This week, Brad Pitt and Edward Norton start a violent secret society and fight club.
Richard Farnsworth goes on a journey of discovery in the straight story.
And Bruce Willis and Michelle Pfeiffer make love and war in the story of us.
It hit me in the ear!
Well, Jesus, I'm sorry.
Ow! Christ! By the ear, man!
Oh, that was perfect.
Brad Pitt and Edward Norton share a painful introduction to fight club in one of four new movies we'll be reviewing this week.
And we'll take a look at movies on the Internet.
I'm Roger Ebert of the Chicago Sun-Times.
And I'm Michaela Pereira of ZDTV's Internet Tonight.
Well, it's nice to be here on the balcony, Roger.
Welcome aboard. You know, they say that movies and the Internet and television are all converging,
and so they're going to converge on you and you're going to tell us about them, right?
Tell you a little bit about that later.
Okay. First movie, it's called Fight Club, and it's a brutal and satirical film about a character who believes that men are lost and powerless in today's society.
His recommendation, if they get together on a regular basis and pound each other to a bloody pulp, they'll be a lot happier and more effective.
As the movie opens, we meet the narrator, played by Edward Norton, who fears he's going crazy, driven mad by capitalism and consumerism.
As a way of venting his grief, he attends 12-step meetings for people with real problems.
He's a tourist, and one day he meets another faker, played by Helena Bonham Carter.
Yeah, I've seen you. I saw you had melanoma. I saw you had tuberculosis. I saw you had testicular cancer.
I saw you practicing this.
Practicing what?
Telling me off. Is it going as well as you hoped?
He's in worse shape than ever when he meets Tyler Gertin, who wants to be hit hard. He's played by Brad Pitt.
I want you to hit me as hard as you can.
Why?
How much can you know by yourself if you've never been in a fight?
Tyler Gertin becomes the founder of a secret male society named Fight Club that stages bloody brawls in basements.
Fourth rule, only two guys to a fight.
Fifth rule, one fight at a time, fellas.
Sixth rule, no shirts, no shoes.
Seventh rule, fights will go on as long as they have to.
One of the narrator's support group friends is a guy named Bob, played by Meat Loaf a Day.
They share what they know about the founder of Fight Club.
Supposedly, he was born in a mental institution, and he sleeps only one hour a night. He's a great man.
Do you know about Tyler Gertin?
The movie is very well made by David Fincher, who also directed Seven, but it goes from good to bad to worse in its story, I think.
The opening is savage social satire, very promising. I really liked it.
But then the movie switches over to stylish brutality and despair. It's kind of a quasi-fascist, vomitorian.
Fight Club contains the raw materials for a great film, but I don't think it had the courage to go all the way with its original vision from hell,
and instead it turns into stylish macho porn and blows stuff up real good.
It claims to be, I think, against violence, but at the same time it exploits it like crazy.
I don't think a lot of people in the audience are going to get what it thinks its message is.
I couldn't disagree with you more, but I did like your line about stylish macho porn. That was beautiful.
I'm a person very much opposed to violence, gratuitous violence in movies. However, I found myself being wrapped up in this.
I understood why these guys were rebelling against society, wanting to punch the crap out of each other.
It wrapped me up from start to finish. I really felt involved in this movie.
Pitt and Norton were wonderful in each of their roles.
Oh, they are, yeah.
They were wonderful. I mean, I always looked to Norton to provide me with that dose of reality when the psychotic Pitt was taking me to places that I didn't want to go.
I thought it was a really comprehensive film.
But you know, why couldn't they have been allowed to interact on the level of personal psychological crisis
instead of the whole movie having to be escalated into some kind of an apocalyptic vision, which is basically on autopilot?
I mean, the last half of this movie we've seen before in many different ways than many other films,
and I would have liked it if they'd stuck with the original vision.
But they did. I mean, as the film progressed, so did his psychoses.
I mean, the fact is they were trying to take us inside of this man's mind, and that's what happened,
and that's why it kept getting more intense and tense, in my opinion.
Well, I know that many people are going to agree with your opinion.
I'm sure that's going to be the majority of you on this film, but I just felt that the first half hour made me think,
boy, this movie is going to take off in flight. It's going to go all the way,
and then for it to just turn into a more routine handling of the same material disappointment.
Well, and I found that I was going to agree with you.
I didn't plan on liking it, and it really brought me into it, and I got wrapped up in the film.
All right, we're going to change gears a little bit here.
In the Straight story, directed by David Lynch and based on actual events,
Richard Farnsworth brilliantly plays Alvin Straight, a 73-year-old man who learns that his estranged brother has had a stroke.
In an effort to set things right, Alvin decides to make the long journey from Iowa to Wisconsin,
but he's unable to drive because he's legally blind and relies on two canes to walk.
