A thread for David Fincher's adaptation of GONE GIRL

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.