Movies That Were Probably Made By a Spasm of Six Year-Olds on Acid: The Top 75 Action Films Poll Results Thread

i kinda wanted my money back after i saw The Game. i was conned. i should have called the cops.

Anyway, I gotta agree that Fincher's movies shine or stink on the strength of their scripts (which IIRC he doesn't write). For example, Benjamin Button looked gorgeous and was masterfully directed, but the plot was just boring and pointless, so it was not a good movie.

i guess i need to watch ronin again. oddly, I have no memory of it - though I did see it in lolcollege, so there is probably a good reason for that.

fincher's like the nu-ridley scott but i think rids is better, like even the past decade he's made a couple of stone-cold epics that i oft view w/a strong drink in hand followed by a post-screening rumination. kingdom of heaven should have found a place on my ballot (and maybe this poll!)

The fact that Fight Club became this aspirational message movie that supposedly tapped into some huge feeling of disenfranchisement was just a huge facepalm to me. Like, really? THAT movie speaks to you?
And the whole unreliable narrator thing annoys the fuck out of me, at least with this movie.
I'd rather something that's ballsout batshit right-wing crazy aspirational, like Red Dawn, than some made up 'maybe it is real, maybe it isn't' crap. the wishy-washyness really bugged me. the whole thing bugged me.

all of it annoyed me except meatloaf, basically.

end rant.

yeah, fight club seemed crazy dumb to me when it came out. i think sometimes i don't understand movies, though.

I love Fincher, so hating Fight Club should pain me. but it so doesn't.

What's a "metteur en scene"?

― Tuomas, Monday, February 20, 2012 3:28 PM (1 minute ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

It means he's like Michael Mann

you guys are breaking the first rule abt fight club

i think the paluhnik thing works best as kinda high concept gross-out clive barker in lit clothing but if you try to get all heavy and existential with me i ain't having it.

For me the problem with Fight Club is that it's most vocal stans seem to have completely missed the point of the film.

^^^^^

and speaking of clive barker and david cronenberg, everyone should have voted for nightbreed. action-packed!

If FC was not held up to be more than it is, it wouldn't annoy me half as much

BAKULA ~ O'CONNOR ~ JANSSEN

Clive Barker's
LORD OF ILLUSIONS

i would have voted for that, maybe.

For me the problem with Fight Club is that it's most vocal stans seem to have completely missed the point of the film.

everyone should have voted for nightbreed. action-packed!

plus it features cronenberg as a therapist/serial killer!

you guys are breaking the first rule abt fight club

― ⚓ (gr8080), Monday, February 20, 2012 4:35 PM (9 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

aloh

bummed that ilx doesn't consider 'no country for old men' and action flick

a guy was doing work on our house and i showed him my room full of records he said "so is this your man club?" hahaha! i think he meant man cave. i blame man cave phenomena on fight club. pretty easy to blame lots of things on fight club.

xxxxp the central idea of the film is that 'you don't have to be a corporate doormat, but at the same time, you don't have to destroy civilisation to do that'. Aside from that the film is a satire, of consumerism, corporations, advertising, self help groups, and even of the ideology Durden spouts (which is no different really to the other self help ideologies featured).

Driving Miss Daisy action flick y/n

The film essentially has two twists. The first being the Calvin & Hobbes twist, the second being 'oh, you know that Tyler's worldview is just bullshit, right?'.

The Fight Club Pretzel

"man cave" crap has a lot more to do with annoying suburban homes with a finished basement "tv room" with the couch that has cupholders and all kinds of college/pro football paraphernalia on the walls than Fight Club, ime

The fact that Fight Club became this aspirational message movie that supposedly tapped into some huge feeling of disenfranchisement was just a huge facepalm to me. Like, really? THAT movie speaks to you?

I dunno, the essential hilarity of needing a support group for being a disenfranchised WASP is still present for me. The only real "this is somewhat uplifting" scenes are those where Pitt/Norton are talking about how their lives are a struggle, and even those are really just a whiner talking to his homoerotic imaginary friend who looks like Brad Pitt

the movie is pretty much a homoerotic Calvin and Hobbes

vaguely remember something on the internet about that

haha I really dug this for a week in hs or something

http://ignatz.brinkster.net/cfightclub.html

'oh, you know that Tyler's worldview is just bullshit, right?'

