Gone Girl (David Fincher, 2014)

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FrauBlucher
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Re: Gone Girl (David Fincher, 2014)

#126 Post by FrauBlucher » Wed Feb 11, 2015 7:46 pm

And that stupid little jump and kicking of her legs (like it was a commercial for chewing gum or something) that caused her to lose her money pouch was ridiculous. Who does that. That annoyed me. Fincher couldn't come up with something more realistic and natural.

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DarkImbecile
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Re: Gone Girl (David Fincher, 2014)

#127 Post by DarkImbecile » Wed Feb 11, 2015 7:58 pm

warren oates wrote:A lot of the specific examples swo's given for the flawless integrity of Gone Girl's plotting are on the order of "It's that way because this or that character says so." Which is fine as far as you accept the motivation and authority of whoever it is who has the bit of dialogue papering over any given objection. Once you start asking what reasons everybody else in the story has to believe any of the pat "because that's how it is" explanations, then you'll run into more trouble.
swo17 wrote:If this were all pitched at like 5% the intensity level, it might begin to resemble the reality of some marriages I know.
Well said. That would be more believable but probably way less exciting to watch. It's easier for me to see how people who don't find the writing of characters problematic might admire the film. A bit harder to see why you do. This is a genre film and it's supposed to be heightened. But that doesn't mean the writer gets a free pass on the construction of her characters, that they can just do whatever next thing would make the story least predictable.
I think what swo describes is why I and many others appreciate the film primarily as a satire on marriage; both halves of the relationship and their respective actions are easily read as the little abuses, failings, manipulations, and tragedies of a marriage taken to purposefully absurd and surreal extremes. Which is why obsessing over the realism of the characters' behavior and decision-making (much less debating whether or not she could have gotten away with it or other "plot holes") strikes me as misguided, and detracts from wallowing in the delicious ironies, brutal observations, and technical magnificence of the film.

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zedz
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Re: Gone Girl (David Fincher, 2014)

#128 Post by zedz » Wed Feb 11, 2015 8:21 pm

DarkImbecile wrote:Which is why obsessing over the realism of the characters' behavior and decision-making (much less debating whether or not she could have gotten away with it or other "plot holes") strikes me as misguided, and detracts from wallowing in the delicious ironies, brutal observations, and technical magnificence of the film.
You do realize that those two sets of things don't have to be mutually exclusive?

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Feiereisel
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Re: Gone Girl (David Fincher, 2014)

#129 Post by Feiereisel » Wed Feb 11, 2015 8:27 pm

DarkImbecile wrote:I think what swo describes is why I and many others appreciate the film primarily as a satire on marriage; both halves of the relationship and their respective actions are easily read as the little abuses, failings, manipulations, and tragedies of a marriage taken to purposefully absurd and surreal extremes. Which is why obsessing over the realism of the characters' behavior and decision-making (much less debating whether or not she could have gotten away with it or other "plot holes") strikes me as misguided, and detracts from wallowing in the delicious ironies, brutal observations, and technical magnificence of the film.
For my money, I think people misread (not unfairly, mind you) Fincher's pristine aesthetic for full-on realism, which creates kind of a disconnect between the material and the style for the viewer. It ultimately shortchanges how expressive, charged, and fictional his films really are. Even his "based on true story" films are dramas rather than cinematic reportage.

Fincher, like Jonze, seems to really enjoy screwing with expectations. In the Gone Girl commentary, one of the things he talks about is how he wanted to use Andie as an instant wedge to divide the audience's perceptions of Nick. And taken as a whole, much of the beginning of the film can be viewed as a ink-blot test for viewers. The viewer needs to read Nick's actions and resolve them somehow just like Boney and Gilpin do, hence their contrasting skepticism and certainty.

This sense prodding is central to his work--Fincher is a gleeful manipulator. It's possible some people didn't like the film because they resented being manipulated; conversely, it's probably why some viewers (myself included) relished it.

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warren oates
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Re: Gone Girl (David Fincher, 2014)

#130 Post by warren oates » Wed Feb 11, 2015 8:34 pm

If it's a satire on marriage as DarkImbecile writes, it's one that's playing with a stacked deck, trumping up its target a bit too easily.

