A thread for David Fincher's adaptation of GONE GIRL

http://cdn.screenrant.com/wp-content/uploads/Gone-Girl-Ben-Affleck-Rosamund-Pike-Entertainment-Weekly-cover.jpg

Well reviewed, of course, with most of those reviews questioning whether the book and film are sexist (Gillian Flynn wrote both).

Every review I've read so far has been positive but sort of begrudgingly so. Like, yes it is well-made, but (to quote Anthony Lane) "so what?" I didn't like the book very much, but my wife did, so it's curious that she hasn't said peep one about the movie.

I thought the book was really good but the reviews of the movie seem to take everything at face value rather than the black comedy which I took from the book. tho it's worth saying that critics had this exact same problem with fight club.

I had to review Sharp Objects a few years ago but wasn't impressed enough to think Flynn was a thing.

and fwiw I thought the gender politics of the book were pretty sharp--if knowingly playing with certain cultural fantasies/nightmares that are sexist. can't really go into more detail on that without spoilers.

100% ready to believe fincher gets sloppy with whatever sexual politics people dig from the book, but I'm still pretty psyched to see it

i mean any thriller with tyler perry and neil patrick harris in the supporting cast i'd at least watch on hbo

that it's the kind of grand hollywood affair that would get oscar noms in slow years is just icing on the cake

for some reason was trying to avoid spoilers on this tho i hate the thought of seeing it

the circumstantial "controversy" headlines p much give stuff away tho

Like, yes it is well-made, but (to quote Anthony Lane) "so what?"

Not unlike The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo.

Yeah - the book gets compared to the novel The Dinner a lot, and I feel like both are similar in terms of how adaptable they are to films. Both seem like they'd make great movies because at heart they're just plot-driven thrillers - but a lot of the darker subtler satirical stuff in both could be hard to pull off in a movie. Also Affleck just seems like totally the wrong guy for this part.

and I don't want to be spoiler-y BUT... this wouldn't be the first time Fincher has told stories with unreliable narrators and Rube Goldbergy plots, so he seems pretty well-equipped for that part of turning this into a movie. Wouldn't be surprised if Fincher's The Game was at least a modest influence on the book.

Fincher is a cool technician, but I'm generally not a fan when he goes cold technician. Which is to say, I like him best when he seems invested in the project and what it's trying to say/do (Seven, Social Network, Zodiac), and least when he's just doing a good job with shaky material (The Game, Dragon Tattoo, never made it through Button). I have the most trouble with "Fight Club" and "Panic Room." The latter is a pretty straight forward technical exercise, but it's got some great performances. Yoakam! The former ... after all these years I'm still not quite sure what to think. Subversive? Middlebrow? Nihilist? Idealistic? Fascist? Facile? No idea. Though yeah, it is well made!

Everyone's all thrilled by Affleck dong, but no one's giving proper credit to NPH rump.

I didn't last an hour into Dragon Tattoo. He's got a number of "so what?" entries in his catalog.

key to fight club is recognizing that it's all those things!

I sorta think affleck is perfect casting. the book does describe him as having a "punchable face" and all.

FWIW, I thought this was a MUCH better shotgun marriage between Fincher's cold elegance and lurid pulp than Dragon Tattoo.

(Faint praise, et al.)

Everyone in the book is punchable.

christ this was fucking amazing.

lookin fwd to this

it comes down to my wanting to watch Tyler Perry as Affleck's lawyer.

Hi I live under a rock and know nothing about this story -- so did Jon Stewart really spoil it on his show during the Affleck interview? Cuz I saw that clip and i'll be pissed if so!

movies that rely on twist endings to be worth seeing/interesting are not good movies

Your (dubious) assertion doesn't conflict with the fact that spoilers spoil

I'm usually slow out of the gate, so I didn't really know anything about this until a couple of days ago. In light of Zodiac and The Social Network, and a cursory glance at what it's about, very interested.

Going by the book, this is a tough call: is it really a spoiler if the spoiler/revelation/surprise happens relatively early? At what point is the twist actually the plot?

Just saw this. Thought it was pretty good.

Kinda ridiculous how many reviews are regurgitating the line that Fincher "elevates" the novel somehow, when almost everything they're praising the movie for comes directly from the book. It's a remarkably faithful adaptation.

Up there with Zodiac as his best, enjoyed it more if i'm honest.

one bright note at least

http://www.sbnation.com/lookit/2014/10/2/6896365/ben-affleck-refused-to-wear-a-yankees-hat-in-gone-girl

almost everything they're praising the movie for comes directly from the book

didn't the author of the book write the screenplay?

yeah.

I had heard she rewrote some stuff to make it different. No?

Not much apparently.

Flabby last act and one plot stand I found needlessly distasteful, but otherwise, my fave Fincher in a while.

hit some of the same gleefully blackened vibe that I get from prime Verhoeven, though it underlines its specific thesis more than any of his movies ever did iirc

could do a Silence Of The Lambs style Oscar sweep.

Just read the book this week—super black-hearted, and a lot of fun. Reminded me of Jim Thompson's A Hell of a Woman. Not sure I need to see the movie, though, especially if it's super-faithful. I didn't picture the husband looking like Affleck at all; they should have cast the dude who played the Winklevoss twins in The Social Network. But then there'd be basically nobody in the cast with real drawing power, so...

gonna watch it in about half an hour

could do a Silence Of The Lambs style Oscar sweep.

Affleck's gonna have to get nominated first, and there's at least three or four biopic slots pre-filled this year.

didn't picture the husband looking like Affleck at all

Haven't read the book, but I'm amazed it's taken this long for someone to cast BAfflleck *because* of his innate smugness and not in spite of it.

granted I read the book after knowing about the casting, but damn if affleck didn't seem to fit perfectly with nick dunne as flynn describes him.

Well! This was a bore.

1:45 has to be some kind of record for a first act

is it a spoiler to big up nph as bizarro christian grey?

Alfred review really makin me not want to bother w this

hey should have cast the dude who played the Winklevoss twins in The Social Network.

Winklevoss guy would've at least made Amy's marrying him plausible, but Affleck is such an offensive nothing in this movie that it's a peculiar kind of punishment to endure him.

is it ridiculous that i'm still enough of a fincher-stan in 2014 that i'll watch this (tho inevitably when it comes to HBO since i never see anything in theaters anymore)?

From the movie version it’s not clear why Amy is so bad.

Iirc, this is one big problem I had with the book. Like, I didn't care, because I wasn't sure why she was doing what she was doing, exactly. I prefer the twisted neo-feminist underpinning of "The Last Seduction"s vilain, I suppose, to "Gone Girl."

i dunno i kinda felt like it was pretty clear why she was so AMAZING

"amazing

"

clever not-really-subtext of the book is that she's clearly too good for him

R Pike is beautiful

is there an equivalent to hurdy gurdy man in this? Otherwise I will be let down

And hanging around (sorry)

Not really, but this had my fave of the Reznor/Ross scores so far

what's hanging around btw?

Radiohead '99 ref

Almost forgot, the instant the credits rolled, a girl who was very upset at no NPH schlong exclaimed "OK, so the radio lied!"

v sad there was no hurdy gurdy man equivalent but otherwise this was a blast.

a blast of suck

the only fun in the movie was the little bounce Pike did exiting the rented cabin after thinking she got away with everything

haha fuck yeah that was great.

Squarely halfway on the spectrum between Hitchcock and Side Effects.

Also, as far as a marriage thriller, enjoyed how different its resolutions were than 80s thrillers like Fatal Attraction and Pacific Heights.

NPH of course did well, but would have loved to see J Timberlake in that role as a variation on his Sean Parker.

Also given the predator-of-the-week outings on Twitter thought that this was very timely.

I enjoyed this plenty. Well made, cold and funny at the same time, great score. It fit my current state of mind re: marriage.

the sound was kinda crappy in the flashback-y early scenes especially one, in the bar when they meet first time. was almost incomprehensible at points. some people are suggesting (on IMDB etc) that it's *intentionally* bad in that scene! the sound was way off in the opening scene of The Social Network too. is DF's sound mixer guy tone deaf or something?

women be reading this book on trains.

continnuum of books every damn motherfucker reading on london underground: girl with the dragon etc -> 'One Day' by David Nicholls -> this

i read the book a couple of years ago and found it disappointing and way overhyped but i think i'll still see this, mainly for the love of rosamund pike.

piscesx I noticed the same thing, lots of mumbly near-incomprehensibility in the first half hour especially, all the banter btwn Pike and Affleck when they first meet especially

So how does this hold up to "Side Effects?" When I saw "Side Effects," my first reaction was that it was a better "Gone Girl." But I'm wondering if my reaction was mostly surface, based on the different ways they turned out. Which is to say, both are pretty ridiculous scenarios, but I found the conclusion of "SE" more believable?plausible?satisfying than the end of "Gone Girl" (the book). I also thought, once the screws started turning, that "Side Effects" was more fun.

I'm a fan of the book, but it's striking how many people (me included) felt a little deflated by the first big plot twist. I think it (mostly) recovers, however.

C'mon, Side Effects was terrible.

Believability/plausibility are completely beside or even against the point of this movie

There are people that liked Side Effects?

this movie's going to be obnoxiously huge

also rosamund pike reminds me so much of laura linney

As high pedigree twisty pulp trash, yeah, I thought "Side Effects" was great. Given I've read "Gone Girl," and given the movie apparently doesn't deviate from the book much if at all, I would be absolutely shocked if the film were anything but high pedigree trash as well. I'm really curious now what folks think "Side Effects" did or got wrong that this film does not.

Believability/plausibility are completely beside or even against the point of this movie

Well, that's not entirely true. When you watch a prison escape movie, you don't want someone cutting their way out with a special laser saw they conveniently assembled. These sorts of stories are set in the real world, and while they do require some degree of suspension of disbelief, when your central conceit is essentially "how'd they do it?" you want the answer to be at least somewhat reasonable. The book I thought twisted and turned itself so much to demonstrate the apparent omniscient plan for every contingency super-genius deviousness of its protagonist that it got a little silly and fridge logic started to overtake the plot (at least in my experience). Has nothing to do with enjoying yourself at the movies, though!

he sound was kinda crappy in the flashback-y early scenes especially one, in the bar when they meet first time. was almost incomprehensible at points. some people are suggesting (on IMDB etc) that it's *intentionally* bad in that scene!

noticed this too, especially when Aflac spoke.

this is the legit clip i was talking about. still sounds a bit muffled even here but in the cinema it was as good as inaudible.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x7z45e-XIVQ

gaaaaah I have to look at Aflac's face

well this is kinda weird. http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/envelope/goldstandard/la-et-mn-gone-girl-academy-oscars-20141004-column.html

I'm not sure I've ever seen something like that before: a mainstream newspaper piece on muted snap-judgement reactions to a movie that I hadn't even realized had Oscar buzz. Talk about "so what?" The Oscars are lame enough. Who cares what some prospective Oscar voters think about a the Oscar-worthiness of a movie? That piece read like the sort of thing that runs when people are trying to sink a movie that's already been nominated.

Tyler Perry for Best Supporting Actor or gtfo

author's twitter bio

Los Angeles Times writer, covering movies and television. When the leaves change color, focus turns to the Oscars.

plus, Josh: it's the L.A. Times.

Oscar odds:

http://i62.tinypic.com/f53vid.png

Ugh, Unbroken. Trailer looked like boilerplate then I saw it was directed by Angelina Jolie.

Written in part by the Coens tho I think?

Fincher NPR interview. Totally forgot about Bennifer et al.

He's been through this, yeah. Ben is extremely bright and he's been through situations that are very similar to this, and he has a, he has a great sense of humor and great wit about what this situation is and how frustrating it is, and he was able to, obviously, draw on that stuff to be able to portray somebody who, you know, puts one foot in his mouth and then goes another two days and puts the other one. And that was, I think, sort of a key to empathizing, and I don't know that it made the character more likeable, because he is kind of frustrating in a certain way, but he's very human.

A shame that The Boiler Room aside he's never accepted a screen role that flatters his intelligence.

weird since the movie seemed to have a low level but steady contempt for his character.

tell you what, his episode of Inside The Actor's Studio was great; it was right in the depths of his Bennifer/Gigli era and he was self deprecating and smart and funny. he made out that Matt Damon was the brains of the operation when they were writing Good Will Hunting, while MD himself was sat a few feet away chuckling in the audience. some people have looked like right self-important windbags on that show but he really came across unexpectedly as a decent cat and i've liked him ever since.

I hold nothing against him as a person, and his ranting at Maher a couple days ago re his Islamophobia was great

I saw that "Actor's Studio" ep at the time, and, yeah, thought the same. He also looked like he'd had a couple in the green room.

Amazed at the hype surrounding this. I thought it was okay; it starts off very badly, improves, then gleefully shoots off a cliff into complete ridiculousness. Fincher's underlit sombre mood sits awkwardly with the trashy pulp of the story, but he clearly loves this type of stuff. This is an improvement on Dragon Tattoo, but it still didn't completely work for me. Affleck is well cast, but Rosamund Pike steals it.

officially one of the '100 best films of all time' now according to IMDB rankings, at number 85. that's pretty nuts even for the already-nuts IMDB.

a fincher suspense with a zillion twists and turns, only inevitable

and probably compiled by men

Richard (Donnie Darko) Kelly has some thoughts:

GONE GIRL and EYES WIDE SHUT:
A Study of Psychopathy in the Heteronormative Patriarchal Occult

http://ronaldtaverner.tumblr.com/

continnuum of books every damn motherfucker reading on london underground: girl with the dragon etc -> 'One Day' by David Nicholls -> this
― intelligent, expressive males within the greater metropolitan (Bananaman Begins), Saturday, October 4, 2014 8:17 PM (2 days ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

people be readin' popular books!

gonna see this tonight

i thought "side effects" was really pleasurable through the 2nd-to-last reel.

