Fight Club
...es. He becomes lost, has an overwhelming sense of meaninglessness and feels like more of a consumer than a person. He furnishes his apartment in IKEA furniture, drinks Starbucks coffee, suffers from insomnia and attends support group meetings for diseases he doesn't have. The movie's critique of a materialistic, superficial consumer culture gives way to its more anarchistic (this word is by no means meant lightly) viewpoint when the narrator meets soap maker Tyler Durden, played by a rather unhygienic Brad Pitt. The two create Fight Club, a forum where men bloody and bruise each other in order to feel alive and experience something of substance. The club expands into an underground army dedicated to the collapse of the oppressive system, finally culminating in the film's surprising, unforgettable ending, which is on par with "The Sixth Sense." For a big budget Hollywood film, "Fight Club" is overwhelmingly compact, with plot details that stream by the viewer in a hurried frenzy, and often proceed in a timeline as erratic as Helena Bonham Carter's eye makeup. But it all works, as long as one pays attention. The result is a film that demonstrates the volatile possibilities for the destiny of a society that turns its citizens into numbers according to their monetary value. Director David Fincher ("The Game," "Seven") masterfully handles the film's dark subject matter and the rich textual detail, marrying the visual style to content in wonderfully expressive ways, as if the narrator's voice is constructing the visual landscape. ...