Fight Club is, at first, a dark comedy about an individual lost in modern society. He lives in a condo, eats junk, and has an addiction to buying furniture - because what the hell else is he going to do with his money as a single, well-paid, obedient member of the middle class? He also develops insomnia and looks at the world through a very dark lens: flourescent lights in his office keeping everyone satiated like monkeys in a cage; constant caffeine and junk addiction with piles of trash all around; the false sheen of the world in the form of corporate offices and airports. There are some great one liners early on ("this is your life, and it's ending one minute at a time") and some very clever moves by director David Fincher to make this Chuck Palahniuk novel come to life on the screen. The little we learn of Jack's past seems to paint a picture of a generation, which makes for good metaphor and necessarily complicates Jack's character to make him more interesting.

The real fun, however, begins when our main character meets a fellow business traveler named Tyler Durden. Phase I of this mission of a film is to critique modern society lightly and playfully, while Jack (played wonderfully by Ed Norton) trudges through life and support groups he has no business going to, just so he can "cry and sleep". Phase II is the process of Tyler warming Jack up to the idea that there are more important things in life than lightly poking fun of society even while doing nothing about it, in classic hipster fashion, and asks Jack to do him one simple favor - "I want you to hit me as hard as you can." This blossoms into an underground movement of Jack-a-likes; business men who travel and deal with corporate nothingness all day who simply need to feel something real. Many of these followers, named "space monkeys" in hilarious fashion by Tyler, fall into line and do what they are told because they know that destroying modern society and following a strong leader for a worthy cause is much better than continuing to live with no goals and no leadership. As Tyler says - "we're the middle children of history, men - no purpose or place. We have no great war; no great depression..our great war's a spiritual war; our great depression, is our lives."

While entertaining in its own right, Fight Club ultimately fails to answer a question it can't help but pose to attentive viewers with its nihilistic attitude toward modern society: It's all well and good to destroy a society if people are so helpless that no other method will do (think the wonderful Ra's Al Ghul in Batman Begins) - but what then? The complete picture is outside the scope of the film and these questions are not answered, neither by Chuck Palahniuk (author of the novel), nor by David Fincher (director). It's too bad, because the film seems to almost get there but can't quite make the leap, focusing instead on the main character's ultimate decision to fix his own twisted mind instead of using the immense amount of energy he's built to help rebuild society. This film focuses entirely on the destruction of modern society while taking some fun jabs at it, and for those purposes, it's worth a watch - you'll find yourself rewatching it many times over the course of years, and thinking to yourself on what a society built by Jack and Tyler Durden would look like.

Seems like everyone today is bored, one way or the other. Why else would we spend so much time on Facebook, playing computer games or watching lousy movies? Corporations know this very well and take pleasure in our boredom, because it means they can squeeze out yet another entertainment service (see the ad to the right, which pops up every time I log on to Technorati).

People look at boredom the wrong way for two reasons:

1. Boredom is the absence of being occupied with something, but sometimes it's healthy to simply cool down, maybe just take a walk in the park or lie in the sun for an hour or two to think about life at large. You don't need to have things going on 24/7.

2. People who are bored easily turn to entertainment, because the very function of entertainment is to make time pass. What we forget is that entertainment eventually becomes a goal in itself; this is how people get sucked into WoW, Blockbusters, computer games and chart music. It becomes a drug. Now you're not only spending a lot of time trying to escape the emptiness lurking in your life, but you're also letting that emptiness control you.

I suspect a lot of you reading this are waiting for a fancy theory about how people can ditch entertainment and join a higher spiritual cause, or something. I think it's much easier than that. Instead of trying to pass time, you need a long-term goal that involves constant commitment. Here are some suggestions:

