Register a SA Forums Account here!
JOINING THE SA FORUMS WILL REMOVE THIS BIG AD, THE ANNOYING UNDERLINED ADS, AND STUPID INTERSTITIAL ADS!!!

You can: log in, read the tech support FAQ, or request your lost password. This dumb message (and those ads) will appear on every screen until you register! Get rid of this crap by registering your own SA Forums Account and joining roughly 150,000 Goons, for the one-time price of $9.95! We charge money because it costs us money per month for bills, and since we don't believe in showing ads to our users, we try to make the money back through forum registrations.
 
  • Locked thread
HUNDU THE BEAST GOD
Sep 14, 2007

everything is yours

Uncle Boogeyman posted:

Speaking of funny jokes, the "Kill Self?" post-it note was a tremendously inspired bit of black comedy that I think was unique to the movie.

Yeah, I don't recall that from the book.

Adbot
ADBOT LOVES YOU

MANIFEST DESTINY
Apr 24, 2009

FourLeaf posted:

So if you've seen it, do you also have a problem with Do The Right Thing? Because it basically does everything you're saying for black people instead of women. It includes all sorts of negative stereotypes racists say about black people, and all you have to do is find the clips of it on YouTube to see people using it to justify their racism. So what was the point of that movie? Is Spike Lee just racist? Or is there something that makes it different from, say, The Birth of a Nation?

Its been over a decade since I've seen it so I really can't address that, I'm pretty sure he doesn't force them all onto one character and make them into the villain though. Its totally valid to incorporate those elements into a book or a film if the purpose is forcing the audience to confront them, to comment on them, to show them from another perspective. Flynn seems to be saying she's using the tropes because they make for a fun pulp villain, so it doesn't sit right with me. Just recently the news was plastered with a woman apologizing for "her role in" getting knocked unconscious in an elevator, so then when Fincher puts out a film whose super villain is a woman with the extraordinary power to fake abuse it leaves a bad taste.

HUNDU THE BEAST GOD
Sep 14, 2007

everything is yours
Pulp literature has always been stuck with being socially irresponsible. To what end?

Lobok
Jul 13, 2006

Say Watt?

I think it's great that she hit all of the MRA fears about women in one over-the-top sociopathic package. If you walk out of the theater saying "aha! I knew that's what women were about!" then anyone in earshot will know you're a pathetic fucker and say "you think all women are Amy Dunne you moron?" Bringing her up in any argument now against women, feminism, etc. is pulling a Godwin.

Also, did anyone think of Lady MacBeth at the end? In the shower, we see Amy effortlessly wash off the blood and the camera follows it as it disappears to show us that there is no "out, drat spot!" moment. The murder weighed on her no more than a sheen of sweat to be rinsed off.

That, and it was just perfect that she was drenched in blood but her blonde hair was as immaculate as ever.

Honest Thief
Jan 11, 2009
Probation
Can't post for 25 days!
I believe most people will leave with an unconformable smile on them, "so, uh, affleck sure was a jerk cheating on his wife, right honey? want me to get you something?"


I simply adored the film, the shocking nature of the theme and characters is there to confront you with complicity, the over the top elements are the fun pulp to gulp it all down easier

romanowski
Nov 10, 2012

my favorite part of the movie was when minkus showed up

HUNDU THE BEAST GOD
Sep 14, 2007

everything is yours

Lobok posted:

Also, did anyone think of Lady MacBeth at the end? In the shower, we see Amy effortlessly wash off the blood and the camera follows it as it disappears to show us that there is no "out, drat spot!" moment. The murder weighed on her no more than a sheen of sweat to be rinsed off.

That, and it was just perfect that she was drenched in blood but her blonde hair was as immaculate as ever.

I like that the very first thing she does after killing Doogie is shake her hair out. There isn't a spot on it.

Lobok
Jul 13, 2006

Say Watt?

The murder itself was fantastic. Those quick fade-outs to transition between different angles. It was edited the way a movie trailer shows The Big Scene. Were the visuals supposed to be like a heartbeat?

Somehow links back to the opening, with all the credits appearing only briefly before fading out.

resurgam40
Jul 22, 2007

Battler, the literal stupidest man on earth. Why are you even here, Battler, why did you come back to this place so you could fuck literally everything up?
Hey, here's a pretty good review I found: http://thinkprogress.org/culture/2014/10/05/3576170/gone-girl-review/

It goes a little bit into what some folks have been saying, an overall positive picture but also an examination of the shortcomings. I think I may have to track down this book now...