So Alvin prepares his old riding lawnmower to make the trip.
Here's Cissy Spacek, who plays Alvin's daughter, tries to talk some sense into her father.
You were born when a village was a president of America.
You are the same three years old, Dad, and I could not drive you there.
Rose, darling, I'm not dead yet.
Alvin has several significant encounters, and in each case, in a most endearing way, he passes on his own brand of wisdom.
Here he shares his campfire with a young runaway.
When my kids were real little, I used to play a game with them.
I'd give each one of them a stick, one for each one of them, and I'd say, you break that.
Of course, they could, but it was easy.
Then I'd say, tie them sticks in a bundle, try to break that.
Of course, they couldn't.
Then I'd say, that bundle, that's family.
One night, while camped in a churchyard, Alvin tells the parish priest the story of how he and his brother drifted apart.
Anger, vanity, you mix that together with liquor.
You've got two brothers that haven't spoken in ten years.
Not only is this a wonderful and heartwarming, yet simple story, but it is also beautiful to look at.
I loved Lynch's depiction of the American heartland, using powerful images of the serenity and vastness of the country's farmlands.
The soundtrack by Angelo Badalamente was both soaring and mournful.
This film took me away from the hustle and bustle of my fast-paced urban life.
I highly recommend the straight story.
Boy, I do too.
I know what you mean about the American heartland, because as he goes on this odyssey, he depends on the kindness of strangers.
I think of that man named Reardon, who lets him camp out in the backyard.
The John Deere repairman, who has the philosophical talk with him, and the priest.
And the old bartender who gives him that bottle of Miller Lite.
And the old, old man at the bar.
They were all likable.
Yes, he tells him the story of what happened in the war, and this guilt he walks around with.
All of these people.
This film is just imbued with that kind of feeling.
The thing that I really liked too was that the family, the straight family, was quite concerned when they were making this story.
I mean, even having Lynch direct the story would have been questionable enough.
But the fact that he did such a beautiful job of showing this man, who lived a simple lifestyle, but was by no means simple.
He had wisdom to share with people.
And he just depicted it so beautifully that they can feel proud.
And that really comes out in Richard Farnsworth's performance.
Here's a man who is absolutely, totally genuine and believable in every single second.
He cannot say a line that you don't believe that he believes.
And so that really, I think, is the bedrock of the film.
Well, it looks like we both agree on that one.
Coming up later in the show, my special report on how the Internet is changing the movie industry.
And coming up next, Bruce Willis and Michelle Pfeiffer are unhappily married in the story of us.
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At first it was a romance made in heaven as comedy writer Bruce Willis met a goofy temp worker played by Michelle Pfeiffer in that scene.
But now their marriage has turned sour and most of the new film, The Story of Us,
consists of the unhappily married couple fighting or refusing to talk to each other at all.
The movie was directed by Rob Reiner who also plays Willis' best friend and supplies him with some cornball philosophy.
What are you saying, you and Rachel stay together because you're afraid?
In a word, yes.
And you're okay with that?
In three words, yes and no.
See, it's not that simple.
You're looking for clear-cut answers.
In reality, there is nothing clear-cut.
Life is not clear-cut.
Each partner has a scene of dinner with friends who complain about the opposite sex.
His mother is suddenly all you're aware of is that there are too many wet towels on the floor,
he's hugging the remote and he's scratching his back with a fork.
And finally you come face to face with the immutable truth that it's virtually impossible to French kiss a person who takes the new roll of toilet paper
and leaves it resting on top of the empty cardboard roll.
They keep up appearances before their children but when the kids are out of the room we see their real relationship.
But the Dodgers are playing the Giants.
Go.
I go too.
Go.
Bruce Willis and Michelle Pfeiffer are people that we like and why in the world did Rob Reiner think we wanted to see them be miserable for 90 minutes?
Especially since the movie is so shallow and lightweight that it has no useful insights in the marriage or much of anything else.
After a while I felt like you do when you're in a restaurant and the people at the next table are fighting and you just want to get up and move.
I mean, geez.
At risk of agreeing with you, I did not want to sit through a movie theater with a bunch of other people watching a couple fight for 90 minutes.
I know.
As a kid I used to hide under my bed when my folks were fighting.
I don't want to watch that.
There were some nice sprinkle bits of comedy provided by Rita Wilson through this film.
They were nice and they were some humorous, clever, but I wanted this couple to break up.
I didn't want to see them together.
They spent the whole time fighting.
That's exactly the way I felt.
And you know, even when they show the happy times in the past, they're contrived like the couple that they meet in Venice.
I mean, that belongs in a different kind of movie.