To speak to Sausage's point: There's ample evidence of unreliable narration, but not enough to close the gap between the two Amys for me.
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Amy 1: Gives back her trust fund money, moves with Nick to take care of his mom, is attracted to Nick's authenticity (the jokes at the stuffy party, the romantically edgy walks in alleys, the bookstore quickie), is hurt by Nick's infidelity.
Amy 2: Frames an ex for rape in college, blames Nick not merely for his infidelity but for losing his job in the 2008 financial crisis and for wanting to move home to take care of his sick mom, further blames Nick for not living up to her ideal image of him (which is what, again, exactly? how is Nick an ideal catch for the psychopathic narcissistic image-obsessed Amy?), concocts an elaborate plan to ruin Nick's life by framing him for murder, plans to commit suicide (psychopaths and narcissists have a suicide rate much lower than the general population), murders Desi in cold blood, then returns to Nick because the image he's created of their life in the public sphere is somehow now her new ideal.
Finally, I'm getting pretty bored with claims like the one from Feiereisel that anyone who wants well-drawn, dramatically credible characters is just stuck on some pedestrian notion of realism.

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Feiereisel
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Re: Gone Girl (David Fincher, 2014)

#131 Post by Feiereisel » Wed Feb 11, 2015 8:55 pm

That's a jump--I don't think that notion of realism is pedestrian or less compelling than what Fincher puts on screen, and I don't think there's anything inherently wrong with that concept of realism. It just doesn't seem to be a primary concern for Fincher, and it's not a standard I hold the film to.

What I was trying to get at is that superficially, the film looks "real". The style is such that everything is well-rendered, which is why I brought up the idea of it miscuing viewers--it's sort of misleading, in a way.

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Mr Sausage
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Re: Gone Girl (David Fincher, 2014)

#132 Post by Mr Sausage » Wed Feb 11, 2015 9:52 pm

warren oates wrote:If it's a satire on marriage as DarkImbecile writes, it's one that's playing with a stacked deck, trumping up its target a bit too easily.

To speak to Sausage's point: There's ample evidence of unreliable narration, but not enough to close the gap between the two Amys for me.
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Amy 1: Gives back her trust fund money, moves with Nick to take care of his mom, is attracted to Nick's authenticity (the jokes at the stuffy party, the romantically edgy walks in alleys, the bookstore quickie), is hurt by Nick's infidelity.
Amy 2: Frames an ex for rape in college, blames Nick not merely for his infidelity but for losing his job in the 2008 financial crisis and for wanting to move home to take care of his sick mom, further blames Nick for not living up to her ideal image of him (which is what, again, exactly? how is Nick an ideal catch for the psychopathic narcissistic image-obsessed Amy?), concocts an elaborate plan to ruin Nick's life by framing him for murder, plans to commit suicide (psychopaths and narcissists have a suicide rate much lower than the general population), murders Desi in cold blood, then returns to Nick because the image he's created of their life in the public sphere is somehow now her new ideal.
Finally, I'm getting pretty bored with claims like the one from Feiereisel that anyone who wants well-drawn, dramatically credible characters is just stuck on some pedestrian notion of realism.
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-Gives back the trust fund money to the parents she has difficulty disappointing.
-Keeps up the image of the perfectly accomodating wife by moving back to take care of an ailing mother-in-law (or just didn't see a way to say 'no' considering there's no way to do that and not seem deeply selfish).
-Likes the idea of a genuine guy who is who he seems to be.
-Has her ego crushed by being traded up for someone younger and prettier despite having spent the better part of her married life trying to be the perfect spouse.
What's incongruent about these things? I don't think those two sides of her are incompatible. I can certainly see how the the above list would breed resentments that fester into destructiveness (whether you buy the specifics of her destructiveness is another story).

I don't think Amy is particularly contradictory, but even so, I don't think a character having contradictions makes them an aesthetic failure. That's actually more in line with my experience of real people.
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Also, the "plan to commit suicide" can't work as evidence given the terms with which you've made it: A. she does not do it; B. the rate is only lower, not non-existant. And even so, her motive for it was as a final damning fuck you to Nick.