Pirate Jet
May 2, 2010
I saw it. It's good!

So I guess I gotta start by addressing the elephant in the room. People who are criticizing the movie for being sexist are having red flags thrown up in their mind about certain buzzwords and catchphrases, verbal or metaphorical, in the movie, and it seems like they're so shocked by those that they're experiencing selective memory. Yes, Amy absolutely is a pastiche of all of an anti-feminist's fears, but to act like Nick is presented as sympathetic is insane, given that the first words of the movie are him saying how he wants to crush his wife's skull - and then those words experience a refrain at the end! Not even starting on how he's cheating on his wife and constantly poo poo-talks her behind her back.

But Gone Girl elevates over just being a revenge fantasy on a lovely husband. An earlier poster pointed out that Amy is easily outsmarted by a group of common muggers, which is absolutely correct. Of course, it's important that she was mugged by the guy who just fifteen (?) minutes earlier had been revealed as a sleazebag hitting on everyone in the park.

So the entire "point" of Gone Girl is that of an imagining of a typical anti-feminist's nightmares, and how easily they fall apart in the face of logic (which matches the fact that Amy is a caricature in a story of fairly realistic characters) - even if the MRA nightmare of a woman who threw rape accusations out like candy and looked to ruin the lives of every man she met was real, she would still be on the losing end of a patriarchal society. Fincher doesn't even need to make up a fantasy society where this would happen, because he's smart enough to realize that it already exists. It's essentially an accusation of anti-feminists hoping to uphold the status quo, and that their fight isn't actually about equality. Amy is the exact kind of woman they're afraid of, and in their dream society, she still loses.

Nobody makes this clearer than than Tyler Perry's character. From the first moment we see him, he's called out as whatever the male equivalent of a widow-chaser is, and only proves to be that way even more so as the movie goes on. If this movie really WERE on the side of Nick and the patriarchy, he'd be seen as a hopeful solution despite being maligned by the masses, instead he's just a universal scumbag. The crucial scene is that of the reactions of people as they watch Nick's interview, commenting on how heartfelt he seems - but we already just saw Nick talking with his lawyer about how much he needs to hide his hatred for his wife. It's the exclamation point on the idea of a "subjective truth" that fuels the movie.

K. Waste
Feb 27, 2014

MORAL:
To the vector belong the spoils.
Having finally seen the film, the accusations of misogyny and MRA-baiting are thoroughly understandable. If the film was lacking in one respect, it was its dogged determination to make Affleck as incapacitated as possible despite lip-service to his being unlikable. Like, the film is explicitly criticizing a culture that assumes guilt based on circumstantial character assassination, from the point of view that the simplest answer is not the correct one, and because nobody actually knows anything, therefore anything is indeed possible. It's not hard to see how this is directly related to contemporary true crime controversies. The mistake, I think, is taking the film's wife-murder conceit too literally. Basically, Affleck is playing a 'white Latino' again. This isn't about women entrapping men, it's about the Trayvon Martin shooting, and Affleck is George Zimmerman. The movie is told largely from this nightmare world perspective, where Trayvon Martin really did pose a threat to the pathetic Zimmerman's consciousness, where Zimmerman saw himself as being trapped and harassed by the Other, and, consequently, where the world assumes rationally that the person in power is guilty despite the fact that it is possible (regardless of probability) that the Other really is to blame.

But this is part of what makes Gone Girl so good, that it pushes this nightmare perspective to such an extreme that it circuitously becomes kind of funny. Personally, I was dying with laughter by the film's end, and so were a couple of old ladies sitting around me. Comparisons to Basic Instinct are apt because Amy is, in fact, the Devil, specifically as a product of cultural idealization. The thing about the Devil or Adversary is that it is the Other of Christ, representing material obsession over spiritual faith. Just as Christ praised those who believed without seeing, forgiving rather than judging, the Devil tempts us by giving us a material image that we can vainly sympathize with and, thus, the point-of-fact to cast stones.

