The Chinese streaming platform Tencent Video has restored the original ending to the film Fight Club after it amended the Chinese edition to tell viewers police had “rapidly figured out the whole plan and arrested all criminals”, prompting a widespread backlash. The wholesale reversal of the anti-capitalist, anarchist denouement to the 1999 hit film, which stars Brad Pitt, Edward Norton and Helena Bonham Carter, made international headlines last month. In the edited version, Edward Norton’s character, the narrator, still kills off his imaginary alter ego Tyler Durden, but a subsequent…
Tag: Film
Fight Club author praises Chinese cut of film: ‘Super wonderful!’
The author of Fight Club has praised the “happy ending” afforded to David Fincher’s film of his book for a new Chinese cut of the movie. Chuck Palahniuk described the change, in which the police successfully foil an anarchist plot and the heroes are incarcerated, as “SUPER wonderful”. Palahniuk told TMZ: “The irony is that … they’ve aligned the ending almost exactly with the ending of the book, as opposed to Fincher’s ending, which was the more spectacular visual ending. So in a way, the Chinese brought the movie back…
Fight Club gets a new ending in China – and the authorities win
The ending to David Fincher’s 1999 cult classic film Fight Club has been changed in China, sparking outrage among fans. Film fans in China noticed over the weekend that a version of the Brad Pitt and Edward Norton movie, newly available on streaming platform Tencent Video, was given a makeover that transforms the anarchist, anti-capitalist message which made the film a global hit. In the closing scenes of the original, Norton’s character The Narrator kills off his imaginary alter ego Tyler Durden – played by Pitt – and then watches…
The importance of being allowed to act up | Brief letters
The inconclusive ending of David Baddiel’s article (‘Why don’t Jews play Jews?’ – David Baddiel on the row over Helen Mirren as Golda Meir, 12 January) is unavoidable, because the only way to achieve consistency is to revert to the assumption that actors can act. Take the case of the late Richard Griffiths’s posh gay Uncle Monty in Withnail and I. He came from an underprivileged background and was married to a woman. To have disqualified him on the basis of the latter but not the former seems risibly arbitrary.Peter…