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warren oates
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Re: Gone Girl (David Fincher, 2014)

#133 Post by warren oates » Wed Feb 11, 2015 10:48 pm

[Heads up: There are lots of little spoilery details in the following, too dispersed to tag in any useful way.]

Real people are contradictory, of course. I've just never met or heard about or read about anyone remotely like Amy, who has the lifestyle values and motivations of a neurotypical empath (both inside and out) when it's convenient for her (or, really, let's be honest, for her author) yet can switch on a dime into full-throttle psychopathy just to keep us all guessing. It's fun to watch unfolding once, but not particularly interesting dramatically or psychologically.

I'm curious too as to where Amy seems to be getting her "perfect wife" playbook. Since her own values and motivations are so slippery and so easily manipulated by Flynn, I'm getting the sense that a lot of voices around here are assuming we all understand and agree on Amy's ideals of marital perfection, when I think that keeping these murky is part of the way Flynn tries to get away with using Amy however she pleases without having to be responsible for/to her character. Take the famous "cool girl" monologue, for instance. It's never clear if that identity was something Nick actually wanted from her, Amy somehow thought he wanted or Amy just assumed all men wanted, and so chose to resentfully perform it for him without even bothering to understand whether he'd wanted her to be anything like that in the first place. But there are a lot of moments in the film like this, where Amy blames Nick for making her do or be something that seems entirely up to her.

Psychopaths care about appearances, not about ideals. Even so, if Amy 1 (good, relatable Amy) cares about disappointing her parents, Amy 2 (the murderess and murder and rape framer) really shouldn't give a shit -- pissing off free-spending parents is pretty far down in the hierarchy of her crimes. And, if she really wanted to impress them above all, then what's she doing with Nick again?

Nobody's stepped up to explain just what Nick's supposed appeal is to the Amy who would come to torture him so elaborately. How's he a good catch in the eyes of this rich, gorgeous trust fund Manhattan socialite (who's secretly narcissistically image-obsessed and dangerously psychopathic)? What does she see in him, this relatively authentic aw-shucks Midwestern dude, this up-and-coming magazine writer (seriously?)? Why or even how is it possible that she -- surveying the entire field of potential mates available to her -- as Sausage writes just "likes the idea of a genuine guy who is who he seems to be."?* Because Nick seems like the best prospect for co-creating/-curating an image-conscious "perfect" life (whatever that's supposed to mean), the least likely to disappoint her? What?

And, back to her plan for a minute, why would she even want to commit suicide? Why not stick around to watch Nick's life burn down around him. It's clear from how well her plan is working as she begins to follow the news and how the real-life events that inspired her plan (as much as Flynn's plan for her) that the neither the police nor the public need to find a body to assign guilt or even to win in court.

*After all, she's not, like the BTK killer, a psychopath who's looking for a normal spouse to provide cover for her murder spree.

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Re: Gone Girl (David Fincher, 2014)

#134 Post by Mr Sausage » Wed Feb 11, 2015 11:15 pm

Warren Oates wrote:I've just never met or heard about or read about anyone remotely like Amy, who has the lifestyle values and motivations of a neurotypical empath (both inside and out) when it's convenient for her (or, really, let's be honest, for her author) yet can switch on a dime into full-throttle psychopathy just to keep us all guessing. It's fun to watch unfolding once, but not particularly interesting dramatically or psychologically.
Amy does not switch on a dime on anything, let alone when it's convenient. Yet I have known a number of people whose emotions could switch on a dime, even between extreme emotions. I also know people whose feelings about things and people changed at normal speeds between hatred and adoration with nothing in between. So this point doesn't make any sense to me.
warrenoates wrote:Psychopaths care about appearances, not about ideals. Even so, if Amy 1 (good, relatable Amy) cares about disappointing her parents, Amy 2 (the murderess and murder and rape framer) really shouldn't give a shit -- pissing off free-spending parents is pretty far down in the hierarchy of her crimes. And, if she really wanted to impress them above all, then what's she doing with Nick again?
I feel like you're not taking the time to think through what you're saying here, like you hit on the first things that sounded good but didn't really look at them closely. If your point is that it's not psychologically plausible for one's neuroses about one's parents to loom larger than other issues (that probably stem from those neuroses), then you're wrong.

