Movies: October 1999 Archives

Grubby, grimy, scary, bloody, cynical, violent, dangerously whacked-out and very, very funny, Fight Club is itself an act of provocation. It's a blast at staples of late 20th century life -- everything from the Ikea catalog and air travel to Blockbuster Video and the auto industry. It's also a blast in the face of state-of-the-art Hollywood, putting megabucks to work supporting a study in hallucination. And it's a challenge to the mainstream audience, which is asked to sympathize with subversion and keep up with a storyline that demands a fairly substantial leap of faith on the part of the viewer. Fight Club is a pitch-black comedy and a phantasmal psychological thriller about the end of the world as we know it, and it's several times fresher and more exciting than anything I've seen this year.