13 Toilet Theater Presents...

Fight Club 3: This Is Not A Movie…It's Masturbation...

You did too much, Eddie, too much.

Isn't it great when a movie interrupts itself to address its own piss-poor screenwriting cliches? I know I love it. I also love multiple, drawn-out, cigarette lighting and smoking takes that include methy, yammering soliloquies. It's kinda like hanging out with a tweaker, without all the usual trust issues. 

Even if this extra-long, turdy taquito of footage could tell a story it wouldn't have any idea how to. As many people saw around the turn of the millennium, David Fincher's (more accurately, Chuck Palahniuk's) Fight Club put an interesting psychological spin on zen practice, domestic terrorism and the Jekyll/Hyde phenomena. Fincher created what I thought was a cinematically artful although cynical, psych-thriller with some innovative (in 1999) use of vivid 4th-wall-breaking storytelling. Palahniuk's prose somehow psychically echolocated a male, 20-something, secret, cynical desire for the apocalypse in many of us then. The words are still fantastic, despite much of my cynicism, which has since subsided as has my old drive to manufacture Jackass-type antics. It remains a contribution to culture, unlike it's 2 disappointing, bastard offspring. 

Fight Club 2 was obviously The Mechanic. If you saw Fincher's film and then saw it, you would definitely agree. The only difference is that the Tyler Durden in this movie looked more like Guy Fieri from the Food Network and had no uber-cool, counter-culture lines. I was privileged enough to see Palahniuk read some of his (then-new) "Haunted" at the Union Square Barnes & Noble in NY back in 2005. It was pretty rad. (I also got to see William Gibson do a reading there too- awesome.) To skewer the one armed, rock-climber dude who upstaged him at a previous reading, Chuck literally threw fake severed arms into the audience that day. He said awesome shit, like "America loves a fixer-upper…Just look at Sarah Jessica Parker." He also said the one movie that he wanted to see most at that time was The Mechanic. Mockery is considered the highest form of flattery, so what is ripping-off? The highest form of being a poseur? Next time any actor gets that emaciated for a role it better be for a new version of 1984. Fuck The Mechanic. 

"This Is Not A Movie" promises what it delivers. It's not a movie. It's a big ol' tub of mouth diarrhea, where wrongly digested counter-culture chunks float in a shit, whisky and amphetamine sludge, peppered with flecks of crappy attempts at black comedy. It re-hashes the Fight Club Jekyll/Hyde dynamic without any dynamism whatsoever. It attempted to blow my mind with shocking revelations about the world around me, most of which I'd already realized by 10th grade. Then it threw these revelations at me from across the room for the rest of the movie while Eddie Furlong struggled with coherence as he had a conversation with his two alter egos: A Vegas sleaze bag and a whiny hippie.

Dude was John Motherfuckin' Connor. Future leader of the resistance in the war against the machines, man. What the hell happened?? If nothing else, let this be a call to arms for Eddie. Get a personal trainer, dude. Slow down on the substances, too. Aren't you a Dad now? I know there could still be some talent there. Maybe he already fried it all out. I guess we'll see.

It would definitely be the comeback of the week... if he still has the synapses. Maybe it's too late for him. Some people go too far. Dr. Gonzo says it best…"you did too much, man, too much, too much, too much." C'mon Ed. You can do it, dude! Find those boot straps. America loves a fixer upper, right?

-2012 Wielgorecki