You're also failing to take the movie on its own terms (you seem to be adopting the DSM's, which is problematic for reasons even beyond the fact you are probably not a psychologist), and failing to make your arguments aesthetic: does the movie account for these things? Does it offer reasons for the character's actions and stick to them? All films make their own worlds; judge those worlds next to your own, but don't confuse the two.

Also, Amy explains at length what she liked about Nick, and the movie goes out of its way to make him seem absurdly charming and dashing (and to hint that Amy likes a fixer-upper), so if you're in confusion about this I don't know what to say except watch it again, maybe?
warrenoates wrote:And, back to her plan for a minute, why would she even want to commit suicide? Why not stick around to watch Nick's life burn down around him. It's clear from how well her plan is working as she begins to follow the news and how the real-life events that inspired her plan (as much as Flynn's plan for her) that the neither the police nor the public need to find a body to assign guilt or even to win in court.
Who cares? This is not a real issue.

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domino harvey
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Re: Gone Girl (David Fincher, 2014)

#135 Post by domino harvey » Wed Feb 11, 2015 11:43 pm

warren oates wrote:And, back to her plan for a minute, why would she even want to commit suicide? Why not stick around to watch Nick's life burn down around him. It's clear from how well her plan is working as she begins to follow the news and how the real-life events that inspired her plan (as much as Flynn's plan for her) that the neither the police nor the public need to find a body to assign guilt or even to win in court.
Not that I'm wild about sticking my hand into the "If I wouldn't do it, a character wouldn't either" motivational cage you're rattling, but this is basically a common use of suicide post-breakup/deterioration of relationship, with the idea that the death will "get back" at the other person. That she clouds the impulse and takes it to such extremes is of some note, but not exceptional or even unusual regardless of how "successful" her plan appears once instigated

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Re: Gone Girl (David Fincher, 2014)

#136 Post by warren oates » Wed Feb 11, 2015 11:50 pm

You can't turn your own capacity for empathy on and off like a light switch. Amy's an empath like most of us when it helps Flynn to make her relatable, a psychopath when Flynn would rather Amy be super-exciting and diabolically formidable. Not so much the garden-variety mood swings you reference as heretofore unprecedented brain-wiring swings.

Not taking the time to think through what I'm saying? I don't know, Sausage, I've lived with this film and been discussing it here and elsewhere with many different people from a variety of perspectives since it came out in theaters. I'm not a psychologist, and I'm not citing the DSM that I'm aware of (though, yeah I've got copies of various versions of that book among many other volumes in my library), and I definitely took the movie on its own terms once and found it to be lacking aesthetically primarily when it comes to the construction of the script (including and especially clarity about just what its own terms are vis-a-vis what Amy supposedly wants at any given moment). Which is why I'm mostly talking about Flynn's choices, not Fincher's (who did about as good a job as anyone could have with the material).

What I'm getting at with the way her attraction to Nick is presented is the dichotomy between what she supposedly sees in Nick and what she's later shown to need him to become. Easy charm and fixer-upper-ness don't seem like nearly enough for what comes to be revealed as Amy's absurdly high standards. Surely she could have found a slightly hunkier more charming Desi-type scion out there on the NYC party scene.

Amy's suicide is supposed to be the lynch pin of her plan up until the moment it suddenly isn't. Declare it a non-issue all you want, but such a detail hardly seems so negligible for a master-planner like Amy. To domino's comment on Amy's motivation: Why wouldn't she just kill herself then? Why go to all that trouble of the whole elaborate revenge scheme? Of course, for me, like I've said before, the Amy who does go to all that trouble is the one -- narcissist and psychopath -- who would in fact be much less likely to want to kill herself in the common fashion you suggest.

