Comments on: The Films Of David Fincher: A Retrospective

By: Hieu Chau

Hieu Chau — Sun, 03 Oct 2010 07:48:10 +0000

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.

By: Joel

Joel — Sat, 02 Oct 2010 23:57:56 +0000

" I find Fight Club to be the best film of its decade" - fearlessweaver

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA

By: Robert.

Robert. — Sat, 02 Oct 2010 19:01:53 +0000

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!

By: Patrick

Patrick — Sat, 02 Oct 2010 16:48:08 +0000

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.

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Sat, 02 Oct 2010 09:31:18 +0000

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.

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Sat, 02 Oct 2010 08:27:24 +0000

'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.

By: KitCon

KitCon — Sat, 02 Oct 2010 04:08:07 +0000

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.

By: Drewbacca

Drewbacca — Sat, 02 Oct 2010 04:00:22 +0000

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.

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Sat, 02 Oct 2010 02:55:32 +0000

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.

By: rodrigoperez

rodrigoperez — Fri, 01 Oct 2010 23:03:04 +0000

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.

By: cirkusfolk

cirkusfolk — Fri, 01 Oct 2010 22:28:15 +0000

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.

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Fri, 01 Oct 2010 21:15:18 +0000

But they said it was good. FACT.

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Fri, 01 Oct 2010 21:00:51 +0000

I know many an idiot who loves The Godfather. Therefore, the Godfather is bad. Fact.

By: AlexP

AlexP — Fri, 01 Oct 2010 20:43:01 +0000

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

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Fri, 01 Oct 2010 20:24:55 +0000

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.

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Fri, 01 Oct 2010 20:21:17 +0000

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

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Fri, 01 Oct 2010 20:21:09 +0000

boy did theplaylist get raped in this behemoth misfuck of an article.

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Fri, 01 Oct 2010 19:59:02 +0000

your fight club take is way off. i can only assume this was written by a woman. or a gay.

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Fri, 01 Oct 2010 19:57:07 +0000

F Scott Fitzgerald wrote the short story Benjamin Button is based on you nincompoop.

By: fearlessweaver

fearlessweaver — Fri, 01 Oct 2010 19:56:30 +0000

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.

By: dani

dani — Fri, 01 Oct 2010 19:53:31 +0000

"Adored by the most mongoloid of male filmgoers."

I'm a female, thank you very much.

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Fri, 01 Oct 2010 19:44:09 +0000

Panic Room better than The Game. Wrong.

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Fri, 01 Oct 2010 19:34:29 +0000

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?