Raging Bull**** from Ed Norton and Brad Pitt!

Rating: Null/10 (4 November 1999)

When Susan Faluhdi wrote a piece saluting this film, but really promoting her own book Stiffed, I decided I'd better have a look. We're nearing the end of the Century and the Millenium and the jig is up in nearly every direction. The Cold War is over. The major political fights in America are over lifestyle issues. The folks producing films are forced to use vaguely focused Arab terrorists as villians, because the traditional communists are our friends, sort of. And Feminists are writing books in defense of abused MEN.
Its the perfect backdrop for a story about young guys so fed up with the ennui of these times, their only relief comes from knocking one another senseless. First its the two friends, Brad Pitt and Ed Norton who knock one another about while living in a broken down abandoned building. But in the words of an old Chrysler commercial, it starts a movement, a momentum a beat. And the Beat Goes On with fight clubs forming all over America.
You would think Pitt would be the lead here, but its Ed Norton handling the narrative, the voice-over. Ed goes thru the usual contortions. Bored in the meaningless job he holds in the corporate world, Norton quits and takes up an equally meaningless unemployed existence with Pitt. Why work for the soulless corporate machine when you can appear just as prosperous with no job at all.
Lingering in the background is a decidedly un-English-looking Helen Bonham Carter. Helen hasn't a lot to do but smoke cigs and look downmarket and fetching. The storytellers are holding her out here in hopes that either Norton or Pitt will make a move on her. For Pitt, that is out of the question. Norton walks her home a couple of times. But Helen doesn't
really get a lot of action in this movie. So much for the love interest.
The movie is a guy thing you see. I can barely remember what the climactic scene at the end is about. Its just a lot of cosmic acting out; Jimmy Carter's Malaise. Its supposed to mean something, but it doesn't have to really, since its producing the requisite violence for a $75 million domestic gross. The violence is meaningless but necessary to stir interest among the 18-34 year old demographic this film is aimed at. Go see the Brad Pitt movie about Tibet, or catch Ed singing in that Woody Allan film of a few years ago. The Fight Club should have been aborted at birth.