A shame that The Boiler Room aside he's never accepted a screen role that flatters his intelligence.
― guess that bundt gettin eaten (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Sunday, October 5, 2014 5:00 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

the strange thing about affleck is that by all accounts he's a very smart guy but even when the character doesn't call for it, he comes across on screen as big boob!

My review was accused in a Facebook group that I will leave tonight of sending people on "an unsolicited neo-feminist guilt trip."

hahaha

i make sure to solicit my neo-feminist guilt trips

I need to feel guilty about something, whadayagot

Almost every new movie by the class of '99 auteur group of Fincher/PTA/Jonze/Payne/etc usually bounces into the IMDB top 250 immediately after it's released. But it's cool. Roughly half of them sink out of it with time.

payne, still? really?

yikes

And don't forget that every Chris Nolan movie is the greatest movie ever made for a couple weeks after they are released.

it hadn't occurred to me that those directors Eric named who attract the worst male brats in the universe all came of age/broke in '99.

From Alfred's review:

“He thinks Lolita is a cheese”

"He thinks velveeta is a cheese", I heard. A better gag, though I am not directly familiar with your American processed dairy products. Rest of the review otm.

You're probably right -- the sound mix was a problem for the first 30 minutes. The movie was American-processed product though.

I'm pretty sure NEBRASKA went top 250 for at least a little while.

Vel-vee-tah

Vel-vee-tah: the tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palate to tap, at three, on the teeth.

"Look at this sandwich of ham."

velveeta mac n cheese is delicious go america

enjoyed that richard kelly piece though now i feel the need to rewatch EWS more than i do to see gone girl.

Like a lot of these things nowadays this fell apart in the tenth act

this maybe couldve worked as a black comedy, that's interesting if the novel reads that way, the movie def does not

like, i couldnt sufficiently suspend my disbelief that amy was a real person no matter how many childrens books her parents wrote abt her; also NPH's character is so convenient idk also not believable to me…1 of the more/most? compelling moments was after amy got robbed, like honestly wtf would she do had she not had him to call?

still had some fun stuff abt the media frenzy and it is mostly engaging, like keeps you thinking abt the holes w/ each twist, plus tyler perry was actually p good as the lawyer

oh and i think that early memory scene was supposed to have the dialogue mixed p low cuz 1). you really didnt need to hear what was being said, everything is in their body language, etc & 2) it was like adult-juno speak, something abt scrimshaws idk id actually like to see a trascription of that exchange cuz it was so fuckin bad

his student love interest is creating a bomb c.v. -- iCarly, blurred lines vid, entourage movie~

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emily_Ratajkowski

one of the appealing things about the novel to me was the slow revelation that the story, which starts off more or less straight, is a nightmarish black comedy. I think the very very final twist is what sorta puts everything that came before in a new perspective (ie, that they are both totally fucking crazy, that relationships only make sense from the inside, etc),

yeah this is not a nightmarish black comedy

it's nightmarish

i thought it was pretty funny but not a black comedy, no

I mean----SPOILERS----

...it's a happy ending for the relationship at least!

still haven't seen the movie.

It was half an hour of everyone talking buffy the vampire slayer alternating with did the dead eyed sociopath lookin sociopath do a murder then the woman from the diary says that thing from the trailer then like an hour of a blue shirt adrift in a sea of orange and then the film starts

i was def going wtf at some of the early dialogue but i think i'm finding it useful to treat a lot of the movie as something that's highly artificial.

i read the early dialog as very self-conscious show-offy I Am [trying to convince myself that i am] A Literary New Yorker seduction crap.
she says "scrimshander" to all the guys. this one happens to pass that test, etc etc.
they're both casting a part and it's sort of clear that's only gonna take either of them so far.

i dunno i didn't think this was totally successful but it did what it set out to do and the last 45 minutes had some good chuckles. honestly I give it like 3 stars but somehow you guys are gonna make me defend it huh.

my review btw: http://humanizingthevacuum.wordpress.com/2014/10/04/pedantry-and-pulp-gone-girl/

Xp that reading works for the flashback scenes but in the 1st half hour EVERYONE talks like that. His sister, the cops - it really is like Juno or some shit. anyway this was fine it just went on for fucking ever

It certainly kept me guessing - when it was going to end!!!!

interesting that they changed this from the novel -- Later the police find boxes of violent pornography in Nick's woodshed, further implicating him.

There was porn in the shed in the book, too, which I thought just added to the surreal ridiculousness of the scene: presumed to have murdered his wife, Nick goes on a shopping spree and fills a shed with porn and golf clubs? At least that's how I remember it. Is this not in the movie?

This was ludicrous and fun and basically just a really well-shot Lifetime Original Movie. Rosamund Pike was fantastic. "Pulpy crime stories that don't quite hang together, anchored by a wonderful performance by the lead actress" is on its way to becoming a subgenre at this point (see also: the Fargo series, Broadchurch).

xp in the movie its just man cave shit, no porn

If you look carefully in the corner of the shed, you'll see Jonah Hill holding a bong.

the violent porn stuff struck me as kinda important in the book--too bad they left that out.

SPOILERS

In the book, it's made to look like he bought the golf clubs etc and the porn before Amy disappeared (and the particular porn she frames him with is meant to suggest that he's always been something of a sexual sadist).

I hated Pike's performance - it didn't even work as a metacommentary on how men can go all AAOOOOGAAA at the sight of a pretty lady. But then again I'm one of those people who likes reminding "cool girl" speech-quoters that said monologue is from the perspective of a psychopathic narcissist.

^^^^ this. Only a (male) director with such little talent for the erotic could have directed that performance.

I'm in no hurry to see this, but I've read a number of objections to readings of this as feminist parable due to the fact that the cartoon female lead is exactly that, a psychopathic narcissist. It's one thing to be an unreliable narrator, but her character is an unreliable human.

is this movie as good as the one with kirsten dunst and ryan gosling? i really liked that movie.

v different -- that 1 was a real story, is much better, earned like 1/100th of what this will at the box office

I'm in no hurry to see this, but I've read a number of objections to readings of this as feminist parable due to the fact that the cartoon female lead is exactly that, a psychopathic narcissist. It's one thing to be an unreliable narrator, but her character is an unreliable human.

someone on that vile FB thread I mentioned yesterday said, "If you're saying this is anti-feminist, you're full of shit b/c first of all Gillian Flynn who wrote the novel also wrote the screenplay."

i was realy surprised by the dunst/gosling one. put it on netflix and figured i'd watch a little (cuz i am a dunst fan 4ever) but it was so good! and the period stuff was great. and the story was insane. and i looked online afterward and was shocked that it had actually occurred pretty much the way the movie said it did. truly bizarre.

if u really want to be blown away get the dvd -- jarecki got the real Robert durst to record an audio commentary w/ him

"If you're saying this is anti-feminist, you're full of shit b/c first of all Gillian Flynn who wrote the novel also wrote the screenplay."

lol would Phyllis Shlafly like this movie y/n

Schlafly

i think what's interesting about the way flynn constructed the characters is that amy is nearly superhuman at performing the roles that she takes on (and there are a number of them, i think, beyond just "cool girl") and that nick is pretty much terrible at all of his roles. the way i read the novel is that far from dismissing amy as a "psycho bitch" you are led to basically admire her ability to so adroitly navigate gender roles to her advantage. amy's sociopathy gives her a kind of insight, an unveiling--since gender roles are a kind of cultural sanctioned and enforced sociopathy. she's all the female archetypes and none of them. she shows how they are connected, mutually dependent. her whole arc in the book is a kind of performative demonstration of this.

she has a kind of (purely negative) agency that nick doesn't! obviously this is a very generous reading, but i dont think it's any more out there than taking the whole thing at face value. the whole narrative is obviously an intended provocation. nick, because he's a man, is given the benefit of the doubt in the performance of roles even though he is bad at them...and this seems to be at the root of what bothers amy. she's a fictional character created by an author who is not, as far as i know, a psychotic narcissist, so i dont think considering the character can really end there. i dont think the book, at least, allows you to stop there. though of course people will.

The movie barely honors her scrupulousness though; it's shown in a montage and dispatched in voice-over in a blank, bored tone.

they should have got susie salmon from the lovely bones to do the voice-over. she was good at that. or mary alice young from desperate housewives.

i just read the wiki plot for this movie. kinda columbo-y. (been watching columbo on the hulu...always entertaining and always highly implausible...)

The movie barely honors her scrupulousness

I disagree - the whole "editing" sequence in NPH's mansion for starters.

at that point she's a scrupulous sociopath, which, I suppose, is closer to the book's intention.

a funny part of the book is that after nick goes on TV and talks about how great a wife, etc., she was---and this being the moment she decides to go back to him since he's finally acknowledging how great her performance is, really,--she says she knows he doesn't really mean it! she doesn't care, it's all surface to her.

is the book as brazenly silly/can't be bothered as the film re the "yes I think this is enough of a disguise to start wandering around in public, oh hey complete stranger wanna trade opinions about this person on tv who looks exactly the same as me" part of her scrupulous plan?

the book is brazenly silly start to finish

excellent dust jacket blurb

I've seen Flynn posing with a Patricia Highsmith novel in publicity photos, and in some ways Fincher has directed the movie as if it were actually a Highsmith story. But in fact both the novel and screenplay are far less 'cool' than peak Highsmith - they better suit De Palma's sensibilities, or Argento's - so the film never really embraces or succumbs to the full brazen silliness of the whole set up (even if there is a great pleasure in watching the way Fincher stages scenes, moves his camera, lights his sets - he's definitely a consistent visual stylist, often a beautiful one).

ryan can i just say how much i enjoy reading your posts on movies/tv/etc.?

npr piece that approaches the topic of treating the film within the sphere of feminism at all:

What has always kept Amy from troubling me in this particular sense is that she does the things she does not because they are in her nature as a woman, but because they are in her nature as a psychopath. One of the problems with the relative paucity of interesting female characters is that they become responsible for representing all women, for speaking to What Women Are Like. The more scantly represented any demographic group is, the more each person seems to reflect upon everyone. But here, it has always been perfectly clear that Amy is an aberration. She is a woman, but she is not only a woman. She is also a monster, and the second half of Fincher's film is, in many ways, a horror movie about the great difficulty — and eventually the impossibility — of defeating her. She is the rare monster in a monster movie who wins at the end. Whatever she has to do, however offensive, however distasteful, however horrifying. Whatever.

the big thing that really got my attention wrt all this was one little bit, when amy returns covered in blood and affleck whispers in her ear "you crazy bitch" or "you fucking bitch", one of those. there's a habit i've noticed among dudez, esp when i spent like a year hatereading reddit, where they're upstanding enough to understand that "bitch" is a misogynistic word and it shouldn't be used against women ... . .. . . ... unless they deserve it! ex-girlfriends who cheated or otherwise just broke their heart or did something cruel or even heinous, the rules are allowed to be broken in those cases, and when those cases arise you can tell there's a certain weight around that word -- a subtext of "i'm a nice guy so it's a big deal that i'm using this word... psychobitch! oh wow that was exhilarating". "i'm allowed to access misogyny if a woman doesn't behave, there's a spectrum of acceptability and if she falls on the wrong end just look out" etc. and then he whispered that in her ear a great deal of the theater erupted in applause. in that moment he was seen as a hero, and it just makes me think there's got to be something in that back half that got lost in translation, cause it really doesn't sound like the book is so simple. this paragraph is a lot bigger than i'd hoped.

xpost

"she's a fictional character created by an author who is not, as far as i know, a psychotic narcissist, so i dont think considering the character can really end there."

this was really interesting, and it reminded of how I felt when I read the book, which was to trampoline from the book to the author and wonder "how could someone who wrote this book actually be in a marriage with someone if their vision of partnership is this bitter, this relentlessly skeptical about every possible way of doing male-ness and femeale-ness in America in this century?". Read in the cold and misanthropic / bleakly funny light of the novel, the author's fawning dedication to her irl husband (how could I ever know if it was sincere?) started to look indistinguishable from the very "good life fantasies" being put forward by the "fake" diary within the first half of the novel and held up to withering scorn by its second half.

And that brings us to the basic spatial mystery of sociopathy/psychopathy, that you can never know for sure who is behind the smile, who is behind the sincere tone, who is speaking- in any human interaction there's a basic block or gap that is covered or by trust, speculated about, but essentially un-verifiable. Characters like this one make you paranoid about that gap.

[Highsmith had many relationships over the years, so it's not like you can't be misanthropic in general and loving in specific. But I don't like that one of my reactions to reading "Gone Girl" was to think to myself "man I could never be in a relationship with whoever would write this book because I just couldn't trust her", since I don't like to think that such authorial speculations are important. ]

That NPR quote is super, super OTM.

on another note, not that i've read much about this, but i haven't read anything that's mentioned amy's fucked up childhood as "amazing amy" and the seeming implication that her parents were probably horrible, which at the very least strikes me as a "partial root of the villain's evil" explanation beyond just "she's a psychopath." it's a simple thing but ignored, and interesting because it's such a unique fuckedupness.

But I don't like that one of my reactions to reading "Gone Girl" was to think to myself "man I could never be in a relationship with whoever would write this book because I just couldn't trust her",

the only writer I'd have married was Wallace Stevens.

