I finally saw "Fight Club" a few days ago.
I like movies with narration. Or rather, movies where the narrator is the main character. The entire "The Wonder Years" series is like that. "Goodfellas", subject of a previous post, goes into the same list. The very obscure movie "Tales from the Underground" follows the same line, but I think I am the only person in the world who watched that one. Same applies to "Cube" and "Dead Girl". It is very odd that no one ever heard of Dead Girl, since it has Famke Janssen, Teri Hatcher and Val Kilmer in the cast.
Back to "Fight Club", from now on without quotes.
Not yet! First I must mention this. Yesterday, the third ending theme for Inu Yasha played for the first time. The song is awful, unfortunately, but it must be noted Cartoon Network delayed its voice-over ads until the lyrics were over! That was beautiful. Tiny little thing, but it seems to whisper "Yes, we are paying attention, we care.". Of course, that is topped by the gigantic and noisy cake celebrating the channel's 10th year, a frequent visit during the episode itself. "The ending theme is important, but what that character is saying is just secondary." Hmf.
Very well, Fight Club. The majority of "I didn't like it" comments I found on boards around the web are shot down with a "watch it again, it is a lot different the second time". Okay, I will do that eventually, and hopefully in widescreen. Let me say, though, that I liked the movie. I just do not see it as being the greatest movie of all times, and never would I watch it three times a week (as some people claim to, in the boards I read).
I have no big comment to make, to be honest. I found it a bit absurd, the logistics do not fit. And there were far too many men joining the clubs everywhere for it to be feasible. Really, are all men so desperate to punch other (random) men? I promised myself not to use the words "society", "evolution" and "primitive" when talking about this movie, so I will not ask any further rethorical questions. It will prevent me from sounding like a bad writer, too.
In fact, I will drop the subject of Fight Club right here and make a complaint about bad writers.
It is rather irritating that most articles I read have that "Reader's Digest" feel to them. What I am talking about is things that start with...
"The sun was shining brightly as I approached the residence of Ms. Smith. When I arrived, she was already waiting for me by the front door. 'Good morning, mister writer, sir!', she greeted me playfully."
Really, I have seen books starting with that kind of thing. "The sun was shining...", "The sun was setting...". Where do these things come from, and why are they so horrendously overused? Is everyone only able to picture things as in a movie? So to set up the ambiance they need to show the sun setting, then the camera moves down to the road and a car comes speeding from the distance as music gets louder. Cut to interior of car, dialogue. Cut to plot-meaningful event outside of car. That does for some very bad writing and would become an awfully produced movie if turned into one (it is a script anyway).
Mister writer, sir, should go to the nearest library and read lots of Poe and Tolstoi before visiting Ms. Smith. But of course, if he did, he would not visit Ms. Smith afterwards, since he would refuse to write for Reader's Digest. Or RPGDot.com. Gods, the tentacles of amateur writing are long.
And if this Journal was not protected against (most) search bots, I am sure writing "tentacles" and "amateur" here, plus that "hentai" a few posts ago, would grant me many random visits by people looking for anything but what I have here. Too bad LiveJournal does not provide me with the cute service Blogspot offers its users, of knowing where each visitor came from. But I like having a journal.
Maybe this is in tune with Fight Club's ideas, but I came up with this thought earlier today:
About 70% of everything that goes through the internet is related to sex. The other 30% is the stuff nature never meant us to deal with.
Forgive the lack of cohesion in this post. Do not, under any circumstance, attribute to it the name of "flow of consciousness" or any other term forged by the early 20th century Surrealists or those silly Discordians. This post was written in about three hours of comings and goings and breaks for King of Fighters and Inu Yasha and includes thoughts that occurred to me during the past four days and which I should have posted before but did not because I had no will to and I do not like posting little things. I did not just sit here and "let my mind run free". I respect the paper (in the sense of "the support upon which text is written") too much to do that to it.
Speaking of Discordians, from the game "System Shock 2" a quote glued itself inside my head, and I often mumble it when Milu the dog barks for no purpose: "Silence the discord!". I love that quote. But the game itself is a bit problematic. No doubt, it is the scariest thing I ever played, but that is not the problem. The problem is the method used to increase difficulty: just add loads of plenty of handful of lots of big robots and protocol droids that can only effectively be destroyed with armor piercing bullets that are rarer than flying pandas. Two minutes wrenching a maintenance robot each time I have to pass through that important corridor that leads everywhere else is just way too much.
Enough. No more notes for now.
Posted by Etienne at April 16, 2003 07:29 PM