In general, when we pen a retrospective on a director’s oeuvre , we try and save them for when a filmmaker is deep into his career and has a least 15-plus films under his belt. But we’re making an exception here for David Fincher, who is obviously considered to be one of the most estimable modern auteurs working today, in the league of Christopher Nolan, if not higher and generally seems to be destined to have a career that will be looked back on with great admiration and panegyrics if it isn’t already.
Known for his impeccably stylish, technically meticulous and resoundingly tenebrous films that tend to gravitate towards anti-heroes, flawed protagonists and forsaken souls, Fincher’s films are always intensely dark, hyper-detailed, always challenging and never really fit for mass consumption. Yet, with each of his films arriving via a major studio, Fincher’s oeuvre does resonate with a strong contingent of mainstream audiences and “The Curious Case Of Benjamin Button” — his most accessible film — earned him the attention of the Academy that ignored his less embraceable, but much better, previous efforts.
The modern horror of his serial killer film ” Se7en” placed him firmly on the map, the anarchic “Fight Club” became a cult-classic basically the day it was released in theaters and the filmmaker has been highly in demand ever since. With “The Social Network” logging into theaters — and having already looked at 5 of his films (and more) that have yet to to the screen — we take a look back on an already impressive body of work that is only growing in stature with each new addition.
“The Game” (1997)
“The Game,” the “Twilight Zone”-y thriller about a wealthy businessman (Michael Douglas) who is engaged in an elaborate, possibly nefarious role playing game by his delinquent brother (Sean Penn), is probably David Fincher’s coolest cool-for-coolness-sake pop outing, but also his most hollow. No matter how deeply Fincher wants to connect the material (written by the geniuses that gave us “Terminator 3”) to resonate themes of loss, regret and legacy (since Douglas’ game begins on the anniversary of his father’s suicide), the movie is too slick and polished to be anything more than it is. Thankfully, what it is is a really fun rollercoaster ride, one with plenty of twists and turns and some extremely weird flourishes (like the fact that a large section of the film’s last act takes place in Mexico), anchored by two fine performances by Douglas and Penn (in a role written for Jodie Foster, hence his name – “Connie”). The film is a trifle for sure, with Fincher working comfortably within the flashy boundaries of his music video days and possibly stifled by the resounding critical and commercial approval of “ Se7en,” but it’s hard to fault a movie in which Spike Jonze shows up in the last scene as a concerned EMT technician, because that’s just funny. [C+]
as much as i agree with you that fight club is overrated, you come off as both pretentious and mean-spirited when you say "adored by the most mongoloid of male filmgoers". I take offense to "mongoloid" as somebody of asian heritage. It's a loaded word with a bad history. Also, why is a film's popularity mutually exclusive with its quality?
Panic Room better than The Game. Wrong.
"Adored by the most mongoloid of male filmgoers."
I'm a female, thank you very much.
Covering Fincher over the past week has brought to light this blog’s worst characteristics. Does dismissing a film as "overrated" in the first sentence really strike you as professional-grade film criticism? (Personally, I find Fight Club to be the best film of its decade, and maybe I just flatter myself but I do not believe I am what you so charmingly call a "mongoloid.") And how many times can you write that a film is not "the defining film of a generation”? We get it, you acknowledge that it is a good film, but not good enough to be universally praised. Thankfully, we have you and Armond White to be contrarian for the sake of being contrarian.
F Scott Fitzgerald wrote the short story Benjamin Button is based on you nincompoop.
your fight club take is way off. i can only assume this was written by a woman. or a gay.
boy did theplaylist get raped in this behemoth misfuck of an article.
Agree with the first three sentences of Fight Club and thought you should've continued to dissect what is wrong with the film. It is nowhere near the best of the 90s. It tries to be sure, Fincher and Norton even kept comparing it to The Graduate. But what The Graduate doesn't do at the end is have Ben at the church saying, "You know I just feel like empty because of you guys, the parents and these pressures that you put on me. You don't control my life!" No it ends with that grand rebellious act followed by that exhausted look of ambivalence suggesting futility. That is the job of a storyteller, you have a main conceit (Ben feels empty and lost like all of us) and by the conclusion you should have said something more.