That NPR quote is sharp. I don't agree with the writer's review of Pike's blank performance.

xpost to zachlyon search "amazing" in this thread but agreed it hasn't been discussed much

Not sure if the movie's anti-feminist (or what extent it matters), but it is pretty anti-marriage, so there's one mark in its corner.

I actually think it has kind of a positive view of marriage - insofar as it keeps toxic personalities aiming their weapons squarely at each other.

said monologue is from the perspective of a psychopathic narcissist.

Even a cuckoo clock etc.

ryan can i just say how much i enjoy reading your posts on movies/tv/etc.?

hey thanks! seeing movie in question in about 15 mins.

Slate piece on what it 'borrows from Psycho'
http://www.slate.com/blogs/browbeat/2014/10/07/gone_girl_david_fincher_and_alfred_hitchcock_how_movies_like_psycho_and.html

it's always hard to figure out what you think about a movie adapted from you already admire...the experience of watching it seems to boil down to assessing the adaptation more than the thing itself. if that makes sense. all i could really focus on was were flynn's attempts at condensation, and a few helpful underlinings for a movie audience.

I think maybe they ruined one of the better bits of the novel when they make explicit that, no, it's not really expected that you know your S.O.'s blood type. i remember anxiously turning to my girlfriend while reading the novel and asking what her's was. there was a lot like that, but i suppose that goes with the territory of a big movie adaptation.

anyway, i liked this, more or less. weirdly, im not sure fincher was the best possible choice of director. weird because i thought he'd be a slam dunk because i think there were a lot of formal similarities with fight club--even some thematic similarities: amy as the female tyler durden? someone write that thinkpiece!

from a book you already admire...that is.

i don't know my blood type

i think my mom might know mine.

****CRAZY SPOILERS IN THIS POST****

a lot of thoughts on this. i found it very rewarding to watch, though I'm not sure "how I feel about it" afterward. it's a tribute to the care Fincher et al put into the film and its plotting that I found it gripping despite knowing the major plot twist already. I imagine that much if not most of the audience has been in a similar boat and the filmmakers could count on that. that said, I do think that seeing the film without knowing the twist would have been a markedly different experience, especially in terms of my judgment of the two main characters. in particular, knowing the twist made me more sympathetic to Affleck's character, since I know all along that he's been framed. partly as a result, I never worked up much animosity toward him. his main crime, it seems, was being a cheating husband. in the hierarchy of wrong actions, that has to be significantly less odious than having a man (nearly) killed for a murder that was never committed, much less killing a man in cold blood.

in other words, the fact that I knew that affleck's character was a framed man made me fundamentally sympathetic to him despite the apparent efforts of affleck and fincher et al to make him dislikable. though even had i not known, the aforementioned hierarchy would ensure that almost any audience member would come away thinking much better of affleck than of pike. as a result the ending becomes less about two fucked-up people who deserve each other being locked together in a loveless marriage, and more about one (flawed, even asshole-ish, but still human) man suffering an eternity of pain for the infraction of infidelity. my understanding is that the book works harder to make the husband an unfeeling, unsympathetic creep and thus there's a kind of perverse appropriateness to the way it resolves.

i hope i am making some sense. i should obv. read the book, if for no other reason than to see how it deals differently (or not) with the husband.

let me try to explain this better. if i hadn't known that pike's tale of their marriage gone sour was a fabrication meant to frame affleck, i might have worked up more animosity toward affleck, animosity that might have lingered even after the rug was pulled out. and that would have created a more ambivalent ending.

i appreciate that the film suggested that affleck might actually be deriving some kind of pleasure from the arrangement he ends up in, but that suggestion is fleeting and overwhelmed by (1) his insistence that he is only staying in the marriage for the kid (exactly what pike is betting on) and (2) his despondent look at the end of the TV interview. this suggests that he is trapped, and not a willing participant in the slightest.

i don't know if i am lamenting something that is present in the book but not really made salient enough in the film (though perhaps it is faintly present)--or if i was just imagining a more interesting or ambivalent ending than the one i got.

on a separate note, the biggest problem i had with the film's plotting and characterizations was this: the pike character was almost supernaturally brilliant and prescient in one moment, and utterly foolish and naive the next. i suppose you could imagine that the truth is a kind of combination or average of those, and/or her foolishness can be explained in a number of ways, but it still reeked of plot contrivance to me and made the conceit of her character even harder to buy into. but these are things i mostly thought about after the film was over, since the grace and focus of fincher's filmmaking didn't give me much opportunity to think about them while it was playing....

I think that it's def possible that one of the reasons I liked the movie more than most here is that I didn't have any foreknowledge of the plot whatsoever. In retrospect, I liked how Fincher and Affleck let the audience share the subjectivity of everyone's increasingly worsening opinion of him.

Tho a documentary about Affleck's career in movies could've probably accomplished the same thing.

i think people parsing this film (and possibly the book) for insights into or even an interesting/twisted perspective on the institution of marriage are probably barking up the wrong tree. i do think it's likely that (for book and film) this is a "hook" that the author/filmmakers counted on--that this would lend the project some notoriety and thinkpiece charge. but the character of Amy is drawn too broadly as a villain (and at in the least, Affleck drawn too clearly as a victim, despite his infidelities) for the film to have any pretensions to universal relevance, even as some kind out outlandish allegory. in that respect the film is not much different from the blockbuster novels and films (e.g. The Dark Knight) that sort through these Social Issues against the wall in a kind of haphazard fashion, in a way that lends them an appearance of Relevance that they don't really earn (or in this case, need).

To be fair, the movie does lead everyone by the nose to those conclusions (dumb as they are) for the last half hour.

god, I can't type today.

I meant to write that "in that respect the film is not much different from the blockbuster novels and films (e.g. The Dark Knight) that throw references to Social Issues against the wall in a kind of haphazard fashion, in a way that lends them an appearance of Relevance that they don't really earn (or in this case, need)."

To be fair, the movie does lead everyone by the nose to those conclusions (dumb as they are) for the last half hour.

― Eric H., Wednesday, October 8, 2014 12:12 PM (2 seconds ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

yes, I think it does. esp. when Pike says something like, "well, that's marriage" to Affleck. a number of people have pointed out that this statement comes from the mouth of a psychopath who essentially can only mimic human feeling, and thus should not be taken at face value. that's certainly true, but of course the author/filmmakers put such a line in knowing that it will be read, by some at least, as some kind of statement about marraige. that's what i mean by the film tossing this stuff against the wall without really committing to it. i suppose that's a part of mainstream filmmaking since forever. it doesn't really bother me that much in Gone Girl... though it does bother me with The Dark Knight, since the latter film doesn't really seem to have much going on other than its huffy-puffy "intensity" and pretensions to significance. Gone Girl is at least a gripping and very precisely made thriller.

loved the part (and I think this is in the book too) where the detectives are reading especially damning passages of Amy's diary to Nick and confirms that most of them are true.

btw in the book it's made very clear that nick is a habitual liar.

Nick confirms they are true, that is.

loved the part (and I think this is in the book too) where the detectives are reading especially damning passages of Amy's diary to Nick and confirms that most of them are true.

most of the stuff that he confirms as true is fairly harmless, at least in the film. the most damning stuff--that he pushed/hit her, that he threatened to kill her--he denies, and at least retrospectively we have no reason to believe he was lying.

This movie had next to no insights about marriage; the attempts to turn Amy and Nick into Addison and Eve are particularly hamhanded.

btw in the book it's made very clear that nick is a habitual liar.

― ryan,

My problem with the movie is the usual Hollywood attempt to sanitize leads – and Flynn wrote the script! Affleck plays him as written: a lumpen ox with loves his sister and plays video games.

well, ONE of my problems

another question

pike played it pretty broad throughout the scenes with NPH. i'm not sure if she was telegraphing her character's reaction to the audience or if the character was telegraphing her "reactions" to NPH. i supposed I'd have to see it again but that whole subplot had an even broader/pulpier quality than the rest of the film.

This movie had next to no insights about marriage; the attempts to turn Amy and Nick into Addison and Eve are particularly hamhanded.

― guess that bundt gettin eaten (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Wednesday, October 8, 2014 12:28 PM (5 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

yeah it's my sense that flynn and fincher want to have their cake and eat it too w/r/t this stuff. they want the frisson of the film sort-of being "about marriage" but they have plausible deniability when they are accused of any particular attitude vis-a-vis that institution.

i.e. same thing with The Dark Knight being "about" terrorism or the surveillance state or GW Bush or whatever

most of the stuff that he confirms as true is fairly harmless, at least in the film. the most damning stuff--that he pushed/hit her, that he threatened to kill her--he denies, and at least retrospectively we have no reason to believe he was lying.

― I dunno. (amateurist), Wednesday, October 8, 2014 1:27 PM (13 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

he denies it and then pushes her at the end of the movie!

Affleck plays him as written: a lumpen ox with loves his sister and plays video games.

don't really get this; the movie comes down on him pretty hard for being such a mediocre person--occasionally charming, a complete nonagent in his own life, and with a few too many echos of his father.

"insight" is probably too loaded and specific a word, but yeah I think it says some things about marriage. maybe even some dworkin-esque things about how violence is built into heterosexual relationships as construed by patriarchy. tho I wouldn't say this is an especially new or shocking idea. one thing I like about how the story is constructed (more so in the book) is the momentary disappointment I felt (and other readers I know) when Amy hijacks the narrative halfway through. we didn't get the lurid husband kills wife story we didn't even especially know we were craving. on some weird level the story withholds satisfaction.

don't really get this; the movie comes down on him pretty hard for being such a mediocre person--occasionally charming, a complete nonagent in his own life, and with a few too many echos of his father.

the movie tells us this, but it's still Ben Affleck – mediocre and un-charming to me, a dreamy movie star to the public.

whatever Nick's faults, i think they pale in comparison to what Amy does. (that effect is exacerbated by casting Affleck, who while not as charismatic as other big actors, still retains a basically likability from most of his previous roles.) I think that hierarchy is definitive.

he denies it and then pushes her at the end of the movie!

right, that's an interesting and troubling moment. I think it could be interpreted two ways. in one, he really is, somehow, the guy the fake diary made him out to be -- he just hadn't revealed it yet. in the other reading, she's just a horrible bitch who now really deserves the violence that she had previously falsified. unfortunately i think the latter reading is going to be the most common one, not least because the scenes surrounding this event make Nick out to be very much the victim.

i think a film made differently could sustain the idea that even though Amy was using the diary to frame Nick for murder, much of it was true--that he really was an abusive fuck of a husband. i think that the choices the film makes--casting, editing, acting--all sort of mitigate against this reading. i think there is a moment in the film where we really might wonder--when it's revealed that he's been lying to his sister about the affair he's having. but everything that happens subsequently in the film (save for that last aggressive shove) works to close down this possibility.

I don't know that it's the point, but other than the robber, there really aren't any bad guys in the movie, just not-bad guys framed for rape and murder.

xxp i guess? i'm not really into forecasting how anyone other than me is going to react to these things (and i have at best neutral feelings about affleck) but i felt like the movie made it clear nick got the partner he deserved.

xpost

in other words the film's moral polarities are drawn to be far too Manichean for the film to really function as a critique of patriarchy or the institution of marriage

that film could have been made, but i don't think it's the one we've got. don't know about the book.

made it clear nick got the partner he deserved.

to risk repeating myself: i think Amy's villainy is far too outsized for that to fit. really? this guy who cheated on his wife and is kind of uncaring and selfish deserves... a psychopathic murderer for a wife?

the film has all kinds of signposts that Nick is not really an asshole. his sister is devoted to him and he to her, he seems to have loved his mother deeply, he interacts in a not-implausible and recognizably human and confused way to what's happening to him.... in other words he's a flawed but basically sympathetic character. he activates our structures of sympathy, to be a bit pretentious about it. Amy, at least once the main twist is divulged, does no such thing, except perhaps in fleeting and ambiguous moments. even before the twist is revealed, her line readings have a pointedly artificial quality that probably sets a lot of viewers on edge even before they learn her true nature.

yea its interesting that one can get to that conclusion re: nick getting the partner he deserved. this is a spouse who elaborately plotted to have him receive the death penalty in response to his affair (and possible other neglect and/or minor abuse). and i obv say that not condoning that behavior by nick but think abt it in retrospect w/ what we know abt Amy. plus, he was ready to ask her for a divorce the morning she disappeared which is self-serving but also the grown-up thing to finally do

i also forgot that the detail of amy stealing casey wilsons urine to feign pregnancy recollected to me the roth novel 'my life as a man' which i read recently & would be p interesting to contrast the relationship there w/ that of nick & amy, to a point

i STILL don't know if he ever pushed her nor if he really wanted a baby or wanted to get divorced and i've read a million views this way and that on the subject. no-one who hasn't read the book seems to know one way or the other! have to see this again.

yeah obv on the surface their crimes are disproportionate, which is sort of why you can read it is a dark comedy. the man is schlubby, passive, unfaithful, probably harmless (but with the lurking thread of violence)--basically an everyman, only useful as the dancing bear referenced by the v/o. the woman is a ridiculously controlling, active agent, willing to kill to propel herself to the best situation she can reasonably get to, total psycho--and the movie is basically arguing that they deserve each other.

the fact that he's nice to his mom and sister is arguably more damning--he can respect women if they're not his actual partner.

i guess i just did not have nearly as much sympathy for nick as you guys--he's a loser, decent in his 20s but backsliding hard, senses only coming alive for booze and outside pussy.

and outside pussy.

cmon he asked the detective to make sure and feed his cat

the fact that he's nice to his mom and sister is arguably more damning--he can respect women if they're not his actual partner.

pretty common experience

re: whether or not he was everviolent, the way he throttles her near the end of the movie added a nice jolt of queasy ambiguity to that question

pretty common experience

― guess that bundt gettin eaten (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Wednesday, October 8, 2014 3:19 PM (4 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

yeah for sure.

re: whether or not he was everviolent, the way he throttles her near the end of the movie added a nice jolt of queasy ambiguity to that question

― Simon H., Wednesday, October 8, 2014 2:22 PM (4 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

right, but like i said i think most of the rest of the film mitigates against you thinking of him as the kind of person the diary made him out to be... or even close.

i think Nick's sister is a key character, at least in the film. her unswerving devotion to her brother, even though at times it seems undeserved, still is a strong pointer to the audience that Nick is not, at bottom, the sort of person who "deserves" the trap that Amy has set for him. her warm presence in the film—and she's in a lot of it—is kind of like Affleck's evident devotion to his cat: it's a moral signifier, an indication that Nick is a human being, a flawed one, but someone who basically doesn't deserve the trap he's fallen into. and the trap itself, once it's revealed, unlocks a very Hitchcockian response, I think. I think most of us empathize with his situation, even if we don't admire or "identify with" his character—we still experience anxiety and fear and, eventually, anger on his behalf.

