I am Jack's sense of awe

Rating: 9/10 (2 July 2013)

I saw this one with a friend some time ago. I've seen it a couple of times more, because I notice more and more ingenious little details and you understand it better and better. It has become my second favorite movie of ALL TIME (1st being Shawshank Redemption). And I'm pretty picky.
*ONLY READ IF YOU HAVE SEEN IT!* You hear "Fight Club". Then it's sure to be a movie stuffed with raw action and brutal fight scenes? You're a bit off the hook. So we start by seeing the narrator held at gunpoint, and then everything leading up to it is being told to us by said narrator. He suffers from insomnia, and his addiction with getting close to people in support groups for various deceases sets a moody opening-feel. It sounds absurd, but it works so well, and it even throws in elements of the darkest humor I've ever heard. And I absolutely loved it. Along comes a woman who disturbs the supports groups, named Marla Singer. She is one of Helena Bonham Carter's career highlights (my opinion). Marla's eccentric personality is Carter's specialty as an actress. Anyway, the real good stuff begins when the narrator's apartment is set on fire, and he has to live with a soap-maker named Tyler Durden. He and the narrator starts an underground fight club after realizing how good you feel after fighting someone. At a point, Marla comes between them when she becomes Tyler's lover, to the narrator's great annoyance, him hating Marla. As more and more members join in, it evolves out of the basement and is reborn in public as Project Mayhem. The narrator feels it has all gotten out of control, and tries to stop Tyler before he goes too far. But he eventually finds out that Tyler is a person invented by himself as a "back-up" when he thinks he is asleep. It escalates to the point where the Tyler-side gets shot and killed by the narrator-side, but by then it's too late to stop Project Mayhem's final purpose.
The narrator is Edward Norton, which pretty much guaranties you that there will be quality. But Brad Pitt does his best performance ever as Tyler Durden. The fight scenes are brutal (especially one where a blond man has his face beaten to complete dis-figuration), as the rest of the movie is uncompromising. It will hit you pretty hard (pun intended) the first time you see it. And the second. And so on. It raises a LOT of existential questions and will force you to think about how you are living your life. It's a two and a half hour long barrage of amazing acting, mind-blowing storyline and special moments that makes Fight Club impossible to overlook or forget. A nifty detail I liked is how we get to know that Tyler works with connecting movie reels at cinemas, and how he uses "artistic freedom" to make it an exciting job. We are treated to Tyler's pranks while watching this movie. There is a flash image of a penis right before the end credits starts to roll, and four short "blink-and-you-miss-it" stills where an image of Tyler is put into the support groups. Brilliant xD. It's the kind of movie that you want to watch again the second it has ended. Unfortunately I'm limited to 1000 words, so I can't continue forever, so I will just finish it now.
Fight Club is, to me, modern-day classic