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Fight Club * David Fincher * 1999

However I have known about this film I never watched it since action-movies are not realy my kind of film. In the end it turned out to be a bit more than an action film: a violent lesson in Zen!
What did I say there? Yes, read it again: a violent lesson in Zen.

Edward Norton plays Jack who is bored by his life as an insurance inspector who suffers from severe insomnia. Accidentally he runs into Tyler Durden (Brad Pitt) and the two become friends. After finding out about their mutual love for fighting and pain, they set up a fight club where strangers can beat the shit out of eachother and still become friends. Fight Club slowly evolves to become an anarchistic/terroristic organisation lead by Jack and Tyler.

Tyler has the strangest philosophy of life which gets pretty close to what you hear from the Buddhist corner of Zen at times. He wants Jack and later his other students to become unattached by the material world, fame, appearance, etc. Also he says that the destruction of life (your own or that of others) will result in higher appreciation of it, but death is something to definately not worry about. During the film Tyler says a lot of things which are in total contrast to his lifestyle and it seems that through violence he wants to reach harmony with himself and the world. Taking ascesitism and self-mutilation to extremes, I like the idea of Fincher and his story.

What I don’t like too much is the end which is very Matrix/Existenz-like. Also the length is a bit overdone (135 min). But overall “Fight Club” is better than I expected and it reveals some strange abnormalities in peoples (spiritual) lifes to extremes.

Chopper * Andrew Dominik * 2001

Maybe you know the story behind this film, but it is a strange one! Mark “Chopper” Read is an Australian criminal who supposedly killed 19 people, but was never convicted for any of these murders. Still he spent most of his adult life in prison for violence, possession of arms, etc. In jail he wrote 9 books with his ‘memoirs’ which were instant bestsellers and Chopper became some sort of culthero with fanclubs and everything. This film is so to say a compilation of the 9 books with the Australian stand-up comedian Eric Bana as Chopper.
The first thing that you will hear about this film is mostly that it is extremely violent, but still funny. Personally I found the film indeed rather funny, but it is not as violent as some people want you to believe. Also the ‘ear-scene’ isn’t like the one from “True Romance” in my opinion. Actually I find “Chopper” not more violent than other crime-comedies that you can see today.
Anyway, Chopper is a strange and charismatic person who seems not too intelligent but he is definately not stupid either. All through the film he betrays friends for money, drugs or just because they did something to him. The film is strangely cut. On one hand it seems as if the film is told by Chopper to two police officers in a bar, but it can also be told by Chopper to two guards in his prison while they are watching a documentary with an interview about him. The scenes are all through eachother and it is hard to tell what happened first and what happened later. Also it is unclear what is presented as a fact and what is fiction. Indeed a style of filming that we became familiar with, especially in the genre.
Overall I found “Chopper” pretty amusing.