Fight Club (David Fincher, 1999)

I know it’s breaking all the rules… but I really wanted to do a blog post on Fight Club…

Despite its popularity, Fight Club is a film which has never appealed to me. The only reason I decided to watch it at all is because I’ve only ever heard positive things about it, and because it’s my friend’s favourite film – she’s always pushing me to watch it, and I’m so glad she did!

Even though it’s quite famous, I managed to avoid finding out too much about it, luckily. Knowing the twist in the storyline would have totally ruined it, because I didn’t see it coming at all. It’s left me thinking all week, and it keeps coming back to me; it’s so brilliantly written and wonderfully filmed.

The film begins with a depressed young man (who is credited only as Narrator, played by Edward Norton), who hates his work, feels alone and alienated, and suffers from insomnia. He starts going to support groups for patients with terminal diseases in order to have people to talk to, and to feel slightly better about his own situation, while at the same time attempting to cheer himself up by creating the perfect apartment (and to be fair, he does have some pretty cool furniture).

Yet when he meets Tyler Durden one day (played by the rather wonderful Brad Pitt), his apartment is also coincidentally destroyed.Tyler believes ‘Narrator’ could learn a lot through pain, misfortune, and chaos, and challenges him to a fight, before allowing him to move in with him. As more men join in, a ‘fight club’ is created, quickly becoming an underground sensation. Tyler establishes some rules, with the famous lines: ‘First rule: Don’t talk about fight club. Second rule: Don’t talk about fight club’.

However, Tyler soon stops treating ‘Narrator’ as an equal, or as a partner within Fight Club, creating Project Mayhem and becoming involved with Marla, who ‘Narrator’ met at the support groups. After this, everything spirals out of control, but I don’t want to write any more – I know that if someone had ruined Fight Club for me, I would have been so irritated, so I refuse to give away the ending. Just take it from me; it’s an amazing film.

Tyler Durden is undoubtedly one of my favourite characters of all time. He’s the kind of addictive personality you don’t want to like, but do, purely because of his charisma and influence. Brad Pitt was also the perfect person to play this part, just as Edward Norton portrays ‘Narrator’ brilliantly.

“We decided early on that I would start to starve myself as the film went on, while [Brad Pitt] would lift and go to tanning beds; he would become more and more idealized as I wasted away.”

– Edward Norton

Perfume: The Story of a Murderer (Tom Tykwer, 2006)

I don’t know what it was that attracted me to this film… and even having watched it, I don’t know what it is that made me enjoy it. It’s brilliant but bizarre. Maybe that’s why I liked it. Nothing bugs me more than feeling as though I’ve wasted two hours of my life on a predictable film, and there was nothing predictable about this at all.

The film follows Jean-Baptiste Grenouille, a man with an extraordinary sense of smell (played by Ben Whishaw, who was my favourite for the 12th Doctor… although after watching this film, maybe not). The opening was possibly one of the most disturbing openings to a film I’ve ever seen – Jean-Baptiste’s mother gives birth incredibly quickly, cuts her own umbilical cord, and pushes him away to be disposed of with the fish guts at the end of the day, before she returns to work beheading fish. Just like that. Then, amongst shots of dead animal carcasses, maggots and rats, Jean-Baptiste is shown as ‘choosing’ to survive, and cries. He grows up an orphan, before one day delivering something to a perfume shop, where he proves to the owner that he has an amazing sense of smell, and can create perfumes with ease.

When he later discovers he has no odour of his own, he feels worthless, and decides that the only way to justify his existence is to create the perfect perfume. He sets out killing several girls, presumably with perfect body odours… He gets rather distraught, however, when he fails to preserve their scent successfully. He murders other girls and practices preserving their scents, which he eventually manages with a hired prostitute. Jean-Baptiste then embarks on a killing spree, targeting beautiful young women and capturing their scents. He leaves their corpses all over the city, creating panic, while at the same time planning his attack on a pretty red-head named Laura Richis, who he decides will be his thirteenth scent – the linchpin of his perfect perfume. He follows her to an inn and murders her, and therefore successfully creating the perfect perfume.

However, he is captured by soldiers who throw him into prison to later be executed. On his day of execution, he pours a little perfume onto a hankerchief, forcing the soldiers to let him go. The executioner, and the crowd, all smell his perfume and start proclaiming that he is innocent. He later leaves and returns to Paris, back to the fish market in which he was born. He pours the entire bottle over his head, which leads to the crowd being overcome by the scent and eventually devouring him completely… The next morning, only his clothes and the bottle remain, from which there falls a single drop of perfume, ending the film.

So really, what can I say? It’s a bit bizarre. In fact, it’s very bizarre, and I actually spent most of the film thinking ‘why am I watching this?’, yet finding myself unable to turn it off.

Session 9 (Brad Anderson, 2001)

I watched Session 9 a couple of weeks ago (stupidly, with the lights off), after it was suggested to me when I idiotically said I wanted to watch a scary film…

Psychological thrillers are my favourite type of scary film – gory horrors don’t do much for me, as I can convince myself that they’re not real, and everyone’s just covered in ketchup. Psychological thrillers, though, do exactly as expected; they get inside my head and shake me up, leaving me sleeping with the light on for weeks.

The plot focuses on an asbestos removal crew working at an old, abandoned mental asylum. Alongside the group’s fall outs and individual problems, Mike discovers some audio tapes of a patient’s hypnotherapy sessions, which slowly reveal the young girl’s disturbed past throughout the film. It’s creepy and weird, and even more disturbing because it’s a real mental illness…

Session 9 starts off well, and builds up a good story… However, it’s as though the writers ran out of steam, and didn’t know how to end it. It seems to trail off and gets a bit confusing.

As well as this, it builds up the tension and just as it gets to a point where it seems as though something is going to happen, there is suddenly a very odd camera shot… This took me out of the film completely, and actually made me laugh, which is never the aim in a thriller.

Overall, it was a good idea for a film, just not very well executed. Nevertheless, it was creepy and disturbing, and that’s exactly what’s expected from a film like this.