And as you sit there and they're so cruel and mean and heartless and brokenhearted toward each other and they have all of these communication breakdowns and you want to say, get me to another movie.
It was like a big old therapy session.
It was.
And in fact, the part that really sent me over the edge, Roger, was these confessionals to camera a la real world.
I'm so over that.
I think it is overdone and it did nothing to help this movie, which I thought was at best mediocre.
You got it.
When we come back, Michaela has a special report on a happy marriage between the movies and the worldwide web.
Today on IHOP Revealed, is there more to IHOP than perfect pancakes?
For the answer, we stumbled upon a secret IHOP workshop and began our investigation with this man.
But his lips were sealed.
Digging deeper, we found this man, feverishly concocting delectable entrees, soups, salads and this, the delicious sourdough bacon burger melt.
Served on Parmesan grilled sourdough.
Just one of IHOP's mouth-watering new burgers.
Though he wouldn't talk, he did confirm that any time's a good time for IHOP.
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Hollywood has been using the Internet as a promotional tool for a few years now.
And pretty much every new release has a corresponding website.
But in many cases, those sites would go up literally on the Friday the movie opened.
Well, that was until this summer when a little film took America by storm, largely due to the hype generated on the Internet.
That film was The Blair Witch Project.
Oh my God! What the f*** is that?
Buzz about The Blair Witch Project had been reaching Internet tonight since last winter.
And as the summer grew closer, the buzz got louder.
On opening day, the lines to see the movie went around the block.
Now the studios are souping up their promo websites and getting them online earlier and earlier.
For example, the family film Stuart Little doesn't open until December, but it already has a fabulous animation-intensive promotional site.
If the movie is this fun, make sure to be a crowd pleaser.
You spit Stuart out this instant, Stobel. Spit him right out.
We do not eat family members.
The Internet provides a cheap way for anyone to see films.
So what can you see now?
Well, most of the movies are short independent works, which are a perfect fit for the Web.
One of my favorite websites for indie flicks is Adam Films.
Here you can see hundreds, like cookies by Todd Lippi.
Who'd like to try a delicious home-baked cookie, free of charge?
All natural ingredients, baked with love.
And there are other sites as well, D-Film and iFilm, to name just a few.
Watching movies on your computer can be pretty frustrating, especially if you aren't lucky enough to have fast access to the Web.
However, right now, animation online looks great.
Ho, ho, ho, my fellow Americans. You know, I love the holidays.
See, in this special time of year, our thoughts turn from day-to-day cares, like special prosecutors, inappropriate relationships, and impeachment proceedings.
You'll find amazing original cartoons on websites like.comics, shockwave.com, and Comedy Central.
The other part of the movie business that the Internet is changing is screenwriting.
Resources and communities for screenwriters abound on the Net.
As well, some filmmakers have used the Internet to not only create their work, but to help finance it.
Case in point, Mark Tapio Kynes' film, Foreign Correspondence.
Well, here I am, 516, right there. So, hey, I'll see you on Tuesday night.
Kynes managed to raise enough awareness and money online to finish his film.
He's found a distributor, and you'll perhaps see his film soon at a theater near you.
So it looks like the sky's the limit with this.
Yeah, especially if access speed gets faster. I now have a new DSL line, and the movies have gotten a lot better.
When it started out, you would look at this little postage stamp that renewed itself every ten seconds.
And now, you get a picture about this big, where the video is pretty good.
I'm not, as a critic, I'm still not ready to review a movie based on what I can get over the Web,
but I know that that day is coming, and it may only be a year or two in the future.
It's coming fast. It's all about speed, and it's on its way. So be prepared.
Okay, when we come back, the peculiar and controversial new film, Julian Donkeyboy.
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Excuse me, excuse me, excuse me. Do you know where's my family tree? My family tree, this tree or that tree.
I got family in my tree, and my family...
That's a scene from Julian Donkeyboy, a very strange and I think insidiously interesting new film from Harmony Kareen,
who while still in his early 20s has already written the controversial drama Kids,
and written and directed Gummo, a movie that inspired a lot of passionate pros and cons.
And now comes Julian Donkeyboy, and I want to start out loud and clear by announcing that about 95% of all moviegoers,
and maybe more, are likely to hate this film intensely.
So that's my disclaimer, and don't come complaining to me if you go to see the film and you don't like it.
But having said that, I admired this film.
Julian, played by Ewan Bremner from Trainspotting, is the film's schizophrenic hero,
and here he is at dinner with his father, played by the legendary director, Vanna Herzog.
This is a profoundly dysfunctional family.
It doesn't even rhyme. You repeat chaos, chaos, chaos, and it doesn't even rhyme.
Chaos.
How about that?
Midnight.
No, shut up. Shut up. Shut up.
I don't like it because it's so artsy-fartsy.