• Gardening: not as gay as you'd think, when you realize there's quite a lot of hard work behind planting a tree, watering it regularly, and making sure extreme cold/warmth doesn't kill it. If you have a bigger space available, why not plant flowers as well and try to create appealing color patterns? Plants that bear fruits and vegetables are of course extra fun to grow, and it can be done right inside your apartment if need be.
• Physical training: working with your body is awesome, because if you have a goal to become a faster runner, a better football player, or gain 10 kilos of muscle, you need to be consistent or else you'll fail. Physical exercise with a long-term goal in mind should be part of everyone's lifestyle, even if that goal is very modest. A plus is of course that you'll also have to find a healthy diet and thus start cooking real food other than the average pasta salad any idiot can produce.
• Nonprofit work: some of the most lovable, honest and healthy friends I've known in my life have been involved in nonprofit work of some kind, whether it's taking care of homeless kittens on weekends, working for a political party, or cleaning up green areas. The nonprofit part isn't that important (nothing wrong with getting paid for good work), but it often highlights a commitment beyond simply making money or increasing social status. People who work for no money do it because they believe in something. With a goal like that you will quickly empower yourself with positive change, and surround yourself with like-minded people.
• Housework: far too underrated. Of course everyone has to clean up the house/apartment every now and then to avoid living in a dumpster, but housework also involves fun things like cleaning drain pipes, hammering loose nails, setting up shelves and installing new electric outlets where needed. Under housework I also add more hobby-oriented things like building random things in the garage and repairing your car. The goal? To maintain a beautiful, playful and practical place all by yourself. If you're a man, I guarantee you'll impress female visitors.
• Relationship: I say relationship, not just love/fling/one night stand, because anyone with a sense of charm can pick up a person from the opposite sex and have some fun, but today there are fewer and fewer people who are able to maintain real relationships. Keeping a relationship alive is similar to keeping a flower alive. Commitment, consistency, and passion. It's a goal for sure, one I hope most of you are either already committed to, or are aspiring to commit yourself to.

There's more, but if you use your fantasy and playfulness, you'll discover it along the way. Life is full of challenges, you just have to pick your personal commitments and get started. Now, some will say that just because you have a goal in life, you're not free from boredom. True, but that's missing the point: when you do have something important going on in your life, you really don't need to fill out the rest of the time, because you'll want some time off from work and instead enjoy the quietness and spacious beauty of time passing. I think you'll agree that experiencing that peacefulness of the soul is more important than any entertainment you can think of.

Alex recently reviewed a batch of Hollywood movies for their liberalist qualities. He made a passing mention to American History X, of which I would like to speak further.

The movie has some good points and some bad points. The good points are that it shows racists to mainly be a bunch of low-brow numb nuts, and that the extent of their political activism is to hilariously segregate themselves and their ideas; in reality this is quite accurate. The main bad point is that its honourable attempt at critiquing racist mindsets is terribly done.

The protagonist, who impliedly inherited his racistness from his father, seems to have a little more smarts about him and uses these to organise a skinhead movement around him. They go around shouting "took our jobs!," smashing up grocery stores and then managing to beat black people at basketball, at which point the whole illusion becomes dangerously fragile.

The main white guy gets sent to jail for something or other. Then he gets raped in the showers by some white racists and afterwards makes a non-threatening black mate. He stops being racist after this. So does his younger brother, but he gets shot by a black boy at school, which must have been a little annoying after all of his progress. Maybe he should have worn a SHARP badge or something.

So the moral of the film (I think) is that we need to parachute drop non-threatening blacks into white neighbourhoods to teach the nervous locals that ethnic people are cool too! Then we get some white guys to go around raping to show people that white people can be complete shits sometimes.

Yes, It wouldn't help to note that interaction with different people aids understanding, but when the basic premise of this film, and every other anti-racist film from Hollywood, is to try and tackle the huge and multi-faceted problem of racial tension with the lesson "make an ethnic mate" or "blame white bigotry" without even skimming the surface of ideas or different contexts, the message becomes predictably banal.

Liberalism is one of the slipperiest ideologies you can think of, because its appearance fools us about its consequences. You always hear liberal people talk about equality and individual rights, but when you ask them how they're going to achieve that, their response is a government-sanctioned program. They assure us we should trust the authorities to make us all one and the same. Something's not right here.

Liberals want the government to force us to conform to their nutty equal rights ideals, which not only have proven to increase race and class conflicts, but also bring us bureaucratic tyranny, a robbed middle class, relativist indoctrination at schools, civilization exhaustion, and chaotic multicultural suburbs. To understand the psychology behind liberalism, tune into any random Blockbuster. Here's a handful of their propaganda arsenal:

Strange Days (1995)

James Cameron's sci-fi-millenium drama, involving a rough black police woman, her pathetic white male friend selling human experiences in digital form on the underground market, and his white male friend who turns out to be a psychopath raping and killing women to, in the end, steal his friend's whory rockstar ex-girlfriend. Is that even an actual plot? I don't know, but the movie's pretty entertaining and may at face value seem to carry some depth.