Jane Austen's Fight Club >>>> actual Fight Club

susie derkins>>>>>>>>>>>whatever they called that wretched helena bonham carter character

tbf I first saw Fight Club during my first semester of college, on opening night, in a kind of crappy old theater. A friend who was kind of my movie-going friend wasn't able to make it so I watched it again with him the next night.

I am that guy.

http://www.funnyordie.com/videos/efeb4dc1b6/jane-austen-s-fight-club

Fincher apparently made the bathroom scene deliberately homoerotic to throw the audience off as to where the plot was going. I don't actually see it myself. That scene just makes both Jack and Tyler out to be daddy hating whingers - when I saw it my reaction was that Jack had chosen his apartment dwelling Ikea buying lifestyle, no-one was forcing him into it. What today would be labelled '1st World problems'.

i just feel funny watching movies where i want everyone in the movie to die. feels wrong somehow. that's how i feel about a movie like fight club.

i've also read interviews where fincher claims or pretends to be completely oblivious to the homosexual subtext of that scene -- to the point of being resentful that the interviewer even broached it.

xpost

so yeah to follow up on la femme nikita - i guess it has style but can't believe everyone was complaining about jaws not being an action movie or the thing not being an action movie but not saying anything about LFN - there's almost no action in the entire movie.

'oh, you know that Tyler's worldview is just bullshit, right?'

I'm just not entirely sure that the movie (or Palahniuk) believes that.

I think the movie does (never read the book), or at least everyone I've ever discussed it with has interpreted it this way. The protagonist being mesmerized by Tyler Durden's ideology, then slowly becoming disillusioned with it is like the main story arc of the movie. Still don't think it's a great movie (the two personalities reveal was too literal, and the final scene makes no sense), but you'd have to be a bit stupid not to see that it's critical of Durden.

Did you guys know that Cronenberg apparently said that an Eastern Promises sequel could be a possibility? Kind of want an entire movie of Viggo as undercover Russian crime guy who beats people up. Like a combination of Eastern Promises and A History of Violence

I'm still going to complain that the original Shaft (or any other key blaxploitation movies) isn't on here.

Haha, should've voted for Sweet Sweetback's Badasssss Song... That one is definitely an action movie in the literal sense of the word, since the second half of it consists of nothing but the protagonist running through various locations. (Not a great date movie though, as I found out.)

I think the movie does (never read the book), or at least everyone I've ever discussed it with has interpreted it this way. The protagonist being mesmerized by Tyler Durden's ideology, then slowly becoming disillusioned with it is like the main story arc of the movie. Still don't think it's a great movie (the two personalities reveal was too literal, and the final scene makes no sense), but you'd have to be a bit stupid not to see that it's critical of Durden.

― Tuomas, Monday, February 20, 2012 2:13 PM (4 minutes ago) Bookmark

this is true, but the movie isn't exactly a consistent critique of anything. it ultimately makes clear that tyler's philosophies are A) fascist and B) a device that the protagonist uses to protect himself from emotional commitment, but it spends a lot more time making tyler and his ideas alluring than it does dismantling them. i like the dissonance, cuz pat answer message movies are almost always awful.

I liked Fight Club a lot, but this may be related to seeing it when it was a first-run box office failure and before it became a message movie for confused alterna-bros.

On the other hand, it can't be denied that it is nowhere close to Fincher's masterpiece, The Game, which is as deep and reticent as FC is ultimately shallow and superficial.

xpost contdr: I read that as 'answer machine movies' lol

alterna-bros.

fixed

idk imo the game was kind of woeful

thank god bros have moved on to worse movies with less content, like boondock saints

This, I thought, was a really good look at one way in which the visuals of Fight Club undercut what's being discussed on screen, in the "pick a fight with a stranger" scene.