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Re: Gone Girl (David Fincher, 2014)

#137 Post by Feiereisel » Thu Feb 12, 2015 12:41 am

The suicide is less important than the act of her postponing it, no? (EDIT: This might read the wrong way--what I mean is that it's not just about the suicide, rather about how that and the subsequent postponing function as a unit.)

It's a pointed inconsistency. She spends time fastidiously building her plan and railing against Nick's selfishness, but then perpetrates her own selfish act because, arguably, she's become hooked on her own story. It's not (necessarily) that Amy's afraid, it's that she's callow, solipsistic, vain...she wants to admire her own handiwork.

To the point about the film being unclear about what Amy wants at any given point--seeing as it's the question that bookends the film--down to rhyming shots and voice-over from Nick--it seems consistent, or at the very least appropriate, that the viewer has limited insight into Amy's motivations. She reveals her plan in voice over after she's lied to the viewer from the jump--how can the viewer trust that, even if it's "off-book," so to speak?

This is further complicated by the idea that Amy's isn't creating her story out of whole cloth--the lies and truth Nick and Amy's courtship and early marriage are woven together into a new narrative. The viewer has no trustworthy version of the story--Nick is as duplicitous as Amy. That a lot of the characters (Nick included, given his capitulation) accept this essentially makes it the truth, even though it's fictionalized. It's a subversive "print the legend" concept.

The film is purposely unstable, and it's up to the viewer to ponder or reconcile that as much as they want to.

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Re: Gone Girl (David Fincher, 2014)

#138 Post by swo17 » Thu Feb 12, 2015 12:55 am

warren oates wrote:Amy's suicide is supposed to be the lynch pin of her plan up until the moment it suddenly isn't.
The notes on her calendar suggest that her plan was subject to change depending on how the story developed. Again, the fact that she is willing to go this far if necessary is an extreme reaction, but scale it back to reality somewhat and it begins to resemble the insulation of two marrieds from everything outside of their own little world, which can sometimes seem like madness to anyone looking at it from the outside.

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Re: Gone Girl (David Fincher, 2014)

#139 Post by warren oates » Thu Feb 12, 2015 1:04 am

I like what you're saying in theory. And maybe that's the kind of film I was hoping to see -- call it a thriller version of Scenes from a Marriage -- so my expectations were too high. Heck, cut the
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college rape frame-up and the Desi killing
and you could almost steer this one back toward something closer to what you're talking about.

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Re: Gone Girl (David Fincher, 2014)

#140 Post by swo17 » Thu Feb 12, 2015 1:29 am

Curiously enough, I just watched the excellent Force Majeure, and it struck me as exactly the same movie as Gone Girl, only taking place in the real world. The former is probably a better film, but I don't know that that means that its mode of storytelling is inherently better--I think both films achieve something that the other one has closed itself off from.

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Re: Gone Girl (David Fincher, 2014)

#141 Post by warren oates » Thu Feb 12, 2015 1:39 am

That's a good comparison and one that I was thinking of today too. I'm not sure I'd say the mode of storytelling is superior in one film or the other, just that, for my money, Force Majeure gets a lot more out of its approach. And maybe what it has to say just feels more true too.

I was talking to somebody else about Fight Club recently. Now there's a Fincher film that's wildly out there in expressionistic fantasy land. And one that's even more full of plot holes than Gone Girl. But there's something about the thematic integrity of the film that I still admire. What it has to say about turn of the century life in a capitalist, consumerist society and about a certain kind of American masculinity in crisis just rings true to me in a way that, say, Gone Girl's thematics don't.

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Re: Gone Girl (David Fincher, 2014)

#142 Post by swo17 » Thu Feb 12, 2015 2:06 am

Fight Club's themes resonate more for me as well (particularly the idea of stumbling upon a personal solution to your modern malaise, but others missing the point as your solution gains popularity) but man, that film is such a mess otherwise that those themes almost begin to seem like an afterthought. I get that you're saying you have similar barriers to appreciating this film, and that you may not feel the end result is worth giving it the benefit of the doubt. I just didn't have the same problems engaging with it, at least not on a first viewing.

