Day 7: January 9th, 2014: Fight Club (1999) - David Fincher

Okay. I had to see the bro-iest of bro movies because walking through life without even understanding this quote:

Meant a lifetime of Fomo and film-major induced shame. But even though Fight Club may be #10 in the IMDb Top 250, it doesn’t even crack the AFI 100 Films list. Even worse! It won zero Oscars. Maybe I should’ve left it off this list?

Oh well. What’s done is done. And to be completely honest, I actually really enjoyed the film. As most critics put it, the idea is there, but the end is a little preachy. The central two characters, as my always well-placed gifs show, are a nameless, boring man with a boring desk job, played by Edward Norton, and the effortlessly cool soap salesman, Tyler Durden, played by Brad Pitt.

I’m sorry? Brad didn’t get an Oscar for that? Life is unfair.

Anyway. So the narrative arc is very interesting, with the film starting at the climax, with Norton’s character with a gun in his mouth and a bomb about to go off, and then it jumps back to the “real” beginning. After explaining (in narration) that his life is an endless train of waking up and sleeping, and that his insomnia creates a sort of zombie-like state where he never has any idea where he is, he goes to see a doctor who refuses to prescribe him anything. The doctor instead tells him to go to a cancer support group to see some real suffering. At the group, the narrator finds that being surrounded by people who are chronically ill brings him a sort of emotional release from the monotony of his life. He starts going to a different support group every night to keep feeling that euphoria. But one night he meets Marla Singer, played by Helena Bonham Carter, who turns out to be a fraud just like him.

Shortly after dividing up the nights with Marla so they never have to see each other again, the narrator meets Tyler Durden on a plane. Tyler is so much cooler than he is, and all he does is sell soap. Norton’s character goes home that night and finds that his condo has been blown up. He calls Tyler, and the two go out for drinks. After the drinks, Tyler finally says in the parking lot:

The two engage in a brawl, and quickly realize that they have never felt the kind of release they feel while beating each other senseless. This is where it gets sort of crazy. 

Soon enough, Tyler and the narrator have created the Fight Club, an underground “support group” where men beat each other almost to death just to feel anything. And the philosophy is very interesting, because Tyler constantly preaches of the emasculation of our generation as a result of rampant consumerism and commercial ideology. The idea is that constantly being told what we need and what to buy to be happy has taken the meaning out of life, and as men, they must cause each other physical pain just to feel anything anymore. It’s barbaric, but I followed it.

And that’s probably due to Tyler Durden’s charm and allure as a man who seems to be totally and completely understanding of how to be happy. But things go south as soon as he starts putting into motion a plan he has called “Project Mayhem,” which requires members of Fight Club to start vandalizing staples of consumer culture, like franchise coffee shops and computer stores. The narrator begins to draw away from Tyler, and things REALLY get crazy after that.

I definitely did not expect the film to be as philosophical as it was, because prior to having seen the film, it just seemed to me like a wrestling movie that somehow became a cult film amongst teenage boys. But it turns out that Fight Club is actually a thought-provoking piece of art. Who knew?

Most critics consider it to be the most controversial film of 1999, many comparing it to 1971’s A Clockwork Orange for its senseless violence. To me it actually felt more like 2001’s Donnie Darko, being a sort of coming of age story with a twist that the person coming of age is actually pretty mentally disturbed to the point of being almost supernatural. Anyway, the point is I enjoyed it a lot more than I thought I would. So I guess I won’t be judging Brad Pitt films by their cult followings anymore!

Day 2: January 4th, 2014: Citizen Kane (1941) - Orson Welles

So this may be a jump in the opposite direction from Spirited Away, but I don’t think it would’ve been possible to finish my college film education without seeing what many critics consider to be the greatest film of all time.

I had the strange experience of watching Citizen Kane while knowing literally nothing about the film except for the ending, thanks to many film professors for spoiling that one. To be honest, I didn’t even know it was directed by Orson Welles, meaning I basically felt like this any time it came up in conversation.

Citizen Kane, according to Wikipedia, is a film à clef, meaning that it tells a nearly true story with a veil of fiction, mostly through changes in names. The subject of the film, newspaper tycoon and politician Charles Foster Kane, is modeled after William Randolph Hearst, a real-life newspaper magnate and politician who used sensationalized stories to influence the American public into buying papers (thanks Newsies). 

The film is told in the period after Kane’s death, when a news reporter named Jerry Thompson tries to discover the meaning of Kane’s last word, “Rosebud.” He interviews many of the people in Kane’s life, including his second wife, Susan Alexander, his estranged best friend, Jedediah Leland, and his butler, Raymond. Each character allows the story to dissolve into flashback, where they recount Kane’s life after his mother discovers a gold mine on her land in his youth and sends him away to be educated by Walter Parks Thatcher, a banker. Because it’s a black and white movie from 1941, some of the time I was like:

but most of the time I was like:

Charles Foster Kane is a great character to follow though, because he is forced to grow up in wealth after spending his early years in poverty, so he spends his time crusading for the rights of the working class. But he is also horribly selfish and enigmatic in terms of morals and convictions. He’s kind of like the Gatsby of the depression era.