I think it's key, though, that someone going into this movie "blind" might experience a similar empathy for Amy, at least up to the point when it's revealed she wasn't killed after all. and perhaps that empathy—and the corresponding antipathy with or questions about Nick—carries through, to some extent, to the film's conclusion, leaving the ending more ambiguous. but since I knew from the beginning that she was a manipulative psycho, my empathy was with Nick all the way.

how much respect is due to a partner who is a manipulative sociopath? i think its v hard to reliably know much definitively abt their marriage, really, and i do like that ambiguity. we do learn independently that amy got her former bf brought up on rape charges seemingly at no fault of that dudes so idk it's hard to see a huge percentage of nick's complicity in amy's plan

xp yea & margot from the outset dislikes amy we're told, sez something like just cuz i don't ever want to be around her doesn't mean i want her missing, etc

nick did bring to the relationship being a maxim or GQ writer or w/e he had done in nyc so you know what maybe he is deserving of all this

margo's dislike of Amy—which long preceded the events depicted in the film—is a strong signal that Something Is Wrong With Amy, even before we know that for sure.

his being a writer for "men's magazines" is surely one of those topic allusions that the film throws out as bait for thinkpiece writers etc.

topicAL

I saw the preview and the whole thing was like OH MY GOD he's being ACCUSED of KILLING HIS WIFE and IT SURE SEEMS LIKE HE DID IT, and there is only one resolution to that question - either he didn't do it, and it's a colossal mistake by the cops, or he actually did and he's a psychopath, and neither one seem very interesting

I can't ruin it for you but Oswald is involved.

I saw the preview and the whole thing was like OH MY GOD he's being ACCUSED of KILLING HIS WIFE and IT SURE SEEMS LIKE HE DID IT, and there is only one resolution to that question - either he didn't do it, and it's a colossal mistake by the cops, or he actually did and he's a psychopath, and neither one seem very interesting

― TracerHandVEVO (Tracer Hand), Wednesday, October 8, 2014 3:53 PM (23 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

wrong

also it seems so weird to dismiss a film on that basis. there are good procedurals and bad procedurals. and this movie, for what it's worth, is a lot loopier than either.

i love the idea that because he loves his cat Nick's an alright guy

http://fecktv.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/03/blofeld1.jpg

I'm sure the cat was meant to symbolize something but I'll be damned if I know what it is

HEY GUYS I SAW THE TRAILER FOR THIS AND SOLVED THE ENDING AND THE ENDING WAS DUMB

damn there are so many movies with cliched pat endings out there, especially when i dream them up after watching the trailer

The sequel will be about Tyler Perry's next case.

PLEASE MAKE IT SO

I'd so watch TANNER BOLT'S MURDER MYSTERIES

yeah, tyler perry was pretty charismatic in this

Not to undermine his achievement, but the movie sets up him to walk away with it.

The Gummi Bear scene might be the movie's best.

yeah definitely. i wonder also if that scene reflects DF's attitude to actors. famously Jake Gyllenhal dissed him for doing endless takes on Zodiac and DF said this in response
“I hate earnestness in performance.. usually by Take 17 the earnestness is gone.”. totes reminded me of the copper chucking sweeties at Affleck's head until he got the most 'natural' performance for the TV camera.

"i think a film made differently could sustain the idea that even though Amy was using the diary to frame Nick for murder, much of it was true--that he really was an abusive fuck of a husband. i think that the choices the film makes--casting, editing, acting--all sort of mitigate against this reading. i think there is a moment in the film where we really might wonder--when it's revealed that he's been lying to his sister about the affair he's having. but everything that happens subsequently in the film (save for that last aggressive shove) works to close down this possibility."

Should mention here that the book does this too (although neither character is exactly likable only one is a monster and whatever Nick might have done it's pretty clear Amy's actions--with everyone pretty much--completely lack proportionality).

continnuum of books every damn motherfucker reading on london underground: girl with the dragon etc -> 'One Day' by David Nicholls -> this
― intelligent, expressive males within the greater metropolitan (Bananaman Begins), Saturday, October 4, 2014 8:17 PM (2 days ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

people be readin' popular books!

so I guess this is how it feels... to be pwned.

http://17rg073sukbm1lmjk9jrehb643.wpengine.netdna-cdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/08/Screen-Shot-2014-08-06-at-9.22.42-AM.png

from a recap of a Q&A fincher did after a screening last night

Fincher mentioned The King of Comedy as a major influence on his work, and the influence of Scorsese’s pitch-black ’80s comedy about notoriety and narcissism can be seen all over Gone Girl, a pitch-black comedy about notoriety and narcissism. Fincher brought up the sequence in The King of Comedy when delusional aspiring comedian Rupert Pupkin, played by Robert De Niro, brings his girlfriend to the Jerry Lewis character’s house uninvited. Fincher talked about how much he loves the combination of fear and uncomfortable laughter evoked by Pupkin’s surprise drop-in. Is Amy kind of a Rupert Pupkin? She just might be. He said, “I want to see arguments between characters where I agree with both of them.”

“I want to see arguments between characters where I agree with both of them.”

My approach to life tbh

I think that was from the same Q&A

So who's side is the director on, anyway? "I root for Rosamund. There are parts of the movie where I go, oh yeah, 'Go Amy.' I love Amy. I love seeing her planning out when she's going to take her own life. I think that's hilarious."

I wonder if Fincher undestands the film he made is not that funny? Sure, anyone saying it is not satisfying to see Affleck being a huge boob are lying to themselves. However between that and the film being thoroughly funny there is a huge gap that Tyler Perry and that dumb cop couldn't fill. Thank god the films as other strengths and by the end I'd say the satire worked for me (I'm not married).

last 45 minutes pulled some pretty good laughs out of the audience I was in tbh

So who's side is the director on, anyway? "I root for Rosamund. There are parts of the movie where I go, oh yeah, 'Go Amy.' I love Amy. I love seeing her planning out when she's going to take her own life. I think that's hilarious."
― Van Horn Street, Thursday, October 9, 2014 5:51 PM (34 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

yea this is a p bizarre thing to say

the situation maaybe is blackly funny but recognize that youre cracking up abt a dsm-classifiable mentally ill person

Q&As are the worst, mainly.

i think fincher likes to say shit that sounds real badass, i'm not sure the film he made really does anything to get the audience to side with amy. certainly pike's performance doesn't really work to ingratiate her, except perhaps in a few moments when she is hiding out with the hillbillies.

I basically had the same reaction to amy as fincher did. Her calendar was hilarious.

sure, it was funny... but were you "rooting" for her?

i guess the answer to that might be complicated. there were probably moments--literally moments--in parts of the film when you're rooting for her to, at least, not off herself. but on balance, and certainly by the end of the film, i think it's fair to say that the film works to align our sympathies largely if not exclusively with nick. if fincher thinks he's made a film that works otherwise i think he's mistaken.

I found it pretty funny tbh

if you don't find a mini-sticky note reading "kill self?" to be funny i don't even know.

otm, there were sick laffs all over this movie

the situation maaybe is blackly funny but recognize that youre cracking up abt a dsm-classifiable mentally ill person

― johnny crunch, Thursday, October 9, 2014

not sure if serious

if you don't find a mini-sticky note reading "kill self?" to be funny i don't even know.

― call all destroyer, Thursday, October 9, 2014 7:51 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

who is denying that it's funny?

I am. A few chuckles here and there and a (fantastic) satire tone are not enough for me to classify the film as being 'funny'. Maybe I have another sense of humor.

i mean the humor is kind of leaden but it's clear that fincher et al are soliciting laughter in those scenes. and those scenes are where Amy comes to the closest to being sympathetic.

it seems that Fincher thinks that because we might find her actions mordantly funny that we kind of "side" with Amy. i doubt that's the case for many viewers. this isn't the first time I've read a Fincher interview and it seems like he thinks he's made a different movie than the one he actually made.

Perhaps it's because I haven't read the book, but knowing both the 'twist' and ending now I might find it funnier.

i don't think you need to go so far as "siding" w/amy to feel some sympathy for her in certain respects.

i have v. mixed feelings about pike's performance but she really nailed the early scenes w/desi, like his attempts to start controlling her and her fear turning into cornered animal rage.

this movie was excellent
i don't know how you guys could get through that movie and NOT find it funny, the whole movie practically sums up it up with that sick punch line about marriage
but you know I love Leave Her To Heaven and this had some similarities

that's a nice observation; hadn't thought about LHtH in relation to this

Some friends of mine saw this on my recommendation and found it boring, predictable and not at all funny, so it really seems to be a love/hate proposition for the most part.

I saw this with my ex, it wasn't funny.

Anthony Lane mentioned LHTH, to this film's discredit.

i guess the answer to that might be complicated. there were probably moments--literally moments--in parts of the film when you're rooting for her to, at least, not off herself. but on balance, and certainly by the end of the film, i think it's fair to say that the film works to align our sympathies largely if not exclusively with nick. if fincher thinks he's made a film that works otherwise i think he's mistaken.

― I dunno. (amateurist), Thursday, 9 October 2014 23:42 (3 days ago)

well you and fincher agree - There are parts of the movie where I go, oh yeah, 'Go Amy.' - he says 'parts' because the film as a whole mostly puts you in nick's shoes. and then he says he loves amy, which makes sense because she's so much more alive than anyone else in the film. And then he says it's funny when she plans her suicide, which also makes sense becuase its really funny

i rooted for Amy the same way i rooted for Serial Mom. nick's sympathetic but he's sympathetic because he's a put-upon schnook being shit on by the world - he's a coen bros protag, hapless and a beat slow. If your sense of humor is skewed in a certain direction it's pretty easy to root for a schnook to be outfoxed by someone who's thought of all the angles. Amy holds the screen and gives the movie such an exuberant charge, we're clearly meant to agree with Tanner Bolt when he expresses a twisted admiration for her. And I did!

at the same time I actually liked nick and wanted him to come out on top. He's easy to root for, he's a decent guy and care was put into placing the audience in his shoes... the movie is most compelling if you're fully on board with both aspects, rooting for poor nick while getting a giddy thrill out of what Amy's pulling off. and when you're in that place i think you also most readily buy into the thematic angle, as i did

lol dudes i'm sure the movie has to be more interesting than that, but whew the trailer sure didn't make it seem like it

(re: my post about the trailer)

re: nick being sympathetic, I think the ending is meant to pull the rug out from under that too. part of what I meant by relationships only making sense from the inside--he abandons his sister (for all intents and purposes) and, implicitly, audience identification.

The disconnect I still can't get over is this story being told in Fincher's favored shadows and shades of green-grey. Def. a story that calls for the garish sitcom lighting of Serial Mom or something.

Just saw this today

This probably won't make a lot of sense to anyone but me, but I felt the exact same way watching this as I did watching American Beauty, which I hated a LOT. Everything that these characters did in this movie felt so contrived and every word out their mouths crafted as though the writer was laughing out loud as it was being written... it twisted in and around and on itself in such 'artful' ways that I just stopped caring why anyone was doing anything, like ok everyone's an asshole great now what

I think there's just something about the level of cynicism needed to come up with something like that in the first place that I guess just really does not appeal to me. Actually, no I take that back. I have no problem with cynicism if it's done well, but this was handled in such broad strokes that it all just seemed so fucking stupid to me

The humorous tone of this also felt like it wasn't handled very well, or was just kind of on the nose most of the time. And the whole point of the movie basically boiling down to 'oh she's just a cunt' really didn't do anything for me at all, and probably annoyed me even more.

I loved the way Fincher made it look; I found myself distracted many times by the ambient noises and level to which he was able to make the suburb & the interiors sound like a real places; I dug Reznor's score...and I like a lot of the actors...but I basically spent 2 and half hours feeling like I was trapped, just waiting for the whole thing to be done

And I'm sorry but that 'twist' was just...like I had a vague idea within the first 15 minutes that that was what was going on and then I have to wait for over an hour to move on from that aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaarrrggh

yep

this was not for me

yeah but a woman wrote the novel and script so it's OK

right?

there is so much about this movie that annoys me that I'm tired of thinking about it

Well! This was a bore.

