Posts Tagged ‘featured’
Shelf Life: Fight Club
Shelf Life: Fight Club
By all accounts, 1999 was one of the best years in film history, featuring an amazing glut of debuts and career-defining follow-ups from a rich and varied roster of directors who are steadily working some ten years later. For example American Beauty, which was also released in ’99, was one of the first films revisited in our “Shelf Life” series, and it seemed most likely to lose its luster, especially given its Oscar win and almost universal critical acclaim, but thankfully the film sustained most of its initial appeal and impact.
Fight Club, meanwhile, faced markedly more polarizing reactions from audiences and critics, although like Alan Ball’s film it captured a moment in the zeitgeist that made it important almost regardless of how good it was. Ten years later, Fox Home Entertainment just released the film on Blu-ray in a gorgeous new set, and after a decade of conspicuous consumption and ironic detachment, it’s time to see whether the weight of its message or meaning still holds relevance.
The Facts: Released on October 15, 1999, David Fincher‘s Fight Club is an adaptation of the Chuck Palahniuk novel of the same name, adapted by screenwriter Jim Uhls. Its incendiary deconstruction of contemporary culture and the narcotizing effects of consumerism, particularly on men, was met with mixed reactions: some hailed it as a brilliant social commentary, while others condemned it as empty provocation, or worse, irresponsible.
Regardless, the film eventually earned $100 million domestically against its $63 million budget (reportedly $17.5 million of which went to star Brad Pitt), and enjoys an 80 percent fresh rating on Rotten Tomatoes. It was nominated for only one Academy Award, for Sound Effects Editing, but it was also nominated for several awards by different critics groups including the Online Film Critics Society, and subsequently netted several awards for its DVD release, which featured several commentaries and featurettes exploring the world within the film.
What Still Works: While during its original release the film was deliberately, perhaps even conventionally reactionary (“f*ck Martha Stewart!”), it really serves as a powerful reminder that contemporary consumer culture is still designed to satisfy us in superficial ways and ultimately distract us from the human connections and more visceral accomplishments that prove more meaningful. Particularly with the benefit of hindsight, the film’s analysis of overmodulated consumption, broken down to the details and objects in our life that supposedly define us, is especially potent, and deserves to be revisited as a reminder to remain vigilant against that kind of complacency.
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Meanwhile, I think especially now the film escapes being mere provocation or dangerous advocacy because it ultimately acknowledges that these characters are trading one oppressive structure for another, and that even the intentional absence of order eventually creates its own organized sense of routine, if not full-fledged cultural mores (hence Project Mayhem, the “space monkeys”‘ blind devotion to their anarchic causes, etc).
In terms of the performances, Pitt and Edward Norton are both really terrific as, essentially, the same guy, albeit in different iterations of his self-confidence, much less self-awareness. Fincher, coming off of the menacing polish of The Game, finds a gorgeously gritty aesthetic that really brings the narrator’s oblivious self-examination to life, and creates a truly subversive and valuable portrait of what is essential schizophrenia, filtered through both movie-star sheen and the thematically-reinforced, exacting opposite of stardom’s supposed “importance” – namely, that all of that beauty and truth is as illusory as anything else.
What Doesn’t Work: Surprisingly little, although the unwieldy structure, oddball rhythms of the storytelling and its eventual descent into (self-) destruction seem more shocking in the context of real-life events like 9/11, not to mention our culture’s subsequent escape even further into conventional, comfortable forms of entertainment. There’s lingering resonance to the destruction of the banks at the end of the film, both in terms of domestic and international terrorism and the current state of our economic system, but it’s subjective whether that’s a virtue or a shortcoming for film, since it certainly isn’t the film’s fault.
Otherwise, there is a degree to which the idea of white guys bemoaning their pampered, IKEA-sustained existence feels, well, so 1999, and that their reaction feels like a more than slightly self-indulgent rebellion that people with constructive minds wouldn’t act out. But as a parable and a perhaps necessary reminder of the complacency and boring blandness that can come from a life lived within the lines – and in light of the fact it’s meant not to be taken literally - Fight Club still transcends such criticisms.
What’s The Verdict: Fight Club is a really terrific movie and I am genuinely relieved to say that it holds up beautifully for the most part. Not only was it the first movie that I bought on DVD, but it was an important one in my adult, intellectual maturation, particularly in discovering that as conceptually appealing as such reckless behavior might be, it ultimately serves as mush as a prison as any other philosophy or paradigm. I think I still prefer Fincher’s previous film, The Game, if only because it was just so shocking and cathartic when I first saw it, but Fight Club is a wake-up call and a punch in the gut that needs to still be felt.