One thing I didn’t know while watching the film is that director and writer Orson Welles plays his own main character, Charles Foster Kane. I always find this interesting because even though back then most acting was unfulfilled and dry, being the early years of the Group Theatre and Method acting, Orson as a writer brings more insight into his complex character than any actor could. One thing that I did find a little off-putting is that they only used makeup to age Kane from his early 20s to his 80s. Meaning the nearly senile Kane looks like this.

Only a little too much makeup I think.

But besides that issue, Citizen Kane definitely delivered in terms of how the narrative reflected a troubled millionaire in search of some kind happiness. Not that it’s very sympathetic, but still I thought it was a great portrayal. Welles ended up winning a Best Screenwriting Oscar for the film, and pretty much everyone with a computer has seen this gif:

So between the timeless gif and the lasting cinematic prestige, Citizen Kane definitely solidified its place in our American cultural history, and it’s certainly worth seeing.

Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004) - Michel Gondry

I think the classic or critically acclaimed films that I haven’t seen fall into two categories. There are the ones that I basically know everything about, like Fight Club and The Godfather. Then there are the ones that I have heard of, that I know are important because they’ve won Oscars or do very well critically, but I have no image in my mind of what they actually are. Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind falls somewhere closer to the latter. I knew Jim Carrey was in it, and that it wasn’t actually a comedy like his other movies, and that was about it. That’s definitely a nice way to watch IMDb Top 250 #80.

The film opens on Joel Barish (Jim Carrey) spontaneously skipping work and jumping on the Long Island Rail Road to Montauk, New York. It’s somewhere in the middle of winter, and the train is empty except for a blue haired girl, to whom Joel immediately finds himself attracted. Kate Winslet (Titanic, Contagion) plays this “colorful” character, Clementine, a girl that has more life in her pinky than Joel’s entire body. She exudes feeling, she is the free-spirited mythical creature that Joel has waited his whole life to meet. And then things go wrong.

The two go through an entire roller coaster of a relationship, finally ending it when they decide they can’t possibly be compatible as lovers and friends. Clementine’s erratic moods and sense of life are a burden for the static Joel, just as his boring stability weighs down her free spirit, so they end it. But then when Joel eventually sees Clementine again at a bookstore, he finds out something strange. She has no memory of him. Her forgetfulness is so genuine that it comes off as startling to the viewer at first. Joel, distraught by this discovery, goes to all of his friends, and they claim not to know who she is.

Joel eventually finds out from his friend that Clementine underwent an experimental treatment to have Joel completely erased from her memory. A man named Dr. Mierzwiak started this treatment as a way of erasing people’s memories of specific events or past lovers, hoping to create a happier past for us to look back on. Joel mulls over this new situation, and then goes to doctor saying that he wants the treatment for himself. That is, after he storms the office and demands to learn about the treatment and why Clemetine got it. Kirsten Dunst (Jumanji, Spiderman), plays the doctor’s receptionist, while Mark Ruffalo (The Avengers, 13 Going on 30), and Elijah Wood (Lord of the Rings) play the doctor’s assistants. They were all great in it.

The next chapter of the movie focuses on Joel undergoing the treatment, which takes one night of Mark Ruffalo’s character systematically going through Joel’s brain (using some bizarre looking brainwashing machines) and erasing any memories he has of Clementine. As the film jumps from outside Joel’s mind to inside it, we see Joel reliving experiences from his relationship. The story leaves the real world and becomes a confusing mess of Joel going in and out of memories, as if the film wishes the show us how scattered memories of the past are intertwined in a web of emotions and people. But as Joel relives both the happy and painful memories, he realizes that he actually wants to remember his experience with Clementine, even if it means he can’t be with her. So the memory version of Clementine and the present version of Joel try desperately to hang on to each other in a very complicated scene that is both thrilling and emotional.

I’m not going to give away the ending, because it’s just too moving and I’m going to say right now that I loved it. While the movie has it’s slow and exhausting points, the story wrapped so beautifully that I wanted to run out and tell everyone that this magical movie existed. Kirsten’s character becomes pivotal, as she struggles with the classic cliché, to love and have lost or to never have loved at all (don’t worry they don’t actually say this in the film). Joel and Clementine go in and out of understanding the importance of keeping memories of all of your experiences, both the good and the bad.

But the two of them are so fun to watch on screen together and I was amazed that Jim could handle himself in such a dramatic role. As someone who takes this film’s messages very seriously, I was a wreck by the end. I couldn’t handle these characters who found love, lost it, and were looking to figure out whether it mattered if they kept those memories or not. The film gets it’s title from the Alexander Pope poem, which the film quotes:

How happy is the blameless vestal’s lot!
The world forgetting, by the world forgot.
Eternal sunshine of the spotless mind!

Each pray'r accepted, and each wish resign’d;

I couldn’t even. Watch it for yourself.