This is actually a metaphor that Fincher engages directly rather than indirectly through his portrayal of the media. The first way we see Amy is literally from Nick's perspective, and from there she is simply gone, glimpsed only in flashbacks, which we are explicitly told by both Nick and Amy are at least partially mutual. In these flashbacks, the dominant attention is paid by Amy as the narrator to Nick 'sweeping her off her feet' and narrativizing their future lives, ironically juxtaposed with the children's book character Amazing Amy. This irony is conscious on Amy's part as an author - like Sharon Stone in Basic Instinct - but also on Fincher's, because it's framed explicitly by Nick's perspective. Throughout the story, characters continue to refer to her as Amazing Amy, even though it's emphasized that Amy as she appears in the flashbacks, in Amy's own words, is nothing like this perfect character, this perfect paternal idealization. The point is that much like there is no Tyler Durden, there is no Amy. She is a gone girl, an absence only made present by televisual/cinematic/novelistic narrativization. Her very existence is an undermining of the stability of reality because in her perfect object conception, she is more real than real.

This becomes funny because, improbably, the object begins telling its own story for itself. The point is that the reality of Amy as a woman goes beyond what either her mother or Nick can fathom. To paraphrase Philip Roth, she becomes an actuality that is continuously outdoing the talents of the authors around her. It's as if Trayvon Martin faked his own shooting and forced George Zimmerman to shack him up at his house Bugs Bunny style. And this becomes a direct accusation of 24 hour news media and galvanized talking heads looking for ratings. Their conception of who Amy is is actually being controlled by her, and they have no idea. They think they have the juicy true crime story, but Amy is writing a crime actuality that outdoes the talents of a news program whose stated objective is to get ratings by pandering to compassion for a victimized woman. They think they are illuminating the lives of viewers by presenting them with 'facts' and the convenient narrative to string them together, but actually what they're doing is distracting them with materialism. Amazing Amy has gone from merely being an object victim to becoming everything, a total expression of our material reality alienated from compassion or God. Through Fincher's sympathetic film, the Other reveals itself as a vivid expression not only of what we desire but of what we truly are.

The problem with calling this misogynistic is that it implies you in no way supposed to identify with a villain or take pleasure in what they do, even though we're all well aware of male villains who are charismatic precisely because they revel in their identities. Obviously there are patterns of sexist cliches to contend with, but by and large Gone Girl really does present a somewhat balanced portrait of a feminine antagonist. Everyone seems to be forgetting the third-act reversal where Amy becomes Desi's prisoner, effectively moving out of one sphere of domestic possession into another. To assume that Amy is only manipulating Desi is a failure of imagination. Just because Desi is obsessed with and deceived by the feminine ideal doesn't mean he doesn't know what he's doing by entrapping her.

mkay0
Nov 7, 2003

I crawled the earth, but now I'm higher
2010, watch it go to fire

MANIFEST DESTINY posted:

Yeah, it is absurd to think such a character would exist, and I don't think anyone is confused about the fact that she's the villain. If you're confused about why people would still have a problem with it, try and imagine a film where the villain is a racist caricature, pick whatever race you want and imagine that all the evil deeds they do are based specifically on the things that racists say about that group. Would anyone get away with making such a film? Doubtful, unless it was a full on satire and even then you have issues. Is this film a satire? People in this thread have said so but without satisfactorily saying what exactly its meant to satire.

It's pretty clearly satire, IMO. Things satirized include-

A. How being a couple works in good times and bad
B. Expectations placed on us by our partners vs. society's expectations for us
C. Personal life vs. Public life

The idea that a person would go so far as to frame someone for murder, kill for and entrap them to have the perfect life is the entire point.

People who don't get this, what did you think the point of the last ten minutes was? If you missed this, I'm sure you think the movie sucks. The entire point went by you.

DARPA Dad
Dec 9, 2008
i saw this movie today.

it was really good and my fincher tier list goes zodiac > se7en > social network > gone girl > the game > fight club > who cares

well bye

DARPA Dad fucked around with this message at 23:54 on Oct 5, 2014

BOAT SHOWBOAT
Oct 11, 2007

who do you carry the torch for, my young man?
Yeah the scenes after Amy's return are key to the message of the whole movie, I find it a bit silly to say they're unnecessary or tacked on.

Coffee And Pie
Nov 4, 2010

"Blah-sum"?
More like "Blawesome"
The fact that a few people defended Amy murdering Desi as self-defense is honestly sort of baffling to me. Yeah, the dude was pretty creepy, but I didn't get the vibe that he was planning on hurting her, or that she couldn't just leave while he was gone. In fact, she only starts to plan her "escape" (tying up her arms, the wine bottle thing, etc) once she sees Nick on TV saying everything she wanted to hear and decides to go back. That having been said, the scene I mentioned was absolutely gruesome, horrifying, and shocking in the best possible way.

