Fight Club Tagged Articles at Cinematical

I am Jack's raging annoyance.

If you haven't heard yet, Fight Club is finally hitting Blu-ray on November 17, jam-packed full features including new bits about sound design, a search index, a bajillion commentaries, those great PSA's, and behind-the-scenes fare. In other words: a must-have disc if it is even half as good as it sounds. (Read the press release after the jump.)

To kick off the event, a new website has been created at www.welcometofc.com. As Coming Soon says: "The site connects to your Facebook and... you'll have to see what happens next!" For me, that means 30 minutes of annoyance as it "loads" whilst phrases get spray-painted on the wall over, and over, and over again. Marketers might be trying new techniques to connect with the audience, but something tells me that grating on their audience's last nerve is not one of them. With the help of Horror Squad writer Alison Nastasi, I found out this is what happens: You need to have an account with pictures, and then the website will create a video with Fight Club highlights and classic text laid over the photos in your account.

If Tyler Durden and his more passive self were ever told to sign up for a popular website notorious for shady practices, they'd ... well, there'd be big acts of vandalism, maybe some hacking, and possibly even an unsanitary soup or two. The first-come, first-serve soap that came with the big DVD release years ago, that was a cool marketing twist.

Nevertheless, this release is yet another reason to go Blu-ray.

"Like many of you, I was stuck," narrates Guardian writer Paul MacInnes in his best Chuck Palahniuk-style monotone. "I looked at blog after blog, trying to find some Star Wars fan site that would justify my existence. This was my life, and it was ending one minute at a time." In a very funny take on Fight Club, MacInnes' short video has the frustrated blogger receiving an e-mail that invites him to a "dodgy warehouse," and finds him taking part in a stage-fighting workshop where he gets the chance to beat up a writer from Men's Fitness magazine.

The workshop, it turns out, was a publicity event put on by Jameson's Irish Whiskey's Cult Film Club, a London film series that features movies like Trainspotting, This is Spinal Tap and, of course, Fight Club. The movies are all free, and the website promises a complimentary glass of Jameson's, as well.

For those of us who blog for a living, the intro to MacInnes' video holds an additional bit of entertainment. An e-mail he receives from his editor contains the subject line "FWD: RICKY GERVAIS DOESN'T LIKE AUBERGINES" (aubergine being the proper European word for eggplant) followed by the note, "Paul - great story. Give me 900 words in 20 mins. And make it good." Indeed. Thankfully, the Cinematical editors would never make us blog about celebrity vegetable preferences.

It's a clever take on an equally clever PR stunt, and a fun few minutes to watch. You can check it out here.

Every now and then we'll throw our fanatical shirt-making friends over at Dutch Southern a little love because those cats are always coming up with some cool, refreshing and totally random movie-related t-shirt that I simply must have. Yes, I'm a movie t-shirt guy -- as are a lot of my movie bloggin' colleagues -- and there's always been this unspoken competition amongst us to see who can show up at the next film festival or set visit with the freshest, most fanboy-esque movie t-shirt. And the shirts also make for great conversation starters. In fact, I wore my John Carpenter character shirt to an Extract screening and found myself talking to Mike Judge about it for awhile as he tried to figure out which character was from which flick.

So, that being said, the peeps at Dutch have released their latest t-shirt, called Product Placement -- and basically it includes a whole bunch of fictional corporate logos from a wide array of films. Some of the company logos included on the shirt are Cyberdyne Systems (Terminator), Paper Street Soap Company (Fight Club), Spatula City (UHF), S-mart (Army of Darkness), Doc Hopper's Frog Legs (The Muppet Movie), Hudsucker Industries (The Hudsucker Proxy), ICS (Running Man) and so many more. The shirt was designed by Josh Eacret, it costs $19 and you can head after the jump for a complete list of company logos featured.

Click image below for a larger version of the t-shirt, and pick one up for yourself right here.

Nearly two months ago, a homemade bomb exploded outside a Starbucks coffee shop in Manhattan, causing property damage but not injuring anyone. The bomber was finally arrested yesterday, and now the police are saying that the alleged teenage bomber "was launching his own 'Project Mayhem,'" reports The New York Times, "referring to a plan hatched by the protagonist of Fight Club, played by Brad Pitt, to sabotage corporations by destroying property."

The accused, 17-year-old, Kyle Shaw, "had started an underground fight club modeled on the one in the film, [Police Commissioner Raymond W.] Kelly said, and had bragged to friends that he was behind the bombing." A search of Shaw's home turned up news clippings about the explosion, a box of sparklers -- the bomb was reportedly constructed from fireworks explosives, a plastic bottle, and electrical tape -- and a DVD of Fight Club. A former high school classmate remembers that Shaw "wanted to watch the movie in our English class in the 11th grade. We were discussing existentialism in class, and he suggested we watch the movie as an example. We ended up watching I Heart Huckabees."

Based on a novel by Chuck Palahniuk and directed by David Fincher, the 1999 film also starred Edward Norton. It would be easy to say that if Shaw was really a fan, he should have remembered the first and second rules of Fight Club. But even before that, he should have remembered: it's only a movie.

We always attribute Ferris Bueller's ingenuity and over-the-top fame to the magic of cinema. Anything can happen in Hollywood -- like a skinny little guy becoming the '80s mecca of luck and popularity. But what if there is more to it than that? What if he doesn't even exist inside John Hughes' Chicago?