― guess that bundt gettin eaten (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Saturday, 4 October 2014 16:52 (1 week ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

just saw it and this was my almost exact reaction. i have seen, or read, this sort of thing down amusingly, where you laugh at the sheer moral deviousness and ingenuity of the protagonists - Michael Dibdin's early novel Dirty Tricks springs to mind, but his wasn't that sort of film, and there was for me only one funny bit - the "octopus and chess" line, and maybe the odd smirk here or there.

whoever reached out at the Jim Thompson comparison upthread - it was certainly a comparison that popped into my head, but again, by way of negative contrast - there was no sense of despair or grifting on the edge, or psychopathic tendencies as existential explanation. it was, after all, a v well-heeled affair. there was a level of cold frivolity in the film, a rather frigid screwball if you like.

in fact one film it did remind me of slightly (in the thompson vein) was Detour, that great compact noir, which does the grim comedy better too. the detached guignol of this really left me cold. everyone else in the cinema fucking loved it tho so what do I know.

dug this a lot

just saw it, and i'm very sympathetic to negative takes. it's a movie about a psycho lady that provides america with a classy shorthand for "she be crazy." it won't be long until an athlete tweets his accuser is "gone girl-ing" him. i haven't read the book, but it's pretty clear the movie overwhelmingly takes a male sympathetic pov, just from the opening-closing shots of the back of her head alone. fincher movies all look the same, some fish-in-a-barrel moments.

that said, if you can think of a better, smarter movie about a psycho lady from a male sympathetic pov, lemme know. closest i can come is, like, double indemnity maybe. but compared to like, fatal attraction, this was pretty impressive.

also i've rarely seen a movie that had a female anti-hero of this fashion. from jimmy cagney to walter white, there's plenty of films where we get to live vicariously through the ruthless adventures of a man who selfishly breaks out from where society in part put him. granted, usually those movie's aren't told from the pov of the gangster's romantic partner, but still.

serial mom is a GREAT comparison point in this sense

Fincher tries hard for a Preminger-esque detachment where everyone has a reason. Serial Mom had the audacity to treat Turner's actions as transgressive-funny; I still remember the gasp from the audience when a certain adrenal gland was speared and played for laughs. Fincher doesn't know from laughs. Waters reveled in the tabloid cliches while Fincher insists tabloids are horrible things perpetuated by horrible women and the horrible audience who watches them.

It's weird how the movie plays like a classy Disclosure.

I'd say Fincher has his cake and eats it too, re: tabloids and laughs, which is how you rake in cash and get nominations for awards. Think the French Connection, which shows cops as pigs and pig cops as guys who get the job done. There's clowny-ass women like Casey Wilson, there's smart, strong, good women like Kim Dickens and the twin. It was as humorless and misogynist as you claim, it wouldn't be anywhere as successful as it is.

It's not just a classy disclosure, it's a better disclosure.

If it was as humorless, I meant.

xpost

yeah i think what you describe is for better or/and for worse par for the course with big mainstream films. you hedge your bets, cover your bases. make it seem like you are being topical and controversial but also make sure you can't be pinned down to any particular POV. "the dark knight" is kind of the great example of this--how do you make a comic-book film seem weighty and important? freight it with a variety of (ultimately incoherent) allusions to the War on Terror, etc. Gone Girl is hardly objectionable on that level but i don't think it's playing any fairer.

i still think it has a variety of virtues, though!

I laughed a lot during gone girl

The whole theater did for that matter

if you're going to resent this movie, resent it as an "all things to all people" blockbuster-for-grown-ups, where some can walk out saying it shows how much bullshit women have to live up to, and some can walk out saying it shows how women are manipulative monsters. and even at that, Gone Girl is an evolution in complexity from Play Misty For Me just as Ben Affleck's character is an evolution in complexity from Clint Eastwood's.

This whole class of male bro directors who crossed over in '99 make films for awards.

Payne is by far the worst offender. Fincher isn't that far behind tho.

Russell worst of all.

Poll time.

go for it

Am I polling the directors who have devolved most into making movies strictly for awards? Or just the worst of them overall?

In most cases I'd ask "what's the difference?" Not with these gents.

Am I forgetting anyone?

Paul Thomas Anderson
Wes Anderson
David Fincher
Spike Jonze
Alexander Payne
David O. Russell

(Rushmore technically '98, but didn't really get on most people's radar until the year after.)

a pity Shyamalyan makes no awardbait. Maybe it's failed awardbait.

He did in '99. Which is why he's disqualified now.

ITT people compare John Waters to David Fincher. Just think on that a bit.

does carbon dating work over short periods of time? ie nick proves she wrote all those entires over the space of a month rather than years, uses that to bolster other evidence to prove it was a set-up, she's jailed, he gets custody of kid, lives happily ever after

and the scene about a third way through where he shoves her into the staircase and says he doesnt want kids, was that real or a flashback? i took it as fact, surprised by people itt suggesting it didn't happen

That was a flashback and didn't happen.

~we'll never know the truth~

but it was positioned as a fabrication from Amy's diary

It bugged me at the time but in hindsight I appreciated how stiff and quippy the dialogue was during the flashbacks, esp. the meet-cute and the proposal, which makes sense after the twist.

she says in the voiceover she made all that shit up no

xp as I said tho the dialogue between affleck & twin, affleck & cop &c is exactly the same type of stiff & quippy at the beginning, it's just shit dialogue

its unclear whether the shove is real or not

Anyways this movie was fine but not great. It got a lot better in the last half-hour or so when it got more lurid and ridiculous. The casting was really bizarre and the movie would have been better with different leads. Kim Dickens was great though and Tyler Perry was fun.

There is a big indication that the shove is fake (i.e. basically everything in the flashbacks at that point is fake and it serves Amy's purposes perfectly) and no indication at all that it's real so I don't know why people would think it's real?

she says something to the effect that the first part of the diary is real, and she only makes it up toward the end, but its unclear where the dividing line is

the thing that places some doubt is that he does shove her into the wall in their last scene together

I haven't read the book, but in the terms set by the movie Ben Affleck was perfectly cast imo - a stud/clown america gives an oscar one day and shits on the next, his whole career has been building to this

oh yeah, no question. he was absolutely perfectly cast.

the dialogue definitely felt a little arch to me initially, but i fell into its groove before long. weirdly in that sense it reminded me of Friends With Benefits, which also opens with obnoxious pre-coital bantering and then gratefully fucks up their shit with family probs.

i refuse to engage in any "did that flashback actually happen" shit because it doesn't matter in the slightest in terms of the story. she's a psycho, he's a heel - beyond that it's rashomon. and the answer is "no, it's a movie, none of it happened" anyway.

the thing that places some doubt is that he does shove her into the wall in their last scene together

― Nhex, Monday, October 13, 2014 1:47 PM (17 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

And thus "becomes the man she wanted him to be" in the way that she didn't want, even if just for a moment.

that shove before the nancy grace interview was a good example of the "something for everybody" scene. on one hand it suggests his potential for violence, that he may HAVE been a threat. On the other it's justified violence of the Michael Douglas school.

its unclear whether the shove is real or not

she says specifically that he has to admit to the shove iirc

and the answer is "no, it's a movie, none of it happened" anyway.

― da croupier, Monday, October 13, 2014 1:02 PM (19 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

This is so dumb.

now I don't trust my memory but I think in the book he admits to shoving her.

This is so dumb.

it's glib, but it's not dumb to acknowledge that movies with multiple unreliable narrators aren't necessarily puzzles with a clear line of what did and didn't happen.

that there isn't necessarily a Right answer

Do you guys really think his character shoving his wife after he knows that she is a violently insane murderer who is blackmailing him with their unborn child means that he had the potential to shove her when she was his perfect loving wife?

Saying that something is ambiguous is not the same as saying it doesn't matter.

she wasn't his perfect loving wife, she was a psychopath he was cheating on out of frustration. and i said these details don't matter in the terms of this story. we know she's a murderous psycho, we know he's a philandering heel. who showed their true colors first, who was more sympathetic when, doesn't really matter.

Anyways I was mainly saying it's dumb because it's so unnecessarily condescending - "You guys are arguing over this piddly little plot point but I can tell that it is irrelevant." I don't think anything thinks this is really important, it's just weird to me than anyone thinks it happened (IN THE CONTEXT OF THE MOVIE, I UNDERSTAND MOVIES AREN'T REAL)

the important factors - he was cheating, she saw it, she faked her death - are uncontested aspects of each take. from what people are saying, he may have also admitted to shoving her. and i admitted i said it glibly, sorry if i hurt your feelings.

She was his perfect loving wife when he supposedly pushed her down onto the stairs. He had no indication she was psychotic at that point.

we know his sister didn't like her, we know she had no friends, we know she was quick to fuck with people, he said she was making him feel like shit about being unemployed. whether or not he knew the depths of her character, saying he saw her as "the perfect loving wife" is absurd.

he wasn't cheating on "the perfect loving wife"

For me it goes back again to the last conversation where (paraphrasing) Ben Affleck says to his wife that all they ever did was try to control and hurt each other. He didn't say that she tried to hurt him, but that they were both complicit in the problems of the marriage. That might be the only part of the film where he genuinely admits fault.

good piece

http://filmschoolrejects.com/opinions/gone-girl-the-possibility-of-a-post-plot-twist-era.php

Saw this w/friends tonight. I absolutely HATED the lighting design.

can we pay someone to keep fincher out of the paperback aisle at the supermarket

Right, because he's definitely better off trying on more Benjamin Buttons.

Zodiac was based on Graysmith's questionable paperbacks...

I did not know that. And I still haven't seen Benjy Butz.

Only having seen Gone Girl the movie and read some descriptions of the book, it seems like the book was going for a "yes, she's a psycho, but he's a cheater so they're both bad" angle. Which the movie wisely cut out. This left him as a good guy, but then it leaves the ending intact, which doesn't make sense in the new context.

I think it's all pretty strategic, honestly. It could mean this, it could mean that.

that's a kind of "strategy" that's art's prerogative though, right? that kind of interpretive Schrödinger's cat. it's not an essay...

just saying I don't think that sort of thing is a "hedge" necessarily.

but also abanana's reading strikes me as wrong--I don't think the movie wants us to draw a "moral," assign good guys and bad, as if this is the total interpretive job of the audience.

i didn't say it was a bad or corrupt strategy

ah sorry, perhaps I'm conflating that with some things you said upthread.

I'm always late to these things...Found the first 30-45 minutes slow, liked it more as it got wilder. I don't think it's nearly as good as Zodiac or The Social Network, but I'd take it over Fight Club. I wasn't sure at times if it was a flat-out black comedy, or if some of the laughs were unintentional. (Different performers seemed to be in different places.) It reminded me of To Die For, a more controlled and better film, I think. Affleck and Pike are okay; I liked the trailer-trash woman and (an easy role) the lawyer. (David Edelstein thinks Affleck is great.) Pike made me think of Laura Linney, the sister of Laurie Metcalfe. My friend and I had lots of questions and half-theories afterwards as to what it all means, and that's not a bad thing. I assume the best line is right from the novel: "Octopus and Scrabble?"

I think that it's def possible that one of the reasons I liked the movie more than most here is that I didn't have any foreknowledge of the plot whatsoever.

Ditto. Knew zilch, except that a disappearance was involved.

hm, I didn't either but I thought one could easily foresee twists of some kind forthcoming. maybe I just watch too much informational murder porn like dateline/48 hrs where they edit & frame it for twists even when they aren't present

I think I was intuitively making quick half-guesses along the way, and some were right and some were wrong.

this movie sucked ass

haha yeah I am... wary of seeing it. Fincher's not v dependable as a director ime.

if you don't like Fincher already you'll hate this

really, slocki? nothing redeeming about it?

I *love* Zodiac, The Social Network is ok, Fight Club is ok but flawed, the Game is ridiculous but kinda fun and then it goes on too long. the rest of his films suck.

i really disagree, but that's the spice of life IIRC

xp hmm. interesting assessment! i would say Gone Girl was like 50% The Game, 50% Dragon Tattoo. so you still probably won't like it
ftr I'm a big fan of both of those films

i thought it felt like a weird cross between an awkward indie romantic comedy and an episode of criminal minds

and it was like a MRA/misogynist's wet dream

really not "feeling" masculine victimization fantasies about manipulative women who fake rape and sexual assault so they can control their esquire writer husbands right now

so you weren't rooting for Amy I see

ayo s1ock did you read adam nayman's thing on it, it is good and relevant to yr points

really not "feeling" masculine victimization fantasies about manipulative women who fake rape and sexual assault so they can control their esquire writer husbands right now

yeah I find this whole premise gross

totally understand people not really wanting to indulge in this type of story and fincher def gives it a male pov but i think it's important to remember that it's an anti-hero story written by a woman - that while it works as an mra fantasy writing it off as merely that does the author and the story/film's female fanbase a real disservice

Well, hey, I liked Taken, too.

like, why should only men get to write about people of their gender committing crimes and violating social norms so audiences can live vicariously through their despicable actions

you make it sound like a gangster novel

it kinda is

by the same stick you can beat this movie with, you could say breaking bad episodes directed by michelle mclaren were feminine victimization fantasies about manipulative men who fake charity drives and medical blackouts so they can control their long-suffering wives

medical prescription blackouts, rather

again, not saying you have to hug and kiss the movie and hand it oscars, just acknowledge that it's not mere fedora-bait

is Baffleck's character as badly written as Skylar

you sound pretty predisposed to hate it, don't bother

I dunno, this had enough De Palma overtones to make it work for me.

if it were De Palma there would be a split screen as Pike and the redneck made love while Affleck takes conflicted selfie

Well, I'm not saying there wasn't room for improvements.