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Re: Gone Girl (David Fincher, 2014)

#143 Post by Mr Sausage » Thu Feb 12, 2015 7:15 am

warrenoates wrote:What I'm getting at with the way her attraction to Nick is presented is the dichotomy between what she supposedly sees in Nick and what she's later shown to need him to become. Easy charm and fixer-upper-ness don't seem like nearly enough for what comes to be revealed as Amy's absurdly high standards. Surely she could have found a slightly hunkier more charming Desi-type scion out there on the NYC party scene.
Well, what demands does Amy make of Nick? None. She more makes demands on herself to be the perfect "cool girl" and suppresses her desire to nag Nick to be or do things, and then burns it to the ground finally when she reaps her reward. Basically, she seems to be trying a more hands off approach, hoping that by setting a high standard for herself Nick will be inspired to reward her by also being perfect. This is an effort to improve off her attempts with Desi and that other guy, I would suppose. It also follows from what we know of her relationship with her parents (even more so if you read the Amazing Amy book).
warrenoates wrote:You can't turn your own capacity for empathy on and off like a light switch. Amy's an empath like most of us when it helps Flynn to make her relatable, a psychopath when Flynn would rather Amy be super-exciting and diabolically formidable. Not so much the garden-variety mood swings you reference as heretofore unprecedented brain-wiring swings.
The only questions here that are relevant are: does Amy show empathy where she typically lacks it, and does she lack empathy where she typically shows it? That's the only way to judge a character's consistency. Let's take the character for who she is and not who you think she ought to be:
1. Amy has no friends or close relationships (outside of Nick).
2. Amy is calculating and an excellent actor.
3. Amy is as happy with an outwardly presentable sham as she is with the real thing.
4. Amy has been conditioned to feel like a disappointment.

Her actions in the film follow on the above. She behaves as I would expect the above to behave (to a degree--we can debate if the above would ever concoct a plan this wild).

What she really thinks and feels for people and why is mostly unknown (one of the film's themes), and all of the information we get about her interior life before the event is a fabrication meant to deceive, and who knows how much it matches reality.

You're grasping at air. This is not where the contrived parts of the narrative lie. This is why you can offer scant textual evidence for a character's decision; you have to take a decision in isolation and compare it either to what you, personally, would do in the situation now that you've had time to think about it or what you have conceived human psychology to be.

You aren't demanding internal consistency from the movie, you're demanding external congruency between it and your conceptions. So there's very little I can say or want to say about your specific points. All I can do, really, is say what I told that member who insisted films couldn't be good or accurate unless they reflected a christian universe: I disagree and I think you should rethink, or at least be less dogmatic about, your conceptual framework when it comes to movies.

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Re: Gone Girl (David Fincher, 2014)

#144 Post by zedz » Thu Feb 12, 2015 3:45 pm

Mr Sausage wrote:What she really thinks and feels for people and why is mostly unknown (one of the film's themes), and all of the information we get about her interior life before the event is a fabrication meant to deceive, and who knows how much it matches reality.
Doesn't she claim that she starts out her diary as a factual account of what actually happened between them and only deviated from that in the later stages, specifically to set up her husband (and I thought it was pretty obvious what incidents were highlighted by the film as fabricated - e.g. the spousal abuse) - and doesn't Affleck's character corroborate this when he's interrogated by the police? ("Yes, that's true. . . that's true. . . wait a minute!") I didn't feel at all like their entire past relationship - from her point of view - was a miasma of ambiguity. If all of that is 100% uncertain, there's no real character there at all, and no motivation for what she does.

At any rate, I was far less troubled by any character inconsistencies than I was by the plot ones (though it does generally feel that Amy is more of a plot device than a real character*). 95% of characters in American films flunk any rudimentary "plausible behaviour under the circumstances" test, so when I do come across that kind of verisimilitude I just consider it an unexpected bonus.