Shelf Life: The Professional
Shelf Life: The Professional
This week, Sony Pictures Home Entertainment released Leon: The Professional on Blu-ray, and because I have the best job in the world, I got to watch it for this column. The truth is that this was a formative movie for me, not only augmenting my budding cinephilia in terms of attention to and interest in strongly visual filmmakers, but in understanding the technical and artistic value of widescreen cinema. Before the film was released on widescreen VHS and later, DVD, I watched the pan-and-scan version when it was first released on video and almost got sick from the cropping and scanning of director Luc Besson‘s balletic camerawork.
Thankfully, I never have to watch it via that sort of butchered presentation again, and even if you don’t think the movie is a masterpiece, at the very least, SPHE’s new Blu-ray offers a gorgeously rich transfer that fully celebrates Besson’s cinematography. But even though this is a film I’ve revisited several times since its original release in 1994, I was curious to see how well The Professional would hold up some 15 years later – which brings us to this week’s “Shelf Life.”
The Facts: Released on November 18, 1994, The Professional (as it was called in the U.S.) was Luc Besson’s Hollywood real Hollywood breakthrough after helming La Femme Nikita and the French films Subway and The Big Blue. Although it received zero nominations from stateside critics groups, the film was nominated for seven Cesars (the French Academy Awards), including best music, best actor for Jean Reno, best director for Besson, and best picture. Ultimately the film only grossed about $20 million domestically, but it still maintains a respectable 74% fresh at Rotten Tomatoes. And of course, it introduced the world to Natalie Portman, whose performance as Mathilda is still one of the best in her entire career.
What Still Works: The relationship between Reno’s Leon and Portman’s Mathilda cements the film’s more visceral elements and truly elevates what could have been standard-fare (or even superlative) action to something more substantial. Besson has always been more of an intuitive and emotional filmmaker than an intellectual one – the them of his follow-up, The Fifth Element, is unapologetically “love conquers evil” – but here he perfectly balances the sentimentality of their budding bond with the harsh and inescapable realities of what Leon does for a living.
Remarkably, however, Besson creates one really fascinating scenario after the next, not only as a set piece to thrill the pulse, but one after another that focuses and utilizes the little character details that are introduced throughout the film. For example, Leon’s ongoing fitness regimen comes into play when he’s suspended over the doorway in a hotel room where he’s being attacked; or although Leon develops a great sense of humanity through his interactions with Mathilda, he also gains literacy, which helps him deal with Tony (Danny Aiello), much to Tony’s chagrin. At the same time, these little details aren’t overstated, nor are the backgrounds and back stories of the characters, so that when Tony mentions Leon’s troubled history with women, it conveys his emotional immaturity without needing to provide a concrete description of how and why he ended up in the states as a hitman for an Italian bookie.
What Doesn’t Work: Surprisingly little, although anyone who was already troubled by the film’s vaguely romantic coupling of Leon and Mathilda will be no more reassured 15 years later. Some of this is emphasized in the extended cut (which with the release of this Blu-ray is for the first time available on the same disc as the theatrical version), but in both, Besson doesn’t skirt the idea that Mathilda has been forced to grow up faster than she might be ready for, which is why she seems to be exploring her budding womanhood when she talks to Leon – which produces appropriately outrageous results.
But the subtle examination of this mentor/ parent-child/ romantic relationship is just one part of the film, and the movie is fairly clear in suggesting that such a coupling would be inappropriate – not the least of which because she often seems more mature than he does – and rescues the film from turning into something other than a redemption story for these two characters.
What’s The Verdict: As Leon or The Professional, Besson’s film holds up beautifully, not only from a thematic and emotional standpoint but technically: in every frame of film, you can see that Besson is a born filmmaker, creating a fluidity and a beauty in his set pieces that emphasizes both the energy of the sequence and its emotional foundations. Personally I think that the two versions are equally good, if only because as interesting as the sequences are of Mathilda and Leon actually doing jobs together, the extended cut runs a little bit long and seems unnecessary in telling the core story of Leon and Mathilda’s relationship with one another; but as a quasi-irresponsible tale of a little girl who becomes a hitman or a hitman who regains his humanity with the help of a little girl, The Professional is a truly fantastic film, and still one of my all-time favorites.