really not "feeling" masculine victimization fantasies about manipulative women who fake rape and sexual assault so they can control their esquire writer husbands right now

yeah I find this whole premise gross

― Οὖτις, Tuesday, November 4, 2014 4:19 PM (6 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

i couldn't shake this feeling off the whole time i was watching the movie. i usually take try to take fiction on its own terms and am really hesitant to to label a movie sexist or racist or classist and i'm not labeling this movie, but i had this queasy feeling throughout like "does the world really need THIS story to be told right now?". Similar to what I felt when I kept seeing the commercial for the movie with idris elba whose premise was "a strange black man is at your door and says he needs help....he is actually a crazed murderer!". There's nothing inherently wrong with telling that story but I question why it was told now.

when's a good time to make a movie about a crazed murderer

when does the world need that movie

it's always a good time to make a movie about a crazed murderer. i love cinematic violence. i'm not even really condemning gone girl but that was my actual IRL reaction while i was watching it. it's entirely possible that i could watch it in like 10 years and the story element of a woman repeatedly lying about being raped wouldn't bother me.

so you're saying your problem with this violent movie about a crazed murderer is that it had a plot element that disturbed you

that violent movies about crazed murderers shouldn't be disturbing

the problem is that the myth that women routinely lie about rape is a big factor in why the vast majority of rapes are not reported or ever successfully prosecuted. that fact intersects with that element of the story in a way that made it hard for me to enjoy.

again, i might watch it again and that part wouldn't bug me. it's happened before.

i have no problem with someone not enjoying a film. when someone extends that subjective morality to the planet it's worth pointing out how arbitrary it is

anyone saying "hey i love cinematic violence" doesn't really get to play Does The World Need This

i'm agreeing that it's arbitrary. that's why i said that i might feel differently the next time i watch it. i didn't say that people shouldn't enjoy this movie, everyone can decide how it makes them feel for themselves. i was just saying that was the reason it affected me.

no you said "i question why it was made now" that's not a "not for me" that's a request for a defense

it's both. it made me feel bad, it didn't make you feel bad, we're talking about it. great! i question why it was made, sure, but i don't condemn anyone for making it or for liking it. i meant that it was a nagging thing in my mind while watching. like "was there an agenda here, or not?" similarly, i don't think 30 rock is racist because its main black character is a cartoonishly ignorant buffoon but i know some people who do think that and that's fine. it just doesn't bug me about that particular show. they're not wrong for thinking that and i'm not wrong.

actually, as i said upthread a while back, it did make me feel bad in the sense that "gone girl" will be undoubtedly become a shorthand for "she's lyin!" by folks trying to discredit a victim. but i'm not going to engage in some "not here, not now" moralistic shit considering my own tastes in film and (if the mood strikes) call out those who try to give it that spin (and sorry, "i don't think there's anything wrong with liking the film i just question the motivations of the filmmakers" is specious as hell). i think pulling that selective piety is a cheat to avoid engaging with the material, which is fine if you admit you're simply not engaging with the material.

imo this movie is a hell of a lot smarter than your "masculine victimization fantasies" of yore and it might have something to do with the author not being a man. i kind of wish the director hadn't been a man either (the film might not have began and ended with pike resting on our chest) but that's different than "the world needs not this mra crap"

having read what the book was like after seeing the movie, I feel like there are inherent limitations with adapting the story to film that made it hard to avoid portraying Amy as more of a one-dimensional villain and Affleck as ultimately a more sympathetic character than he was in the book as a result but maybe that's giving Fincher too much of a pass

that's just how it made me feel while i was watching it. i'm not writing an editorial on huffpo entitled "if you liked gone girl or even found it interesting artistically, you are sustaining rape culture, and that's not okay". i don't feel that i am being moralistic, just explaining how a real issue impacts how i ingest fiction.

there seems to be be some semantic difference here about the meaning of "questioning"-i mean questioning like the sexual orientation, not as a synonym for "challenging". what i meant was that i genuinely couldn't tell when i was watching it if it had some polemical elements or not.

i love the greasy de palma shit too, dog! there is no piety implied intentionally.

xpost

but yeah that was part of the reason that i was questioning, the fact that it was an adaptation of a book (that i haven't read) and the tangle of interpretive differences that result. like you could film the plot of lolita in a million different ways and never get the tone even kind of right.

thing is, in your 30 rock analogy, i guarantee people who think the show is racist are not 100% ok with you liking it,even if you're ok with them NOT liking it. it's far easier for the unoffended to be "live and let live" about that kind of thing. so if you're now saying "i dunno what they were doing, and whether that was a good thing" then fine you walked out with your head spinning, you didn't mean to imply you actually came to a complete thought. but if you're saying you DID find it offensive, that you DO think its not the right time culturally for this movie to exist, then stick by that.

i didn't imply i came to a complete thought. i directly said that i questioned the movie's genesis, which literally means that i had questions about it. no proclamations were made. i was troubled by it the one time i watched it. i think that that feeling can co-exist with being ok with other people not being troubled by it, but i live in my own head and you live in yours.

imo this movie is a hell of a lot smarter than your "masculine victimization fantasies" of yore and it might have something to do with the author not being a man. i kind of wish the director hadn't been a man either (the film might not have began and ended with pike resting on our chest) but that's different than "the world needs not this mra crap"

Lynne Ramsay, please phone home...

alright slam at this point we're debating what you said vs what you meant, and you're clearly on the namaste train now so it's cool

*stomps around, waiting for some other punk to sound even vaguely high horsey about this movie*

idk why this movie has made me sound so new age-y. i am actually really angry and judgmental about almost everything.

as with everything extra-filmic, im betting the MRA angle wouldnt have bothered me as much if i actually liked the movie

but "a woman wrote it!" hardly shields it from any criticism in that regard, either.

and it's disingenuous to think that art exists in some sort of moral vacuum, i mean, you COULD make a movie about a hook-nosed jewish money lender and release it in say, hungary right now, but i dont think hungary or the world would "need" that either

by the same stick you can beat this movie with, you could say breaking bad episodes directed by michelle mclaren were feminine victimization fantasies about manipulative men who fake charity drives and medical blackouts so they can control their long-suffering wives

― da croupier, Tuesday, November 4, 2014 4:38 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

and this dude? really? no.

do you believe that this movie is pro-MRA?

no, i just think it spins a fantasy that lines up very neatly with the mra/gamerg4te narrative and that made it hard for me to enjoy, as a human being who lives in the world and doesn't just become a neutral blob when he enters a movie theater

i think of myself as someone who tends to be TOO sensitive to real-world political and material echoes and resonances of works of art and i don't think i ever once felt uncomfortable with the way this was played--too cartoonish, too blackly comic. and, idk, affleck's character is such a prickish schlub and amy is so charismatic and gleefully psychopathic

it could be "where i'm at" at this particular moment but i'm just having a hard time with any popular entertainment that uses faked rape/abuse as a plot point #ghomeshigate

no, i just think it spins a fantasy that lines up very neatly with the mra/gamerg4te narrative and that made it hard for me to enjoy, as a human being who lives in the world and doesn't just become a neutral blob when he enters a movie theater

hey slocki if you actually read what i wrote you'll see i never suggested one needs to be a neutral blob and haven't been one myself

I can't imagine how stupid you'd have to be to watch the sequence in which Amy "edits" together the falsified rape, complete with physical "evidence," and leave the movie thinking "see, fake rape is totally a thing that is plausible"

i was thinking more of the scene where he meets her ragged ex-boyfriend in a bar and he talks about the fake date rape accusation that ruined his life

don't tell me that's not EXACTLY what MRAs are thinking of when they beat their chests about false accusations

That scene is really the only one in the movie that made me uncomfortable, doubly so since that scene/character could be excised from the movie and it loses nothing in terms of the plot. It felt like a dangling, unnecessary holdover from the book.

xp I can't help but feel that sentiment is not at all what the movie was going for, given the generally blackly hilarious tone of the whole picture. it's kind of like saying Strangers on a Train perfectly lines up with people who want to plan a double murder of their spouses

The fake rape accusation of the first boyfriend would align with what you're saying, but the scheme of the movie it's sooooo small potatoes in Amy's grand hysteria

yeah even just on a story level i wasn't a fan of the "she's been doing this for ages" thing because it made me wonder how she lasted so long WITHOUT going ham on someone after meeting affleck. that if she was so quick to lose it would she have even made it to missouri

yeah i found that hard to reconcile too...

i thought her transformation was the most effective part of the movie but i could never really get a handle around her character, or affleck's either (esp when you find out that most of what you "know" about him is false).

i think of myself as someone who tends to be TOO sensitive to real-world political and material echoes and resonances of works of art and i don't think i ever once felt uncomfortable with the way this was played--too cartoonish, too blackly comic. and, idk, affleck's character is such a prickish schlub and amy is so charismatic and gleefully psychopathic

― max, Wednesday, November 5, 2014 10:19 AM (13 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

yes

don't tell me that's not EXACTLY what MRAs are thinking of when they beat their chests about false accusations

also just fyi, in case anybody's compelled to get it twisted. "it was written by a woman" doesn't put it above criticism, it's just worth remembering when a dude wants to say this movie is just pandering to dudes

the reason i made the breaking bad analogy is to acknowledge that there's an audience for "woman finds herself in a shitty marriage with a philandering schlub, BREAKS EVERY SOCIAL TENET WITH NO REMORSE to get her way out of it" that doesn't wear fedoras, and to say "well you can't have the vicarious thrills men get every damn week on television, because it's not safe for women to be cold-blooded to men in movies what with gamergate" is actually kind of paternalistic and shitty

this isn't to say fincher wasn't catering to the male pov in the adaptation

fincher was definitely having his cake and eating it too, something that can definitely be critiqued without pretending the film is just Fight Club 2: You Married Her And She's Still After Your Balls

the reason i made the breaking bad analogy is to acknowledge that there's an audience for "woman finds herself in a shitty marriage with a philandering schlub, BREAKS EVERY SOCIAL TENET WITH NO REMORSE to get her way out of it" that doesn't wear fedoras, and to say "well you can't have the vicarious thrills men get every damn week on television, because it's not safe for women to be cold-blooded to men in movies what with gamergate" is actually kind of paternalistic and shitty

this isn't to say fincher wasn't catering to the male pov in the adaptation

― da croupier, Wednesday, November 5, 2014 10:56 AM (1 hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

walter white was indisputably the hero of breaking bad... there's no way you're telling me amazing amy was anything but the supervillain of this movie

i think that is a rather important distinction tbh!!!

she's totally the (anti-)hero!

yeah that's why I made the comparison upthread between Baffleck and Skylar cuz in order for croup's analogy to work you have to consider Skylord the protagonist of BB

xp

she's a villain, maybe, the way a batman villain is: they are the source of all the fun.

i'm not saying breaking bad and gone girl are a note for note match. you could use the relative tenderness with which ben affleck is portrayed compared to skylar as either a knock on breaking bad or a knock on gone girl. i'm merely comparing them to help you realize how this movie has appeal beyond the mra crowd (so yes, amazing amy was more than just a "supervillain"), and to call out the hypocrisy of condemning the movie for daring to tell a story that has been told countless times for the delight of men like you and i.

and one more time - let's not have any backpedal into "i'm just a human feeling my feelings shit". you could hate this movie for the haircuts and that'd be fine. it's when that personal distaste is extrapolated to some "this is bad for society" bit of self-flattery that it's worth noting how arbitrary (and in this case, paternalistic) that vanity is

anyway, i think i said this upthread, but Nick's status as "protagonist" is one of the more interesting things about the story, both book and film. his decision to stay with her at the end flips what you presume to be his status in the narrative on its ear. (imo)

uh the shit was meant to be outside the quotation marks in that last paragraph. or in between asterisks. either works.

walter white was indisputably the hero of breaking bad... there's no way you're telling me amazing amy was anything but the supervillain of this movie

― socki (s1ocki), Wednesday, November 5, 2014 12:14 PM (8 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

i mean, yah, like darth vader or the joker in dark knight

the movie provided limited insight into Amy's inner life, compared to Nick which caused her to seem more supervillain than antihero

also her previous false rape accusation, which seemed totally superfluous

guys this is hardly the first time a woman has been the bad guy in a movie, or been portrayed as manipulative, scheming, hateful, etc, so please don't tell me that this is some great step forward and that finally women are getting their due as the object of dread and hatred

honestly can't tell if you're really this disingenuous or what

like are you intentionally applying a selective read of what i'm saying or is it just a defensive tic

i am not personally making that claim fwiw. i think it does the movie (and pike) a disservice to regard amy as a contemptuous and hatable villain instead of a charismatic and compulsively watchable one. maybe it fails in that regard for you, or maybe even if it succeeds the resonances are too powerful for the portrayal to be enjoyable.

i could say the same thing about you, but i wasn't going to, because i think there are better ways to have this conversation xp

dude i've repeated myself multiple times in vain, forgive me for not once again explaining that this movie isn't above critique

She was a totally engaging, showboating, audience-grabbing, even sympathetic character in her half - the movie pretty firmly puts you on her side as co-protagonist, she's not merely a despicable villain. The film steers your sympathies for her as an anti-hero, feel like this is hard to miss?

i disagree with you! and that's fine. but like, let's keep it friendly here dog. i dont dig the hostility

and i don't dig having half of what i say ignored

i'm not ignoring you by disagreeing with you.

if you genuinely think i'm saying this movie is a major advancement for women, rather than just a lot better than michael douglas "oh no my balls" movies from the 90s, you're genuinely confused and need to re-read the thread

it's a glossy thriller about a psycho, and as such isn't defensible if people are resolutely against glossy thrillers about a psycho. but it's just as much a "female anti-hero fantasy" as it is a "male victimization fantasy" and to ignore that is fucked. and that's what you keep doing.

http://www.theguardian.com/books/2013/may/01/gillian-flynn-bestseller-gone-girl-misogyny

"To me, that puts a very, very small window on what feminism is," she responds. "Is it really only girl power, and you-go-girl, and empower yourself, and be the best you can be? For me, it's also the ability to have women who are bad characters … the one thing that really frustrates me is this idea that women are innately good, innately nurturing. In literature, they can be dismissably bad – trampy, vampy, bitchy types – but there's still a big pushback against the idea that women can be just pragmatically evil, bad and selfish ... I don't write psycho bitches. The psycho bitch is just crazy – she has no motive, and so she's a dismissible person because of her psycho-bitchiness."