* A good example of this: the weird quirk of her doing that little heel-clicking leap, which she performs twice. It seems like a bizarre character detail for somebody so composed, but it turns out it's not a character detail at all, it's an extremely lazy plot point, since they need it to reveal the cash and precipitate the next twist of the plot. The only reason we see it twice is that the first one is a set-up for the second, which is necessary for the plot. Cast-iron lazy Hollywood plotting, like a character blurting out "I have a terror of enclosed spaces!" ten minutes before she's stuck in a lift - because having this information emerge when she's actually trapped in an enclosed space is deemed to be bad writing, but shoehorning it into the cocktail party in the scene beforehand somehow isn't.

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Re: Gone Girl (David Fincher, 2014)

#145 Post by swo17 » Thu Feb 12, 2015 4:15 pm

*Force Majeure does this too!
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With the flying saucer toy.

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Gone Girl (David Fincher, 2014)

#146 Post by Mr Sausage » Thu Feb 12, 2015 6:12 pm

zedz wrote: Doesn't she claim that she starts out her diary as a factual account of what actually happened between them and only deviated from that in the later stages, specifically to set up her husband (and I thought it was pretty obvious what incidents were highlighted by the film as fabricated - e.g. the spousal abuse) - and doesn't Affleck's character corroborate this when he's interrogated by the police? ("Yes, that's true. . . that's true. . . wait a minute!") I didn't feel at all like their entire past relationship - from her point of view - was a miasma of ambiguity. If all of that is 100% uncertain, there's no real character there at all, and no motivation for what
Yup. I assume all of that stuff is true. I also assume she is cherry-picking and that this is a selective account meant to create a certain impression. I certainly wouldn't use it as a full, accurate record of the character's consciousness. She is, something of a mystery (hence the voice overs in the beginning and end).

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Re: Gone Girl (David Fincher, 2014)

#147 Post by dx23 » Mon Jul 06, 2015 10:12 pm

I saw the film for the second time last night. I've kinda liked it the first time due mostly to the acting but now that I've wathced it again, I feel like Fincher tried to do a satire/parody of a Lifetime movie. I haven't read the book so I don't know how accurate the film is to the source material but my conclusions about the movie are:

- Everyone in the film is a horrible person (except Margo, who seems to be a really caring and loyal person). I mean, everyone from Nick to Amy to her parents to the neighbors, lawyers and reporters, seems to be horrible people. I expected Nick and Amy to be bad people, but the idiot neighbor best friend, the lady taking a selfie with Nick and the idiot cops and FBI agents that don't question anything Amy says take the cake on how this film accentuates these characters.

- I find that the films looses total realism the moment no one questions Amy about anything and take her word as complete truth. I mean, no one (except Detective Boney, who as soon as she starts asking questions she is looked as she farted in church), not the reporters, not the FBI questioned anything about Amy's implausible story. For example, if Desi had really come to the house, his fingerprints would have been somewhere.

- I mentioned this film being a parody of a Lifetime movie because it has every element that is in one of those shitty films. The tortured wife, the clueless husband, the idiot neighbor, the mistress, the cocky lawyer, the pedantic in-laws, and the Nancy Grace reporter.

- Small things, like Amy losing her waist purse full of money doing a stupid little jump, having the door unlocked with all that cash and keeping it all in the same place makes this film lose the "realism" factor. I know that maybe Fincher and the author of the book were trying to say that no matter how smart Amy was, she still really naive to the real world but then this makes me more pissed that no one questioned her stories on the kidnapping and raping. Those stories fall apart after questioning her like the FBI and cops are supposed to do.

flyonthewall2983
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Re: Gone Girl (David Fincher, 2014)

#148 Post by flyonthewall2983 » Mon Jul 06, 2015 10:28 pm

For what it's worth, it's being shown in the original aspect ratio on HBO Now.

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dx23
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Re: Gone Girl (David Fincher, 2014)

#149 Post by dx23 » Mon Jul 06, 2015 10:42 pm

That's where I watched last night.

criterion10

Re: Gone Girl (David Fincher, 2014)

#150 Post by criterion10 » Mon Jul 06, 2015 11:16 pm

flyonthewall2983 wrote:For what it's worth, it's being shown in the original aspect ratio on HBO Now.
Any reason as to why HBO didn't crop it? I've just been assuming Fincher had some involvement with it.

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