys get to see me blunder around formulating and discarding theories.  

I am not demanding that you live-blog everything for our entertainment.  Your efforts have a real touch of humor and class that make for great reading, and the Star Wars Holiday Special is going to be something else, but I just suggest those other films as something you might like to watch someday if Fight Club was to your taste.

Your live blog of the Star Wars Holiday Special, though, wow.  I am keenly interested in your thoughts and emotional impressions on that one.  And as you watch it, just imagine those of us children who were hungry for more Star Wars, sitting up past our bedtime to watch the Special in November of 1978.

May God have mercy on your soul.

[Gaston de Foix]

5 minutes ago, Wilbur said:

I am not demanding that you live-blog everything for our entertainment.  Your efforts have a real touch of humor and class that make for great reading, and the Star Wars Holiday Special is going to be something else, but I just suggest those other films as something you might like to watch someday if Fight Club was to your taste.

Your live blog of the Star Wars Holiday Special, though, wow.  I am keenly interested in your thoughts and emotional impressions on that one.  And as you watch it, just imagine those of us children who were hungry for more Star Wars, sitting up past our bedtime to watch the Special in November of 1978.

May God have mercy on your soul.

Fight Club was engrossing, but it was also somewhat depressing.  SW Holiday special will be fun, although that experience you speak of, staying up wanting more Star Wars, is not one I can access now.  The movies will never mean to me what they meant to you (or even my nephews who are 6 and 8 and are nuts about SW). 

But I'm happy I get to experience it vicariously through your eyes. 

And honestly live-blogging is good way for me to keep my (mild) ADHD at bay.  I struggle to sit through 2 hour movies otherwise.  Just because I've been feeling a little down I wouldn't mind doing a comedy first, and saving Memento for afterwards.  What's the funniest movie ever made, in your opinion?

[Gaston de Foix]

4 hours ago, Kalibear said:

It does! And Memento is both very similar in style and very similar in twistiness. I think, honestly, it's the best of Nolan's movies.

Better than the Dark Knight?

[Soylent Brown]

13 minutes ago, Gaston de Foix said:

And honestly live-blogging is good way for me to keep my (mild) ADHD at bay.  I struggle to sit through 2 hour movies otherwise.  Just because I've been feeling a little down I wouldn't mind doing a comedy first, and saving Memento for afterwards.  What's the funniest movie ever made, in your opinion?

I don't know about funniest ever made, but one film I keep going back to which always makes me laugh is Step Brothers.

[Kalbear]

1 hour ago, Gaston de Foix said:

Better than the Dark Knight?

I think it's a significantly better movie than the Dark Knight is, but it's also a significantly more Nolan movie. He's pretty restrained in the Batman movies - he has his swelling music, his slightly twisty bits, but there's very little ruminations on memory and the mind and what a person actually is, and what reality actually is. It's hard to explain, but when you see Memento you'll see how basically all of his other movies ever came about and why. 

[Nictarion]

2 hours ago, Ramsay B. said:

I’ve always thought he deserved way better, especially lately. He’s in 2 of my favorite movies ever- The Proposition and Animal Kingdom, and was great in both. 

He’s with Carice van Houten. He’s doing just fine in life.