In the novel Amy is more pragmatically evil, maybe because the meticulousness with which she fills in the details of the crime had a numbing effect on me.

She's more qu'est-ce que c'est in the movie imo.

having not read the book like seemingly every other person i know, i might not be carrying over the same "pragmatically evil, bad and selfish" impression to the movie.

i haven't read the book either, but if you compare the amount of scenes we spend with her alone, compared to say glenn close in fatal attraction - not to mention the amount of voice-over she provides - it's pretty clear to me the movie is providing you with a relative degree of motivation beyond "she crazy"

tbf Fincher/Flynn didn't do a great job of carrying that over either

xp

i dunno, there was never any point where i was like "welp, i might not have handled it that way, but she did what she had to do"

well no you're not pragmatically evil

i also cant say i really bought her buying into affleck's supposed tv conversion

or at least like... finding it appealing in the way she appears to

yeah no again, the movie is still a trashy thriller about a selfish murderer and like every damn one it was probably flawed in the novel and definitely flawed in the book. it's only the determination to deal with it on a "mra-bait? no thanks" level that forces me to bring out the bazooka

cuz like, clearly the movie was written by a feminist and enjoyed by feminists. they're not all being duped here.

it's also being not-enjoyed by other feminists, if that matters to you: http://www.gq.com/blogs/the-feed/2014/10/gone-girls-girl-problem.html

definitely flawed in the film, i mean. fincher always errs on the side of crass crowd-pleasing

xpost please control+f the word "again," slocki. i'm surely you'll find a couple examples of me saying ONE CAN FIND FAULT IN AND NOT ENJOY THE MOVIE

ultimately tho... i didnt think this was a very good movie, i mean, politics aside, i just found it struck such a weird tone, it didn't thrill or scare me, the character interactions felt so forced and even cutesy... its a strange one

you know what was a good movie though, was john wick

which, i might add, features a female bad guy who is just that - a skilled badass with her own motives and who exists on her own terms

(and who never, like, uses her sexuality to get her way in a way we've seen in dude-driven movies a million times before)

"House of Cards' Southerner Problem"

still can't think of a good reason to see this

ugh I hated John Wick outside of the first 10 mins, but then again well-shot action sequences are generally not enough to get me through a movie unless they are truly spectacular. I wish people still knew how to craft interesting or at least diverting villains, sorry thread derail but I feel v alone on that movie

lol "killing countless people because three killed your dog is ok but a women using sex to get ahead well there goes my monocle"

"why can't we just have a nice parade of russian mafia bloodshed without all these antiquated tropes"

to be clear i loved john wick

For me, it's also the ability to have women who are bad characters … the one thing that really frustrates me is this idea that women are innately good, innately nurturing. In literature, they can be dismissably bad – trampy, vampy, bitchy types – but there's still a big pushback against the idea that women can be just pragmatically evil, bad and selfish

this is a weird thing to say imo. 1) I can think of a ton of evil women characters throughout history ranging from the crude folktales of evil stepmothers/witches to Lady Macbeth to Barbara Stanywck in Double Indemnity to Livia Soprano 2) Its pretty obvious that while you can have bad female characters, the risk is that they may just be used or received as feeding mysogynist stereotypes, which is probably why some writers shy away from them (they are difficult to write, and they may be misconstrued), and which has obviously happened with this movie.

which I will not be seeing btw

maybe she just reads different books than I do but there are loads of non-psycho bitch/evil woman characters

then why are you mad at her for trying to write another

I'm not mad at her, the setup of this book/movie just doesn't seem remotely interesting or appealing

she's saying in literature it's more common, but in movies, less so?

which I would agree with

not going back to the 30s/40s/50s misogyny that this movie is somewhat evoking

fair enough, re being unimpressed with the concept - i'm sure people who read a lot of crime fiction weren't impressed by the concept of silence of the lambs either

(not a quality comparison so much as a "the rare crime thriller that makes a ton of money and might have oscars thrown at it in a slow year" comparison)

she's saying in literature it's more common, but in movies, less so?

is she talking about the movies there? I guess I can't tell.

evil women in film (can we include TV too?): Cersei Lannister, Ursula, the Wicked Witch of the West, etc.

I'm just calling bullshit on this specific dichotomy she's claiming, if that isn't clear

xp

if we narrow this down to "crime thriller films" than yeah ok yeah that is not a genre with a lot of well-developed female roles, generally speaking (it's pretty much madonna/whore). but that isn't what she said. She said "literature", which is bullshit.

MA'AM HAVE YOU HEARD OF SHAKESPEARE?

hey I wouldn't take anything for granted with our shitty popular authors these days

wait wait ursula is a well-developed female role

like, the little mermaid, ursula

again, feel free to suggest it's vain of an author to assume their success at crafting a rich female villain character, but just listing disney characters is beside the point

ursula is not a simple psycho bitch, was my point

it's not that she assumes the success, it's that she assumes she's unique

i'm not reading that at all, she's responding to criticism that her character is too misogynist
and really besides Cersei and Patty Hewes from Damages, it's still hard to come up with really great, compelling evil female roles in the last few decades. but at the same time I don't want to turn this into a list thread...

like, no one pushed back against Ursula being a "pragmatically evil, bad, selfish" female villain, this conception is so common that it's it taken for granted in children's movies

xp

it's still hard to come up with really great, compelling evil female roles in the last few decades

I don't think it's hard at all, but it comes down to taste about what you consider "great" and "compelling".

lol "killing countless people because three killed your dog is ok but a women using sex to get ahead well there goes my monocle"

― da croupier, Wednesday, November 5, 2014 3:06 PM (1 hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

you really wanna go there with that argument? i thought it was great to a see a film where the women characters weren't total all conventional sex objects. that bothers you because there was action movie killing in the movie too? i can't even figure out what you're advocating for here

sorry to not just let it go, but there's something about the john wick comparison that's still bothering me.

in both films, a woman ruthlessly rejects the codes of the patriarchy that surrounds her so she can successfully execute a man. in both cases, she doesn't really have to, but is compelled by a mix of sociopathic excitement, greed and contempt. both would appear to be "a skilled badass with her own motives and who exists on her own terms" to the same degree. in wick, she's executed by the patriarchy for breaking the code of conduct (wick, though he has committed his own trespasses, is spared). in gone girl, she and john wick reach a detente, with both accepting their toxicity (at least for the moment).

now granted, you could say the assassin in wick doesn't "use her sexuality to get her way" in the story, though she's dressed in tight leather while all the other assassins wear smart suits. but really you'd be saying that while she exploits everything else in the story, she doesn't exploit rape culture - beyond looking distractingly hot. now (again again again dear god, let it stick this time) i'm not saying a film that acknowledges rape culture is above critique or has to be enjoyed. but to contrast it negatively with a relatively chivalrous mob fantasy just because the latter didn't go there, is dubious ground.

lol xpost

and here i was second-guessing whether to bring it all up again

john wick never used sexual violence as a convenient plot device or way to raise the stakes. the female assassin could have easily been a male character with almost no alterations in the script - in fact i suspect she was originally written as such. i liked that, a lot, about the movie. she was a co-equal baddie.

also let's compare the second and third female lead in gone girl to the second and third female lead in john wick

in gone girl, she's a serial rape-cried-wolfer, a uniquely evil sociopath who seems to exist only to twist men to her desires and leave them ruined—which is, how I suspect, most of #g4merg4ate sees women. do i blame this movie for it? not at all. does it make it more difficult for me to enjoy it as a dark twisted fantasy? absolutely.

the female assassin could have easily been a male character with almost no alterations in the script

so again, it sounds like your problem with gone girl is that the character's societal situation was distinctly female

again, you keep backpedaling to "do i have to enjoy it" as if anyone's asking you to

and while GG had the caring sister and smart detective, it also had the shallow selfie lady, the bloodthirsty fox news host, the busty girlfriend who turns him "like they all do"

again, you keep backpedaling to "do i have to enjoy it" as if anyone's asking you to

― da croupier, Wednesday, November 5, 2014 4:23 PM (45 seconds ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

if we're not talking about whether we enjoy this movie or not i really don't know what we're doing right now - dude i'm not like prosecuting this movie in front of a jury in criminal movie court

croupier can't handle the truth

i honestly feel like alicia florrick around here sometimes

forget it croup, it's the internet

you know what's a fun movie, the last seduction

forget it croup, it's the internet

yeah i mean when you compare the plots and treatment of john wick and gone girl and the acknowledgement of rape culture/patriarchy in the film and the response is "she was a chick that could have been a dude, i dug it" i think it's time to just let it goooo let it gooooo

You know who's a fun character: TANNER BOLT.

i really want tyler perry to get an oscar for it just so kenan thompson can do his tyler-fanning-himself-with-money bit on weekend update with an oscar next to him

tyler perry by FAR the most enjoyable part of this film

the quote from flynn up above about how her female villain is so unique and different from all that has come before is just horseshit. it kind of reminds of the delusional self-aggrandizement of nicholas sparks's recent interviews--it seems to exhibit little to no knowledge of the history of crime literature or film.

but it's kind of a red herring anyway.

i guess i just found this film to be pleasurable in the confident and precise way it told a story. and for me anyway, the whole man-is-framed-and-has-to-prove-his-innocence story is almost inherently compelling, as long as it's not told incompetently. but i wouldn't make any great claims for it.

i mean i appreciate leave her to heaven largely for the integrity and beauty of its form as well.

I appreciated it for drowning an annoying child.

it's wonderful for both reasons!

dammit slocki now i actually think less of john wick - where gone girl has a bunch of women of varying degrees of depth and sympathy, john wick has a madonna and a whore. all the older men in their world respect the code, and when reeves and dafoe break it, it's evidence of soul. palicki's character only breaks it because of moneylust, which is condescendingly humored until she's finally dispatched by a virtual gang-bang.

thanks for making me realize that!

ILX never fails to push my feelings on any number of films to one extreme or another.

4 Golden Globe noms. but.. best Director and best screenplay but not best film? dunno how the F that works but fair dos for the rest.

happens for Oscars too once in a while

I like to divide history into two parts: one before the release of Gone Girl, the other after.

Happy for Pike, she deserves it

Movies that got Best Drama & Best Director noms: Selma, Boyhood
Movies that got Best Drama & Best Screenplay noms: Boyhood, The Imitation Game
Movies that got Best Drama & Best Actor in a Drama noms: The Imitation Game, Selma, Foxcatcher, Theory Of Everything
Movies that got Best Drama & Best Actress in a Drama noms: The Theory Of Everything
Movies that got Best Drama & Best Supporting Actress noms: Boyhood, The Imitation Game
Movies that got Best drama & BEst Supporting Actor noms: Boyhood, Foxcatcher
Movies that got Best Drama & Best score noms: Imitation Game, Theory Of Everything
Movies that got Best Drama & Best Songs noms: Selma

Total Noms for selma: 4
Total Noms for Foxcatcher: 3
Total noms for Theory Of Everything: 4
Total noms for The Imitation Game: 5
Total noms for Boyhood: 5
Total noms for Gone Girl: 4

even with birdman and royal budapest hotel over in comedy, it's just a really tight race between six movies. Foxcatcher, which got no non-acting noms, sticks out as the one gone girl probably photo-finished with

also might have suffered from being the least "feel good" of the six

oh wait foxcatcher wasn't feel good

I didn't see it, but Imitation Game was feel good?

sort of wish this movie had ended at the twist. last scene, amy driving off and gleefully narrating what she did (that scene really reminded me of the cruel intentions remake). maybe an epilogue showing nick getting convicted. after that it turned into a different film, still compelling to the end despite the length but not as good. if it had ended there i'd've come away gasping, as it was i came away still admiring it but with substantial reservations.

torn between wanting to appreciate a charismatic villainess and getting annoyed at the MRA-friendliness of it all, and how that could've been avoided - interesting to read how nick is less sympathetic in the book; i have no patience with everyman schlubs but it seemed like the film went out of its way to make him likeable or identifiable, which meant the "we did this to each other" conclusion made no sense because they were operating on such vastly different scales of badness. agree that nick's sister's presence went a very long way - i didn't know about the twist butit's pretty obvious that what it seems to be building towards is not what happened. (also, having the prime anti-nick voice in the first half be the terrible tv host, that's another warning sign.)

i thought her speech about how she felt like she'd been killed on the inside already was very powerful, and went hand in hand with nick being unable to say what she did all day. you got this image of amy stewing in her own resentment and all these acres of time to concoct this incredibly devious plan. but in the second half the film sort of backtracked on that to reveal that she was a habitual manipulator, schemer, false rape accuser. i don't think that was necessary. the idea that her monstrosity had been created by marriage was undercut by that "innately evil" implication.

also, it does that othello thing where a supremely smart villain ultimately gets caught out by a clumsy mistake they'd never ever have made. amy would not have gotten close to that girl so soon after her plan and she would not have fucking dropped all her money. c'mon.

also i'm not sure why it was so important to her at the end to "entrap" nick. that was exactly what she went to great lengths to escape from, and she only went back because she found herself in an untenable position. she didn't need that marriage to continue. (maybe the second half would've been more plausible if they'd been more famous? book tried to imply she was a minor celebrity of sorts thanks to her parents' books, but really they were both just minor staff journalists.)

lead cop was a good character, i thought.

oh i assumed the flashback where he pushed her was real but the film could've done a bit more with the ambiguity of how their marriage really was vs what she wrote in her diaries.