K. Waste
Feb 27, 2014

MORAL:
To the vector belong the spoils.

Coffee And Pie posted:

The fact that a few people defended Amy murdering Desi as self-defense is honestly sort of baffling to me. Yeah, the dude was pretty creepy, but I didn't get the vibe that he was planning on hurting her, or that she couldn't just leave while he was gone. In fact, she only starts to plan her "escape" (tying up her arms, the wine bottle thing, etc) once she sees Nick on TV saying everything she wanted to hear and decides to go back. That having been said, the scene I mentioned was absolutely gruesome, horrifying, and shocking in the best possible way.

It's not so much that her actions are defensible as folks are seriously underestimating and making a lot of loaded assumptions about her and Desi's past. She's consistently manipulative of him, but he's clearly an imposing presence who's very naturalistic about imposing his whim upon her. There's something about their relationship that was unique to them that isn't necessarily the case with Nick or the other guy. Again, it's a failure of imagination in a movie all about unknown knowns.

The REAL Goobusters
Apr 25, 2008
I feel like the Desi thing was the one true thing that happened unlike the other ex. NPH just nailed the creepy atmosphere of his character. Just felt real unsettling when he was on screen or talking.

Wraith of J.O.I.
Jan 25, 2012


Coffee And Pie posted:

The fact that a few people defended Amy murdering Desi as self-defense is honestly sort of baffling to me. Yeah, the dude was pretty creepy, but I didn't get the vibe that he was planning on hurting her, or that she couldn't just leave while he was gone. In fact, she only starts to plan her "escape" (tying up her arms, the wine bottle thing, etc) once she sees Nick on TV saying everything she wanted to hear and decides to go back. That having been said, the scene I mentioned was absolutely gruesome, horrifying, and shocking in the best possible way.
See, I didn't get the vibe that she killed Desi and went back to Nick because she saw that interview and felt like that was the man she fell in love with. I got the impression that she found her situation with Desi worse than what she had/could have again with Nick and concocted a plan that would frame Desi as her kidnapper and allow her to escape back to her "normal" life without getting in any sort of trouble (and, in fact, coming out "ahead" from where she started). I didn't really believe she fell back in love with Nick or whatever she said, but just that that was a convenient way for her to escape from Desi. Did others here believe what she said about the Nick she saw in that interview?

Commissar Of Doom
Apr 21, 2009
She wanted that version of Nick that he was projecting in the interview, the illusion he used to deceive people in NYC so they didn't think he wasn't just another dickdrip from a midwest shithole. THAT'S what she wanted, she didn't love Nick as he actually was... who could aside from his family. Desi was a rich POS but insane and weird and probably not worth the long con needed to get anything substantial out of him. When her on-the-fly scheme worked out at the end she gained a singularity of leverage to force him into that role for at least a decade or two so their kid can grow up. A fitting punishment for all his sins I suppose.

Commissar Of Doom fucked around with this message at 03:26 on Oct 6, 2014

Liam Emsa
Aug 21, 2014

Oh, god. I think I'm falling.
So if I make a movie where the guy is revealed to be a rapist who uses physical force to get what he wants, that's a "misandrist" film, right? Because the guy uses cliched stereotypes about men?

Commissar Of Doom
Apr 21, 2009
I think people will only care that it's a "good" and "well crafted" film that "makes them think" and/or "entertains them" in some way. If it's a POS people will spit on it and shove it on the ever growing ash heap of "cinema."

A True Jar Jar Fan
Nov 3, 2003

Primadonna

Loved the movie, loved its score. Some not so quick thoughts after just seeing this, kind of all over the map. I hate all the spoiler tags but whatever.

I loved that this film was messing with expectations the entire time and I never felt that anything I saw or was told was 100% reliable by the end. With Neil Patrick Harris, the dude is shot to look sinister and gives a performance to match. He's the creepy mastermind with a Bond villain mansion and Harris plays up that element, and then the bedroom scene comes and we see that he's just another guy completely out of his element. We see him looking villainous because Nick sees him that way and Amy writes him that way. He felt along the same lines as Alien in Spring Breakers, another guy that's kind of sleazy but gets completely ruined by being swept up in something bigger than him. Much of the film's plot deals with how the media paints characters a certain way to manipulate audiences while the film itself is doing the same thing to us.

