To commemorate the ten-year anniversary of the release of Fight Club, one of the most provocative major motion pictures of the past decade, the savagely witty Guy Movie Hall of Fame winner (Spike TV) is finally making it’s debut on Blu-ray — with the blood and bruises looking more brutal in 1080dpi than they did on the big screen and packed with a ton of original and new bonus features. In our own homage to this classic man’s movie, I opened up my Top Secret files on Tyler Durden and the Fight Club to resurrect my October 1999 interview with Brad Pitt, who offered up his thoughts on his soon-to-be-released cinematic legend that would hit theaters a couple of weeks later. You’ll find that interview, plus this week in home video, after the jump.

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Pardon a personal rant: I have been well-known (at least around my own house, and among my own children) as a dedicated hater of homework. It wasn’t simply the fact that a kid of seven or eight had to spend all day in a classroom, and then bring home work designed specifically to extend school hours into the evening - though I have a few ideological issues with that, too. Rather, my problem is with the nature of the work, which is all too often not a review of ideas and lessons gone over during regular class-time, but rather entirely new lessons, meaning that parents get to play teacher to children already worn out and sick of listening to people trying to teach them. Also, the lessons being taught are often based on some nu-education model, meaning that kids are encouraged to “discover” the underlying lesson themselves, rather than being given a few tools they can then practise using. Math is the worst for this. I have occasionally spent five minutes explaining some nifty trick of addition or multiplication or whathaveyou that my son was being asked to work out himself and then sum up in two sentences. Usually, I just skip the “discovery” part, tell him what he needs to do, and then get him to repeat it a few dozen in times until it he can do it without thinking. Repetition and memorization gets a bad name.

So I could only feel a familiar rising of blood pressure when I came across this post at BoingBoing.net, which offers an example of some first grade math homework, and then asks commenters to figure it out. I only sorta could, and I was not alone: teachers and college-level math tutors confessed to being baffled by the assignment, too. (I challenge DRIVENmag.com readers to try it, too.)

My favourite comment, the one that hit all-too close to home, was this one: “Teach in class, homework is reinforcement.”

Amen. So endeth the rant.

(Top image by H McKenna used under a Creative Commons license.)

After starring in two romantic comedies earlier this year — The Proposal and All About Steve — Hollywood acting vet  Sandra Bullock  has shifted artistic gears for her latest film The Blind Side, with her portrayal of the real-life, well-to-do, white, Memphis housewife who took in a homeless, black teenager, made him a part of her four-member family, encouraged him to attend college and helped him to secure a spot on the roster of one of the hottest NFL teams on the gridiron.

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Various dates until Nov. 21, Victoria: The Rake’s Progress is your typical boy-meets-girls, boy-dumps-girl, boy-hangs-out-in-big-city-with-the-devil, boy-ends-up-in-the-nuthouse, boy-dies kind of story. Igor Stravinsky based his opera most famous opera on a series of 18th-century paintings by William Hogarth, and so the tale is appropriately sordid. W.H. Auden co-wrote the libretto, so it’s both sordid and poetic.

Pacific Opera Victoria is mounting a production of Stravinsky’s opera in five performances, with the first happening last night, Nov. 12. Four more chances left to catch it! (Check out the stage and costume design.)

While hockey and football get most of the non-UFC attention as far as violence in sports go, it’s high time to salute the orgy of thuggery that is girls’ soccer.

The big breakout bad-girl – the “Vinnie Jones with the double-X chromosome”, if you will – is the Univerisity of New Mexico’s Elizabeth Lambert, who recently punched and kicked and tripped and slapped her way through a NCAA west conference semi-final game against Brigham Young University.

Though all she received during the game was a yellow card, Lambert has been suspended indefinitely by her team, and been dubbed (albeit cheekily) “America’s Greatest Villain” by Deadspin.com.

Obviously, the video is a lot of fun to watch, and some of her hits are just shy of out-and-out assault, but the reaction to her antics has more to do with people’s ignorance of the realities of soccers (and perhaps of young women).

Blogger and soccer dad Tbogg adds some perspective …

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In naughty romantic comedy The Ugly Truth, part-time film goddess (Knocked Up & 27 Dresses) and full-time TV star (Grey’s Anatomy) Katherine Heigl, teamed up with 300 and RockNRolla Scot Gerard Butler for director Robert Luketic’s look at the war between the sexes. Heigl is Abby Richter, a romantically-challenged morning show producer and Butler is a chauvinistic news correspondent, Mike Chadway; determined to prove that she’s not romantically challenged, Abby takes Mike’s advice during a promising new romance, with amusingly unexpected results. The Ugly Truth is filled with fake orgasms, sexy Jell-O Twins and politically incorrect gags.

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At this point, I think it’s fairly obvious that the fatted cats who run Maple Leaf Sports and Entertainment spend much of their time devising ways to piss people off. Raising ticket prices for losing teams has long been their best trick, but once in a while they really get creative …

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Walls make for very powerful symbols, as many devout Jews, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Roger Waters can attest.

Today, of course, marks the 2oth anniversary of the crumbling of the Berlin Wall, the most visible symbol of the Soviet Union’s freedom not-loving ways. The memories of that moment are thick on the ground, and many in Berlin are reliving that night when they were first able to cross deadly no-man’s land between East and West.

And so, to mark this highly significant occasion, we offer you John Cougar Mellancamp:

Personally, I think too little attention has been given to the role played by Cougar’s dancing in the fall of the Soviet Union. After all, people in East Berlin could barely buy jeans at all, never mind jeans that tight…

(Berlin Wall juggler photo by Yann Forget, used under Creative Commons license.)

November 5-14, Toronto: Here’s the challenge I am giving myself: to write about the Rendezvous With Madness Film Festival, which examines how issues of mental illness and addiction are represented onscreen, without using the words crazy, nuts, daft, demented, sick, cuckoo, barmy, tetched, mental, psycho, berserk, bonkers, cracked, delirious, schizo, out to lunch, or wig out.

The festival, now in its 17th year and is put together by Workman Arts, a not-for-profit arts organization that works out of Toronto’s Centre of Mental Health and Addiction, presents more than a dozen screenings over its nine days, along with panel discussions, and even an evening of comedy. The full schedule is here. Last night’s opening night gala was sold out, but there are still tickets left for other events.

Missing it would be… ah, disappointing.