Fight Club

First rule about fight club: you do NOT talk about fight club. Some may automatically feel that this movie is not for them because it is all about fighting. False! This movie is highly existential. On the surface we see Tyler Durden and the narrator and all these different characters who have nothing in common. There is violence. Oh there is TONS of violence. However, this movie is far from all fighting. The movie is based around the idea of fighting "the man." I saw this movie once when I was a kid, but I watched it recently completely forgetting how compelling this movie is. Tyler Durden seems like the bad guy throughout the movie, but in actuality we, the viewers, are the villains. He puts the brutal truth in our faces (my favorite idea). He says "You are not the car you drive. You are not the contents of your pocket." He is saying that the material things we own do not define us as a person, yet we always view this. The wealthy are treated better than the poor, but we are all God's children. He also says "Reject the basic assumption of civilization, especially the importance of material possessions." The entire movie represents how society has all fallen to the material world and no one is able to overcome it. Hence why Tyler Durden creates fight club. He allows people to feel something. When they fight they are no longer numb to the world. SPOILER ALERT! We are all Tyler Durden. The narrator creates Tyler Durden as his own persona because he is tired of his condo selling life. We all have the person in our minds that we strive to be. That person is who Tyler Durden represents. Plus let's be real here. Who doesn't want to see a young, shirtless Brad Pitt? I rate this movie 10/10 stars. It is a personal favorite of mine. However, it is hard to appreciate until you fully analyze the symbolic features throughout the film. Seriously, everyone should watch this.

The Fault In Our Stars

So I realize that technically the movie The Fault In Our Stars has not yet been released; I just want to discuss the book. I just finished reading it today. I decided upon this novel because I refuse to be a heathen who sees a movie before reading the book. I am not sure whether to be happy or sad about it. There are two sides I've taken to this book: one is that it is a love story about a girl and a boy with a tragedy at the end (basically every cliché romance novel) or two that it is a representation of death that no one wants to admit. The book was relatively pessimistic, but I guess that makes sense because it is about cancer. Then again the focus is far from a cancer novel. In fact, I was very impressed by the metaphorical aspect of it all. The character Augustus Waters was the type of character I have longed to see for a very long time. I have not loved a character so much since the Harry Potter books. He is the charming, charismatic type of character that everyone just wants to read about more and more. Yet he represented the brutal truth of death. The book tells us that we are all a statistic in the greater scheme of life. Time screws us all over eventually. All of us have a set number of days left on this earth (some more than others). However I think the scariest idea represented in the book was that all of us strive to make a mark on the earth before we die. We want to believe that when we die, people will remember us forever that it will be this great tragedy. Yet this is not true. It is such a pessimistic view but it is merely the truth that all of us hate to admit. When we die the world keeps moving. People mourn but eventually we are nothing but a forgotten memory to most. The sad reality is that all of us have this moral duty to treat the dying better than the living. Not to ruin the book, *SPOILER ALERT* but when one character is dying he sees people who have not talked to him in three years. They act like his best friend but no virtually nothing about him. Nevertheless, I have to say that I enjoyed John Green's pessimism throughout the novel. Not that I am a pessimistic. I have quite the optimistic view on life. John Green forces the reader to see beyond a cliché love story. He wants us to realize that we cannot live our lives until we can accept that one day we will die. I highly recommend everyone to read this book. After all the movie is coming out in about two weeks.