That is, until you realize it's the same liberal fodder suggesting society is in chaos because of an oppressive, white police force set out to execute a famous black rapper who wants to start an equal rights riot. But hey, if you feel discriminated against and belong to a minority, rioting is always the liberal way to go. If you happen to kill someone, blame it on childhood abuse or oppressive power structures in society. Strange Days is liberalism marketed in a slick, appealing form, touching our emotional radar like ice cream stimulates our taste buds.

Crash (2004)

If you thought American History X smelled liberal, wait until your sensitive new girlfriend or closet liberal friend forces you to watch this one. Crash intertwines the fate of several racially charged situations where people of different colors are forced to confront each other. I know this sounds emotional right there, but what's hilarious about this movie is that it eventually becomes something of a comedy. Black people run over Asians, stop the car, notice the "accident;" pull rap jokes, and continue driving. That's the "black crime" in this movie.

The white people, of course, are the real racists here, distrusting their Hispanic locksmith simply because he's foreign. Oh my god! To avoid hitting too much on the whitie, they include a pretty funny confrontation between an Arab and a Hispanic. The problem is that we're having a hard time taking this stupid garbage seriously. In the end, the black woman in the burning car gets rescued by the oh-so-previously-racist white cop. Tear, tear. My old high school still uses this movie as education material about racism. I am not kidding.

Titanic (1997)

Yes, I just had to include it, but why? Isn't it pretty lovely to see Leonardo DiCaprio pick up beautiful Kate Winslet on a steam boat? Don't the soft nude scene and the awesome effects at least deserve some credit? I agree, but if we take a closer look, we see that this movie is nothing but another liberal love story. Let's see: bored out rich girl meets artsy and playful but poor guy, girl and guy fall in love with each other despite class differences, and uptight rich parents are upset.

What next? The boat sinks and of course all the rich people act like selfish monsters, while the poor have to sacrifice themselves, since they are embodied with the glowing spiritual light of Goodness. I can't say all of this crap makes up for the two mentioned positive things about the movie. It's another liberal con job that subtly suggests you're heartless and boring if you've got a lot of money, while you're eternally innocent and full of artistic passion if you're constantly broke. Yawn.

Dr. Strangelove (1964)

I know, I've praised this movie before, and will continue to do so, because it's simply a masterpiece. So what's wrong with it? Anything reducing complex reality to a simple format, which satires by nature do, runs the risk of being used for different purposes than intended. Dr. Strangelove is a hilarious portrayal of how nutty top executives within administrations can cause more conflicts than solve them, and we better heed that wisdom knowing how the Bush Administration became so pragmatic that it circumvented the Western belief in the rule of law.

But we all know that's not how this movie will be interpreted. It'll be seen as yet another liberal shot at right-wing Reaganism. Look at what happens when Conservatives try to establish diplomacy with foreign governments! If we just cuddled and hugged with Gorbachev, Soviet Russia would eventually admire our freedom and join a happy ending. Not. But at least, Hollywood liberals argue, we can dream of it and pretend it's real, and if someone says that's insane, we point to movies like these and claim you're intolerant and bigoted.

Enemy of the State (1998)

Government surveillance paranoia, political murder, underground technology complexes and a black family rescued from all of this thanks to a retired white expert in...government surveillance and underground technology? Pinch me, or am I watching a liberal movie? What's funny about this Will Smith-Gene Hackman Blockbuster is that it not only nails the classic Black/Hispanic/Mexican-White team meme, but also conveys a rather confused view of the government.

Liberals love government intervention for anything and everything unjust, we know that for sure, so why are they making a movie like this? Because the liberals only approve government strength when it's babysitting our kids or collecting taxes, never when it defends itself against terrorism or cleans up violent suburbs. This paranoid worldview suggests we're all victims of an oppressive power structure not to be trusted, unless it's committed to liberal purposes. So as long as we have impotent bureaucracies, government is good, but when it flexes its muscles, it's tyranny. No wonder we're losing the wars in the Middle East.