MeinPanzer posted:

The problem I have with this response is that while every character ends up looking bad (except for the sister, I guess), the movie really presents Nick as the protagonist, and after the point where he confesses his infidelity, he pretty much just becomes a sympathetic character
I liked this because his lawyer directly stated that it was going to happen. When he said "they're going to love you now" he's talking about both the people in the real world audience and in the fictional audience. It even sort of works on Amy! She gains a new sort of affection for Nick during his TV interview that probably isn't anything like love but is certainly a feeling of kinship. He taught her that he can manufacture himself just as well as she can. His "Partners in Crime" line is pretty fantastic.

I loved that the Amazing Amy Case of the present day and the Amazing Amy books of the past are essentially the same thing, both selling the public on a true story that isn't really there.

Also thought the early shot of Nick carrying a giant copy of MASTERMIND under his arm while going to the bar was pretty funny and "I just want to shoot some people" while playing his game was pretty funny too.

Zwabu posted:

I think the issue is, as a practical matter, there's now way she could get away with being on the road in the cabin for days and then being at the lake house for weeks and make up such a complicated story about what happened.


As a practical matter, you're right. But what matters is the FBI doesn't care. They're satisfied with these results and close the case. It's showing law enforcement as corrupt and gross as the media. The Good Cop knows the story's full of holes and she gets shot down trying to pursue it.

Yoshifan823 posted:

Weirdly, I didn't buy the dude who got fake-rape-accused, at least not entirely. I mean, I dont doubt the event happened, but clearly you only get one side of that story, and the other dudes Amy fucks with are seen from an objective point of view, rather than telling their own story. I'm sure if we just heard Desi's side of the story, he'd seem pretty sympathetic too.
I felt the same way. The film is so heavily about buying into the image you're being sold that it seems silly to accept anyone's story at face value by that point.

Another thing I liked: Amy, for all her brilliant machinations, gets totally punked by the Dumb Redneck Cliches she meets. And she automatically assumes the man manipulated the woman into robbing her because that fits the image.

FourLeaf
Dec 2, 2011

Wraith of J.O.I. posted:

See, I didn't get the vibe that she killed Desi and went back to Nick because she saw that interview and felt like that was the man she fell in love with. I got the impression that she found her situation with Desi worse than what she had/could have again with Nick and concocted a plan that would frame Desi as her kidnapper and allow her to escape back to her "normal" life without getting in any sort of trouble (and, in fact, coming out "ahead" from where she started). I didn't really believe she fell back in love with Nick or whatever she said, but just that that was a convenient way for her to escape from Desi. Did others here believe what she said about the Nick she saw in that interview?

I thought the crazy intense way she was staring at the screen during the interview showed that she really did take Nick at his word that he'd stop being such a lovely husband, so she decided to give him a second chance. Later in the film when Nick and Amy are in the shower together she makes sure to remind him of his promise that he'll change his behavior, while washing off Desi's blood. Implication: finally, after all the years of her acting like the Cool Girl, now it's Nick's turn to be a "Cool Guy," to pretend to be exactly how she wants. And if he breaks his promise, she'll make him suffer.

When Desi turned off the TV, that was the moment she started planning how she was gonna kill him and frame him for kidnapping. I honestly don't think she was planning on killing Desi all along; her living situation in the beach house had many similarities to her marriage, and was actually an improvement in certain ways. If she had stayed with Desi it would still be her faking her way through a relationship and pretending to be a man's fantasy woman, just like she had been doing with Nick, only without any of Nick's financial problems or the cheating (because Desi really did seem genuinely obsessed with her). Amy seemed ruthlessly pragmatic. If staying with Desi was the only way to avoid having her scheme discovered (and letting Nick get away without his "punishment"), then she would resign herself to it.

MoaM
Dec 1, 2009

Joyous.

Honest Thief posted:

I believe most people will leave with an unconformable smile on them, "so, uh, affleck sure was a jerk cheating on his wife, right honey? want me to get you something?"

The dude sitting in front of me kissed his female movie-watching partner at least three times during the movie.

Liam Emsa
Aug 21, 2014

Oh, god. I think I'm falling.

MoaM posted:

The dude sitting in front of me kissed his female movie-watching partner at least three times during the movie.

We were on a date, okay?

NutritiousSnack
Jul 12, 2011

James Hardon posted:

I'm a PUA MRA brony fedora manlet rapist neckbeard so I'm even more excited to see it now. Misogyny ftmfw.

I really miss having you in this thread especially after this review. You or g00m would have been nice. :smith:

teagone
Jun 10, 2003

That was pretty intense, huh?

