Friday, 6-Feb-09 was an interesting day, because myself and a few friends from work gathered for an evening movie screening of Fight Club!  I brought my laptop (and speakers and other stuff) to office in the morning, and showed the movie on it.  Like in a theatre, trailers were shown before the main feature and I was giving commentary on the movie too!  Trailers shown included Watchmen (of course), 300, 2012, Terminator Salvation, Banlieue 13 and the sequel Banlieue 13 Ultimatum, Blade Runner: The Final Cut, Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen and G I Joe: Rise of Cobra.

It was great to watch the movie again — I was reminded of how much I love this movie and why.  I have seen Fight Club numerous times from Engineering days, and I could always relate to it.  Edward Norton's character of the Narrator is supposed to be an "everyman" which means that he is representative of all of us who can't take control of our lives and let external situations govern us.  Tyler Durden (Brad Pitt) is the way we all wish to be — smart, cool, and powerful (because he has nothing to lose).  Now I can't obviously speak for others, but I can definitely relate to this!  There's a little of Tyler in everyone.  In the movie though, this "breaking free" is taken to an extreme and it goes out of control.  But I love the underlying theme (a similar theme runs through American Beauty as well, just that it's a much lighter movie).  I guess having the movie explained allowed the audience to appreciate it more, and I hope to do more such "screenings" in the future!

I was extremely inspired after watching the movie this time.  I did two photo manipulation experiments, based on the movie.  Of course, I am only the "model" for both these photos.  This was the first attempt —

I do think I went a little overboard on the FX in this one though.  But I think it turned out pretty nicely.  At any rate, I think it's not a bad effort, for a quick photo taken with my laptop webcam and ten minutes spent in Photoshop.  The next experiment though, was far more successful in my opinion —

This one was taken with my Nokia N82 cellphone camera and I am quite proud of this.  I think it's a more restrained picture due to which the effect stands out better.  Again, all bruises are done on computer only.  I want to do further movie-inspired photos like this — planning to buy a proper camera and then set up the photos better (a little better staging, lighting, props, makeup FX will go a long way!).  By the way I have recorded a number of videos also inspired by Fight Club, but these are not being uploaded on YouTube or anything (as people will doubt my sanity then).