Fight Club (film)

"Edward Norton: The reason Fight Club penetrated to a lot of people our age was that it grappled with that idea that there's this person that I am who's forced to move around in this neutered, contemporary world, but people don't know what I've got inside me. That sensation—not just in young men, but in people in general—or that idea of how to get your authentic self out there in the contemporary world. I think the reason that lodged with a lot of people was that people really do understand that sense that there's a schism inside them that they're aware of, that doesn't get expression. I feel that way. I think a lot of people our age feel that way. They feel more complex than the world allows them to be."

"Guaranteed: Fight Club will blow your skirt up. It's not just the rush of seeing Edward Norton, Brad Pitt and director David Fincher hit career peaks in a groundbreaking film. And it's not the sick kick of watching Gen X amateurs bare-knuckling each other in seedy basements; that'd get old fast. The film's bold, bruising humor leaves marks on a wide range of hot-button issues: It's about being young, male and powerless against the pacifying drug of consumerism. It's about solitude, despair and bottled-up rage. It's about how not to feel dead as Y2K approaches. It's about daring to imagine the disenfranchised reducing the world to rubble and starting over. For daring to imagine, Fight Club will take a few hits. Fincher's film of Chuck Palahniuk's 1996 novel – with a high-voltage script by newcomer Jim Uhls – is already being misinterpreted as an “apology for fascism.” One critic wondered whether Rupert Murdoch's Fox 2000, the company releasing Fight Club, “knew what it was doing” in spending $70 million on a movie that is “not only anti-capitalism but anti-society and, indeed, anti-God.” My take is that Fight Club is pro-thinking, no matter what deities are offended. Is that threatening? You bet. Norton catches lightning in a revelatory performance that keeps delivering miracles of character nuance. He may be the best actor of his generation. Watching Jack beat himself bloody in front of his boss is a high-wire act that belongs in a time capsule. And Pitt, in his riskiest role to date, uses his sexual swagger to subversive comic effect; he's freer, funnier and freakier than you've ever seen him. It's Tyler who shows Jack how to add nitric acid to soap and make nitro-glycerin. It's Tyler who turns fight clubs into militias and then bomb squads ready to blast the foundations of the planet's power base: banks and credit-card companies."

"We had some great choreographers on the fight scene once we got into the club itself," says Pitt, who plays Tyler Durden, a self-styled male-consciousness raiser. Newsweek's David Anson reviews Pitt's character as "a kind of Nietzschean Robin Hood, using violence to restore dignity to the benighted American male. "If Rudy Giuliani was upset by a little bit of elephant dung on a portrait of the Virgin Mary," writes critic Jason Kaufman for NY Rock, referring to the New York mayor's recent displeasure with the Brooklyn Museum of Art's "Sensation" exhibit, "'Fight Club' should give him a coronary on the spot." Anson, in his Newsweek review, says the film trades in homoerotic imagery without addressing it: "When the movie, after satirizing the gym-enhanced bodies of men in Gucci subway ads ("Self-improvement is masturbation," Tyler pronounces), cuts to the impeccably lean and cut body of its leading man, it is in the grips of a style-content contradiction that this slick denunciation of surface values battles throughout."

"How much can you know about yourself, if you've never been in a fight?"

"When you wake up in a different place at a different time, can you wake up as a different person?"

"Losing all hope is freedom"

"Mischief. Mayhem. Soap."

"It's only after we've lost everything that we are free to do anything."

"This is your life and it's ending one minute at a time."

"Fuck Martha Stewart ..its all going down"

"You're the all-singing, all-dancing crap of the world."

"Advertising has us chasing cars and clothes; working jobs we hate, so we can buy shit we don't need."

"Edward Norton - The Narrator"

"Brad Pitt - Tyler Durden"

"Helena Bonham Carter - Marla Singer"

"Meat Loaf - Robert Paulson"

"Jared Leto - Angel Face"

"Zach Grenier - Richard Chesler, The Narrator's boss"