MRA-friendliness

Most Reductive Audience-friendliness??

seemed like the film went out of its way to make him likeable or identifiable

I don't agree. The casting of Affleck is perfect because both he and Fincher know very well that he comes off as an entitled douche. (Also, fwiw, Fincher has said that he "roots for" Amy and I think the film bears that out to come degree.)

I'd have dropped the scene with the ex she framed.

There’s a Gone Girl reunion brewing, with director David Fincher, screenwriter Gillian Flynn and actor Ben Affleck teaming up for a remake of the 1951 Hitchcock classic Strangers on a Train.

http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/david-fincher-ben-affleck-gillian-763366

my first thought: affleck again? barf.

second thought: well, actually the character /is/ supposed to be kind of unappealing.

third thought: maybe they can improve upon the ending.

that said, there's a rumor of a new fincher project every few weeks, and most of 'em never get made

does Affleck play Bruno

i assume he would have the farley granger role.

jesse eisenberg kind of born for the bruno role, no?

For me this was an entertaining enough way to spend a weeknight without drinking, glad I didn't know the plot before going in, and certainly not in a rush to see it again. Sometimes that's enough? I don't see many films at the cinema I guess.

So somehow I didn't read any spoilers, watched this, and it is worse than the scariest horror movie. I'm kind of shuddering at home. The crazed dysfunctional relationship with weird framing and gaslighting really hits too close to home. Very well done, but ahhhhhhh nooooo

as far as Fincher being pro-Amy, sure. every one of his films has the protagonist, or someone acting in the interest of the protagonist, doing severely fucked up things that are vindicated by the elevation of the hero in the end

loved this. much preferred amy the bored & devious heroine escaping her oblivious cheating husband to amy the endlessly evil rube goldberg constructor.

actually found the ending really unsatisfying, but i guess as dour metaphor it fits.

amy's "that's. marriage." was actually the most horrifying moment of the movie for me.

well, yeah

that one was kind of pitched at the cheap seats, i thought

that line, i mean

kind of like marriage

and... scene.

boom!

affleck got so much more believable as his smug shallowness was revealed. nice casting

He was not especially believable as a creative writing teacher, that's for sure.

you kidding me? run into more than a few creative writing teachers like that.

He didn't strike me as someone capable of writing creatively, I'll put it that way.

something we are told in writing workshops is that everyone is capable of writing creatively

i wonder if gillian flynn had an MFA professor like that back in the day

I didn't mind this, even tho it's a crap Regular People Potboiler and the last third is spectacularly silly.

Carrie Coon is great, hope she gets better films than this. She and Kim Dickens gave the best performances.

lol Neil P Harris is so bad AND unattractive.

Co-sign on Carrie Coon. It's funny she plays Affleck's twin because IRL she's like 10 years younger.

well, in the spirit of this movie, broads in the biz are used to doing that when they're not glamor queens.

v savvy to not have Affleck use the C-word til the last 5 minutes; makes for more measured thinkpieces.

still, this ismarriage. This or Eyes Wide Shut.

marriage more like Eraserhead imo

Coon is great on The Leftovers, though I gather your TV plate is overfull as it is.

Morbs - You likely remember this, but Coons played Honey in the '12 Broadway Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?.

that's where i know her from, yep

(then she went and married Tracy Letts)

So apparently Fincher originally wanted Jon Hamm but Matthew Weiner didn't want to mess with Mad Men scheduling. Huh.

That would have been pretty good

Seems too old by a few years maybe

a year older than affleck

I haven't seen it yet, but I think Hamm would have been terrible. He projects a different sort of smug/cocky/smarm than Affleck, and even though Hamm is only a couple of years older, he seems like he's 10 years older.

xpost!

i wonder if this is still happening

http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/david-fincher-ben-affleck-gillian-763366

i doubt it!

fincher always has like 20 rumored projects for every film he actually makes.

in other news, i watched G.G. again and it's pretty great, isn't it? i still don't think they came up with a truly satisfying ending, but it's growing on me. i think this film is easier to like the farther away we get from all the "cultural commentary" on it which was mostly hot air.

hamm casting would've been interesting. i think the fact that affleck (whose persona is basically that of a likable doofus) plays the husband kind of rules out much real suspicion that he did it, while hamm's persona seems like he would be capable of such a thing. or maybe hamm is just less of a known quantity, which amounts to the same thing.

fincher movies are such a pleasure to watch, he just knows where to place the camera, doesn't he? the result doesn't really come across as fussy, even though his working methods are famously fussy.

one of the only contemporary directors to have the kind of stylistic and narrative assurance that hollywood could once (almost) take for granted.

Wow. I watched almost half of it again and fought the urge to throw the TV through the window. Knowing how Fincher's going to develop the story robs the movie of any suspense; instead I'm left watching this stump of an actor going through the motions of grief. In most other Fincher movies, yeah, I can appreciate his skill.

grief? affleck's character is experiencing a lot of things, but grief barely registers.

fortunately the character is also going through the "motions of grief"

God this movie is ponderous an hour in. I need the supposedly trashy parts to start popping.

this was the worst movie i've seen this year
fincher can put a movie together i guess because he kept me engaged though I think it's mostly i was exhausted
my main takeaway is that there are women capable of jamming bottles up their ass to frame a man for rape so way to go everyone involved: you've further poisoned the culture with your barbed take on poisonous culture
what a horseshit hate film

agree completely, this was some truly dumb shit.

I'm piling on. Yeah, this was fucking dumb garbage and I felt very much at odds with the 90% of people I've talked to about it. Similar conflict about Her, but that's another thread.

Fincher is frustrating. Amazing talent but kinda dense about his choice of material.

thought it was a horseshit hate novel, have avoided the film

Saw this a second time last night (originally saw it in the theater on release). Whatever problems with the themes, it's pretty great as a coffee table book and structurally. And, NPH aside, the characters really have subtle shades instead of being simple archetypes. And Tyler Perry slays.

a coffee table book is something else tho

Same as Easy above--thought this was better a second time at home. Checked back, and I gave it a 7.0 two years ago, so I did like it. But I wrote that the two leads were just okay, and I found both performances very effective last night, especially Rosamund Pike. She finds the perfect gray area between the character's intelligence and early charm, the empathy you feel for her, and the blank monster that makes it all happen. Liked Perry, Kim Dickens (who I know from House of Cards now, and didn't then), Emily Ratajkowski, and even Patrick Fugit a lot too. If I were married, I'm sure I'd find lots to contemplate here.

i love this movie. surprised slocki & slam dunk didn't dig it, although I think part of that may have been related to the fact that I read the book before I saw the film & they didn't

i think some of the argument upthread about it—the nature of amy as a villain—was kind of the *point* of the film...

I guess I can see MRA types latching onto this but that's like when assholes latch onto wolf of wall street or scarface & miss the point of the ending

Quote from the author:

"For me, [feminism is] also the ability to have women who are bad characters … the one thing that really frustrates me is this idea that women are innately good, innately nurturing. In literature, they can be dismissably bad – trampy, vampy, bitchy types – but there's still a big pushback against the idea that women can be just pragmatically evil, bad and selfish ... I don't write psycho bitches. The psycho bitch is just crazy – she has no motive, and so she's a dismissible person because of her psycho-bitchiness."

Has anyone thought to tie this movie to “the current moment”

don't give them any ideas

i think its extremely relevant (and misunderstood)

This was entertaining as a thriller and satisfied my need to see Ben Affleck being punished, but it (and the book) seemed like a mess, morally. It's "straw woman: the movie".

thank you for illustrating what i mean by 'misunderstood'

lmao

great movie, tho tbh I kinda wish it didn't include the Scoot McNairy scene

So what did I misunderstand? I had the feeling I was misreading it, but I don't think the film's very clear about what it's trying to say.

the author quote immediately before the "one year passes" marker above seems to get at it

Thought of Gone Girl yesterday after seeing Phantom Thread.

And honestly thought Phantom Thread, while astonishing in acting and design, would have benefitted from Woodcock's livelihood being threatened at some point by his actions (wrong thread to go any further on that).

xpost

Right, obviously that makes sense - but I don't think the movie does a good job of making Amy much more than a (Flynn's words) "motiveless psycho"

i hated this movie but not as much as i’ve hated all the books trying to be “the next GONE GIRL”

This, moreorless:

But there are moments, several of them, in which Nick’s unsavory feelings about his complicated missing wife and about women in general—feelings that might be charitably summed up as “bitches be crazy”—seem indistinguishable from the filmmaker’s own vision of Amy as a black hole of ineffable female needs, moods, and desires

(From here.)

Thought of Gone Girl yesterday after seeing Phantom Thread.

I would not have, ever.

if you watched this movie and thinks Fincher likes, respects or agrees with the Nick character then idk what to say

if you're not cheering for Amy by the end of it you're doing it wrong

You shouldn't be cheering for anyone by the end of it! (Maybe Margo.)

still amazed they created an entire universe where no one has heard of a divorce

Yeah my impression was that they were both horrible people.

of course they are! but one is just an asshole and the other is charming and diabolically insane

i'm amazed y'all remember the plot of this thing

Why does it matter if the woman is actually a psychopath? This is total respectability politics bs for what the movie is about: men’s fear of losing preferred status in a system that rewards our own dehumanizing selfishness

The reaction of people being to her violent and extreme response to which acts as if this systemic inequity is then justified .... idk I think this movie is one of those times when it’s already about the things you guys are trying to bring to bear in critique of it

Rewording that first sentence: that ppl act like her violent and extreme response is a justification of this inequity ....

Losing preferred status is less it maybe than being about losing *control.* I can’t think of anything more resonant in all the insecure responses from men to “the current moment”

Also @ chuck Tatum how is she “motiveless”????? She explains her entire purpose!

I was gonna say, I seem to remember a key monologue.

affleck is a failed writer; she's shown to be the more successful writer. seems like the point of the odd ending is to show affleck being written into a reversed version of an archetypal 'woman's story' of marriage, one that was itself echoed in her fabrication of their story in her diary entries. now he goes about the house in fear for his life, unable to penetrate her inscrutable thoughts or read her emotions accurately. and now (inescapably?) he is trapped in a joyless performance that denies him any possibility of authentic human development through knowing and being known by another, intimately. it would be bonkers to have her return and have BOTH the detective and his lawyer (both reality-principle characters) believe that she had framed him, in a movie whose ultimate aims were in some sense realistic or whose genre were in some sense 'straight'. but they do because that serves to reinforce the sense in which affleck and pike are bound together in confinement from the world - she has trapped him. not with the baby, exactly, but with her revision of the myth of marriage, for which the baby is the dumb conventional social sanction, as validated by the performance for the media and the nancy grace or whoever knockoff. so the genre is one in which she must play out 'psycho' desires, out of vengeance, to magnify some version of the desires at play in 'realistic' analogues of the underlying plot of love and happy married life. if i quite had a read of the fantasy projection it is articulating, what i'd want to suggest is that it does it despite the risk of seeming to court MRA appeal because the MRA fantasy about women and men is one that it must activate to reject. not sure if it does that, though.

interesting that it goes to the trouble of having both their parents figure in the story, presumably in order to back-stop the interpretation of their roles in the marriage or in the roles of their self-scripted performances. they make a big deal out of her parents (mom, but dad somehow wholly on board with it?) stealing, or not stealing, but improving upon her childhood and life by writing her into a fictional character. affleck gets a sick mom and a mentally ill dad (who forgets himself, his family, apparently becomes just a font of vile misogyny). in her case at least, that makes the reclamation of the authority of 'writer' a clear goal. not as sure about him.

curious too that when he's conferring with his sister at the end, and she's wrecked by the news that he might stay because of the baby or whatever, she says 'i knew you before we were born', which sounds to me like the movie's somehow sanctioning the hilarious rumors the nancy grace knockoff feeds about the twins being too close (in the airport, the other passenger glares at affleck and says 'twin sister' in total disgust). not as literally true, but as one of the elements in the movie's myth-rewriting work. with his sister, his twin, there's a claim to knowledge of each other that somehow prefigures their birth into the world, i.e. society, into their social and gender roles as formed by that society. but as pike underscores after she has returned and they've had it out, perfection of the knowledge they have of one another is one of the key things at stake in their marriage, as marriage, too. so (as is already the case in real life) marriage is in competition with other forms of relationship in which people can find fulfillment. (this probably has something to do with why they make his affair be with a student, and him be a teacher: then we're on the same ground, life of the mind turning unplatonic, or over-poetic, sketched in just enough to allude to that cliche).

Interesting

wtf?

There are still tickets available to join me on the Avalon Waterways GONE GIRL CRUISE this September 15 - 22.

Details, deals, and full itinerary at the link below!https://t.co/Ct6KKnOGYO pic.twitter.com/KjRTe7RDkE

— Gillian Flynn (@TheGillianFlynn) July 23, 2022

this was one of the worst pieces of shit i've ever seen

lol

9 years old today (total classic, my fav fincher)

how was the cruise?

i need to rewatch this, i think i would enjoy it more now than i did at the time