Fight Club never gets past its main conceit which is your "analysis" at the end of your little piece. I put analysis in quotations because the Narrator flat out says it via voice over in the beginning. We get that Tyler represents all he is wishing to be. Expand on that, where does that take him? Can you even come close to the ambiguous truths of The Graduate ending? No, no, they just spend the last act of the movie explaining their metaphor ("You created me!") making the entire experience a waste of time. And yes it is beloved by the most obnoxious bro types.
-Hayden Maxwell
Does everyone need a reading comprehension lesson today? Those first three sentences of the Fight Club review apply to what others have/might say about the film. The writer then goes on to defend it.
You ruffled some feathers here, but yes, well-played. There's a lot of boobs who adore Fight Club for the wrong reasons. #4 Anon seems to be one of them
I know many an idiot who loves The Godfather. Therefore, the Godfather is bad. Fact.
But they said it was good. FACT.
Anon was right in that everyone else's take on the Fight Club blurb's first three sentences was wrong. The letter grade of A- should've told them the writer didn't think it was overrated. I'm just happy to see some love for Zodiac. It is the JFK of the 2000s. I think the grades for all the films were spot on for once. Three C's, a B and the rest A's.
Y'all are silly ducks. I wrote Fight Club and while I do think it loses its way in the third act, I still (mostly) love it.
Zodiac is def his best. Fight Club is def his worst. Sorry, but that is just how it is. & anyone coming here for serious criticism… seriously? This is just another bastion for barely kept in check studio-centric gossip.
Not that there is anything wrong with that.
It's a shame to see such stupidity amongst Playlist readers. I had thought it was a rather more enlightened bunch than the normal types who troll movie sites like AICN or Cinematical. At any rate…
If anything, the writer is not hard enough on some of these films. Benjamin Button is one of the worst pieces of drivel to come out of the cineplex in a long time while pretending to be art house fare.
Panic Room bugged the crap out of me with its plot holes, uninteresting characters and less than stellar performances.
And last but not least, Aliens 3 is a train wreck of epic proportions. That movie is a boring and pointless piece of garbage pretty much from start to finish. Unexciting, looks terrible, messy, uninteresting, confusing,boring characters… the list goes on and on about how terrible this film is.
But Zodiac is damn near masterpiece level and FIght Club and Se7en stand on their own two feet a lot higher than most films of today ever could.
I haven't visited The Game in quite some time, but I remember loving it for the high concept fun that it is. Anxious to revisit it soon.
Thanks for the well written article that is relevant and easy to discuss.
Maybe quotation marks with your first sentences re Fight Club would have been approriate and more reflective of the body of your review. But just to compare Fincher and Nolan this year. The Social Network: 97% RT T-meter score, 9.2 ave score, 100% with Top critics, 97 on Metacritic. Inception: 87% RT score, 8 ave. score, 79% with Top critics, 74 on Metacritic. Not even close.
'fight club' is not overrated. i hate when a film is bashed because it was picked up my mainstream nonintellectual sort. get over it.
'zodiac' is fincher's best film, however.
As much as I love Fight Club, and I really do, it's hard to protest that many of its fans are morons who even after seeing it over and over think it's a movie about fighting.
Actually, the bar-code tattoos in Alien3 were the only bit that survived from William Gibson's earlier treatment. But yeah, they were very Fincher-ish.
So many angry anons! Chill out people, overrated doesn't mean is bad, FC is a great film (A), but is defiantly overrated.
Finally someone agree with me, Fincher has more bad films then good films. Thank you Playlist for having the guts to do this list.
Watch out with the mongoloid males!
" I find Fight Club to be the best film of its decade" – fearlessweaver
HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA
This is a great feature on David Fincher. I really love Fincher's work and couldn't agree more with these. When Benjamin Button released, I thought it was a nice film but wasn't as great as his previous efforts.