Acting "Fight Club"

by Cláudio Alves

Fight Club is an exhausting film. Years of heated discourse and malicious fandom have made it so, its miscalculations laid bare by the legacy it has earned. Inheriting the pulp narrative of Chuck Palahniuk's source novel, the movie is a failed satire, critique made incoherent by cinematic idioms where the visceral appeal of style is at odds with necessary intellectual remove. The love many feel for it is still easy to understand, whether it's masked by irony or proudly defended. David Fincher's bravura filmmaking makes toxicity seem cool, kinetic and self-aware. Though, Fight Club seduces too well and, in the end, is unable to bat away its lovers with some feeble pretension of dissected masculinity.

If 4chan had a cinematic embodiment, here it is, as gloriously enraged as it is putrid and entitled, shallowness dressed in a costume of depth. Quite frankly, it's even exhausting to write about the thing. Maybe because so much has been written already. After so much discussion of its theme, intent and Mephistophelean stylings, I propose we discuss an element of the picture that's rarely examined – the art of acting Fight Club…

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Beauty Break: Toshiro Mifune Centennial

by Nathaniel R

100 years ago on this very day Japan's most famous movie star Toshiro Mifune was born (in Qingdao, China, then Japanese occupied). He was "discovered" by accident, when friends entered him into a 'New Faces' competition. Word travelled all the way to Akira Kurosawa, that there was a young actor he had to see. Kurosawa was, in his own words, "transfixed" and the rest -- 16 films of a classic collaboration -- is history. For our Mifune Centennial celebration thus far we've covered Stray Dog, The Hidden Fortress, and Yojimbo but herewith a beauty break to bask in the photographic glory of this iconic masculine star...

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March. It's a Wrap

March was approximately a decade long but it has finally ended its interminable reign. Will April be as endless? Only the novel coronavirus knows. Here are a dozen blog highlights from the month that was...

March Highlights
• What if Sondheim's "Company" were a movie - Lynn ponders casting possibilites
• Top 100 Documentaries of the Decade - Glenn sees (and ranks) everything.
• The moment I fell for Kristen Stewart - Claudio looks at The Runaways (2010) for its 10th
• Lady in a Cage (1964) -Nathaniel gets in the elevator with Olivia de Havilland
• Never Rarely Sometimes Always -Murtada talks to director Eliza Hittman
• RIP Max Von Sydow -Nathaniel says farewell to a great
• Cate as Blue Jasmine - Murtada dives deep with special guests
• Deneuve in Repulsion - Jason minds the crack
• Emma and Cactus Flower - the podcast has returned
• Toshiro Mifune - a centennial celebration (the actual 100th is tomorrow - two more pieces coming)

Most Discussed
• Oscar Category Fraud Eric looks at the (screen percentage) numbers
• Not the Iron Lady - Claudio asks what should have been Meryl's Third?
• Daniel Day Lewis - the best three-time winner?

Toshiro Mifune @ 100: Yojimbo

Team Experience is celebrating the Centennial of Japan's great movie star Toshiro Mifune for the next couple of nights. Here's Eric Blume...

When the Akira Kurosawa film Yojimbo was released in 1961, he and Toshiro Mifune already had collaborated on over a dozen films, and this collaboration is widely considered one of their greatest.  It essentially birthed the character of The Man With No Name, was remade three years later by Hollywood as A Fistful of Dollars with Clint Eastwood, and has had an enduring influence on films for almost sixty years...

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Horror Actressing: Shelley Duvall in "The Shining"

by Jason Adams

Why isn't the face of "Cabin Fever" that of Shelley Duvall's? Why isn't it her Wendy Torrance huddled behind that bathroom door holding a knife that we see, instead of Jack Nicholson's Jack peering through the broken slats? I mean we all know the answer -- it rhymes with "Fuctural Fisogyny" -- but maybe we should start to do something about that. All of the news stories we've seen over the past few weeks about the victims of domestic abuse being quarantined at home with their abusers feels like a good start to having that conversation. Losing your mind trapped in a single location is scary, but being trapped in one place with a person you love who has lost theirs is scary tenfold.

For all of the abuse that Shelley Duvall suffered as an actress at the hands of her director Stanley Kubrick in the making of The Shining it feels just, and way overdue, to re-situate the film as that of Wendy Torrance's story of survival...

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