Torontoist has a little column called Televisualist, which picks out notable TV listings for the week. When talking about Monday night's screening of Ferris Bueller's Day Off, writer Christopher Bird suggests that Ferris is nothing more than a figment of Cameron's imagination, a la Fight Club:

POSIT: Ferris Bueller does not, as such, exist; the movie is actually about Cameron's day off and his unresolved crush on his best friend Sloane, and the parts where Cameron is not onscreen are merely the products of his imagination as Ferris, the perfect human being, does all the things Cameron could not or never do, until Cameron snaps and decides to live his life for himself.

And as Bird notes, when Cameron decides to live his own life, Ferris' luck runs out. This isn't Bird's own theory, mind you, it's been around for some time -- spreading through the internet like an unwanted virus. But what do you think? Is Ferris nothing more than a less jaded version of the narrator's Tyler Durden? Or are people just out to ruin one of the greatest teen comedies of all time?

I'm sure if you pick apart the themes and scenes from both films, you'll find that The Dark Knight and Fight Club have lots in common, though for the purpose of this post we're talking about a song called "Where Is My Mind?" from The Pixies. In David Fincher's Fight Club, the song played during the final scene as Edward Norton and Helena Bonham Carter lock hands and watch the city in front of them crumble to the ground. Remember? Well in honor of The Dark Knight's television premiere on HBO this Saturday, June 13, the cable channel is airing two pretty groovy commercials featuring the same exact Pixies song mixed with a bunch of those memorable (yet haunting) pieces of dialogue and scenes from last year's biggest film.

I couldn't have said it better than Brian over at MTV's Splash Page, who notes: "The shots of the burned out buildings and The Joker's hospital demolition scene are particularly effective with the music for anyone who has heard in the background during Tyler Durden's anarchist attack on civilization in "Fight Club." It's also a great match for an in intensely cerebral film like "Dark Knight" where the hero's sanity is constantly being picked apart as much as the villain's." So who's staying in with me on Saturday night to welcome Batman to HBO?

Watch both HBO commercials and the scene from Fight Club after the jump.

I couldn't begin to describe how excited I was yesterday when I had to have my iPhone replaced at the Apple store due to it breaking a month after I bought it only to learn that Apple has just launched a new iPhone to screw with folks who recently bought the old one. Don't you love those guys? To coincide with the latest iPhone 3GS (which I heard features an app that will actually babysit your kids and one that will take your girlfriend to a boring chick flick -- but don't quote me on that), Apple has launched a new marketing campaign beginning with this commercial from director David Fincher, who's apparently a pretty big mac junkie.

To be quite honest, I was hoping for colorful dancing set to some sort of quirky hipster tune, but instead what we have here is some dude breaking in to iPhone headquarters (or some such place) in order to test out the phone's new video function. It's not exactly brilliant, but Fincher directed it alongside his Fight Club cinematographer Jeff Cronenweth. Will this be the first of a set of related ads? Guess we'll see.

Watch the commercial after the jump

We tend to feature a lot of movie poster photoshopping contests on Cinematical because a) they're tons of fun, and b) they promote creativity and imagination. This latest one is close to being one of my favorites -- over at SomethingAwful.com, as part of their Photoshop Phriday, they asked folks to create public service announcements out of movie posters (or, as they say, "rehabilitated them to be educational, informative, and inspirational"). So, for example, the classic Jaws movie poster suddenly turns into an advertisement to join the Amity Island High Swim Team, and The Spirit poster featuring Sarah Paulson turns into a PSA against germs. One of my personal favorites, although a tad fuzzy, takes the famous Fight Club poster and transforms it into a PSA for fighting infections. Some very funny and unique creations to be found, for sure.

Check out the ones mentioned above and a couple other favorites in the gallery below, then hop on over to SomethingAwful.com to see the rest.



[via Superpunch]

I always thought those Fight Club public service announcements were all kinds of awesome -- Ed Norton talking about proper movie etiquette, and the fact that no one has the right to touch us in our bathing suit area, and Brad Pitt discussing the emergency exits and drinking your own urine. Whenever the real movie theater announcements would pop up, I'd wish it was the Ed and Brad versions instead.

But oh, the above clip completely beats the other two. Apparently this has made the rounds before, but I've never heard of it, so in case you haven't either, check out the song above. However, be warned: This is a song about penises, so if you don't want to hear Brad Pitt and Ed Norton singing about them at work, don't click! But it would be such a waste, because it's flipping brilliant. It's definitely the best twist on words that I've heard in a while. (Check out the lyrics after the jump ...)

Enjoy!

Each week, The Exhibitionist comments on the latest news, trends and innovations related to the theater industry, or it discusses long-continuing problems with and complaints against cinemas in general, or it simply relates a specific moviegoing experience of yours truly. But rarely does this column get into the subject of actual movies. Well, seeing as there's not much new in the industry this week, and seeing as I'm fortunately not being dragged to see Sex and the City and therefore have no experience to relate about being a sole male in an auditorium packed with women, I figure this is a perfect time to bring up actual movies. Not just any movies, though: I'm presently only interested in discussing movies about, set in or prominently featuring movie theaters.

The earliest movie that I'm familiar with that significantly involves a theater is Buster Keaton's Sherlock Jr. The silent comedian plays a projectionist who falls asleep on the job then has a dream in which he literally climbs through the movie screen and into a detective film. A similar idea of breaking the boundary between auditorium and screen is used in Woody Allen's The Purple Rose of Cairo and in John McTiernan's The Last Action Hero, both of which involve a movie character who manages to leave his respective film within the film. But nothing tops Keaton's screen-entering stunt, which utilizes special effects that still astonish more than 80 years later.