I watched Fight Club this weekend. The West Lafayette school district sent email to parents that kids are starting up fight clubs around town. I had heard lots of good buzz about Fight Club over the years, but never got to watching it. It was an outstanding movie. I read it as the protagonist becoming enlightened through study and practice of the Dharma. It had a bit of of a Zen sense, in terms of Tyler’s nihilism. Turns out I wasn’t too far off the mark, based on re-watching it with the commentary from the directory and Brad Pitt and Edward Norton.
It was really well shot and the script, dialog and acting were outstanding. You could just tell that everyone was doing more than cashing checks in this movie. And Tyler reminded me of Scott Crabtree, my roommate freshman year.
Some of the other movies on my favorites list:
- The Matrix (only the first one). I enjoyed the explicit sense of a meta-reality. Too bad they never took it further to a meta-meta reality, even converging on Godel’s Incompleteness theorem.
- Moulin Rouge! I hated this movie the first hour or so of it. If I wasn’t sick as a dog while watching, I would have turned it off. But then something clicked, and I saw a gorgeous, stylized love story.
- Memento (perhaps my all-time favorite). This movie made me realize that we really have no idea what we know. Memory is so tenuous, that being here now is about all there is.
I tend to like quirky movies that at least give some sort of nod to deeper philosophical and religious issues. I also didn’t like Fight Club so much initially. I found it hard to identify with the narrator as a real yuppie. And I was starting to get into this “people would never really punch the shit out of each other for fun.” I let go of these reservations and was glad to have done so. This movie actually had a lot to say.
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