You see, I like the real stuff.
I like something like the end of Dirty Harry.
I saw this Dirty Harry, and the end is really a damn freak big shout out.
The movie was shot on digital video, and then it went through a lot of manipulation and post-production.
It subscribes to Dogma 95, the manifesto from Denmark,
asking directors to use real light, natural sounds, and handheld cameras.
Why don't you tell your sister that she's a dilettante?
She's never going to learn to play this harp.
She's a dilettante, and she's a slut.
Despite the Dogma rules, or maybe because of them,
Julian Donkeyboy is visually wildly creative.
It looks like a jumble of disorganized images,
but out of the maze emerges the story of Julian, his pregnant sisters, played by Chloe Sevigny,
his brother, the high school wrestler, and his crazy father.
Be a man. Be a man and quit that moody broovin'. Quit that.
You're cold!
In spirit and style, Julian Donkeyboy is a throwback to the experimental underground films of the 1960s
and to appreciate it fully, it probably helps to have a certain amount of experience
in seeing offbeat experimental films, or maybe it helps to have no experience at all.
It's not a film you understand from moment to moment, I admit that, but it all adds up.
For me it did anyway, and at the end I was thinking, yes, Harmony Kareen is the real thing.
He may not be for everybody, and at times he's not for anybody,
but he's got the passion of an artist, and he has a lot of crazy courage.
Julian Donkeyboy has a mysterious, almost hypnotic quality, and what?
What do you think about this?
To quote Werner Herzog in the movie, I don't like artsy-fartsy, I like the real thing.
I know that I fall into the 95 percentile, but I have to say, I left feeling physically nauseous
because of the way this was shot. It was extremely experimental, it succeeded on that level.
It was successful in showing the life, the view of the world from a schizophrenic's point of view.
Is it watchable? No. I don't think it is watchable for the average American viewer,
than the average North American viewer. It was difficult to see, it was non-linear.
We all like to think an intro, body, and conclusion didn't even follow that.
Well, I agree with you. In fact, I already said it's not for 95 percent of the viewers,
maybe 98 percent of the viewers. There are some people who are going to look at this and say,
Harmony Kareen has really broken through the envelope. He has really achieved what he wanted to do here.
He has taken no hostages, he hasn't dumbed it down for anyone, he hasn't made it easy,
but he has achieved something that has to be honored.
And there's a continuation of what he was doing in Gama, which I did like for the record, I did like.
It was watchable. I didn't find this film watchable. I could not grasp what it was trying to tell me
or what it was trying to do.
Okay, so I know you speak for 98 percent of the viewers and I speak for that other 2 percent
and we know who we are. When we come back, our Video Pick of the Week,
the funniest of all the Frankensteins.
My assistant, Inga, may I present Frau Blucher?
The
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The Reburd in the Movies video pick of the week is brought to you by Nestle's Raisedettes.
At the Movies or at home, Raisedettes.
Mel Brooks' 1974 film Young Frankenstein has become a comedy classic, a spoof of all horror films,
lovingly combining elements from a lot of sources, but especially from James Whale's 1935 classic, The Bride of Frankenstein.
My video pick of the week stars Gene Wilder as Dr. Frankenstein and Peter Boyle as the monster.
We shall command the thunders and penetrate into the very womb of impervious nature herself.
Here's maybe my favorite scene, the monster as a song and dance man.
If you're blue and you don't know where to go to, why don't you go where fashion sits?
Bring the relief!
Now Young Frankenstein has been released on tape and DVD in a new 25th anniversary edition and it's my video pick of the week.
Now let's take another look at the movies we reviewed this week.
A big split decision on Fight Club with Edward Norton and Brad Pitt.
Michaela was really caught up with it. I thought it ran off the rails after a brilliant start.
Two very affectionate thumbs up though for the straight story with Richard Farnsworth in a heartwarming performance.
Two thumbs down, way down for the story of us. Who wants to see two people fighting for 90 minutes?
And finally a split decision on Julie and Donkey Boy. I thought it was a brilliant, a very difficult film.
Michaela thought it was certainly difficult.
Well the one I really liked Roger, The Straight Story. It was a beautiful film.
I felt so happy to finally see a movie that made me feel this good about life.
Well I think 98% of everybody is going to like that and we know which movie the other 2% can go to.
Thanks a lot Michaela for being here.
Thank you very much for having me.
It was a lot of fun. Remember you can hear our reviews, Michaela's and mine, on the web at ebert-movies.com, part of Go Network.
And go to Michaela's site, internettonight.com, for links to every single site that she mentioned in her piece on this show.
Next week more new movies including Martin Scorsese's Bringing Out the Dead with Nicolas Cage.
And until then the balcony is closed.