Saw this yesterday. Took me a bit to get into it in the beginning, but poo poo I was totally into it during 2nd and 3rd acts. Especially the bits involving NPH (what a creeper). I'd rank Gone Girl maybe third among my favorite of Fincher's work, behind Zodiac and The Social Network. This had all the obvious hallmarks of a solid Fincher film; his poo poo is just so slick and stylish. That said, I can see how some will read this as an utterly misogynist film. My initial reaction upon discussion with friends afterward was solely "drat, that woman is cray cray" and actually feared for Nick in the end with all the power that Amy has over him, but also saw that craziness as a display of karmic retribution.

FourLeaf posted:

I thought the crazy intense way she was staring at the screen during the interview showed that she really did take Nick at his word that he'd stop being such a lovely husband, so she decided to give him a second chance. Later in the film when Nick and Amy are in the shower together she makes sure to remind him of his promise that he'll change his behavior, while washing off Desi's blood. Implication: finally, after all the years of her acting like the Cool Girl, now it's Nick's turn to be a "Cool Guy," to pretend to be exactly how she wants. And if he breaks his promise, she'll make him suffer.

This makes a lot of sense and I think is a good direction as to what Amy's motives/mindset were during that particular situation. It plays into her Amazing Amy stories where the fictional Amy always gets or becomes the thing she wanted, as if she were living out some hosed up iteration of one of her own stories in real life.

Buzkashi
Feb 4, 2003
College Slice

ShoogaSlim posted:

The cat for best supporting actor or I boycott the academy awards.

I agree wholeheartedly with this. The cat and the sister were the only likeable characters. I especially enjoyed the fact that after a big shouty fight with Nick, the sister still takes a second to pet the cat as she storms out the door.

It was occasionally difficult to not see Neil Patrick Harris as Barney Stinson.

teagone
Jun 10, 2003

That was pretty intense, huh?

The cat did kind of look sinister as gently caress while perched on the kitchen counter in front of Amy. That was pretty amazing acting. Really made the scene. I say this unironically.

teagone fucked around with this message at 14:07 on Oct 6, 2014

1997
Jan 20, 2008

calmer than you are
I bet that cat got paid bank. He turned in a pretty solid performance.

K. Waste
Feb 27, 2014

MORAL:
To the vector belong the spoils.
In the alternate ending the cat is Amy and Nick's child.

A True Jar Jar Fan
Nov 3, 2003

Primadonna

K. Waste posted:

In the alternate ending the cat is Amy and Nick's child.

The way he carried the cat into the house like a baby was pretty adorable.

Sir Kodiak
May 14, 2007


Fun movie. In regards to Amy checking off the MRA-fears list, I took this as a conscious (both for Amy the character and the writer) inversion of her "Cool Girl" act. She knows exactly what immature and self-centered guys want out of women, she's willing to provide it if they live up to what she perceives as their part of the bargain, and she inflicts exactly what they fear the most once they don't. She has accurately read a misogynistic culture and can switch from a chili-dog loving blowjob nymph who walks around in lingerie to the "psycho bitch" who steals sperm to get pregnant and fakes a rape accusation.

I think the other strength of the movie's take on this sort of gender politics is that it implicitly suggests that for someone to do these things - trick someone into a pregnancy, fake a rape, etc. - they'd have to be as cold-bloodedly manipulative as Amy. This is not the scenario that your typical MRA talks about, that women revert to dead-eyed lizards when no one is watching, that every smile is an act. The film proposes that it is difficult, that it takes a combination of absolute sociopathy and extraordinary willpower, to fake a rape: Amy coldly twisting the twine around her wrists, silently using the wine bottle, etc. This is markedly different from the misogynist's worldview, that a woman can just scream rape without physical evidence and the world will believe her (it won't).


Pretty film, though less showy than what I normally associate with Fincher. Great score. Filled with great performances, I didn't know Rosamund Pike was that good an actress and I'll join everyone else in being surprised at Tyler Perry stealing the movie. That he'd fit perfectly as a natural showman for an audience that he doesn't himself associate with is interesting in light of his directorial career. The scenes with Rosamund Pike made up to look like she's not wearing makeup were a hell of a thing, that Amy Dunne essentially tried to live her life with all the prep that an actress has to do to appear on camera.

A Gnarlacious Bro
Apr 25, 2007

by Jeffrey of YOSPOS
Insanely bad movie, and that dude is right that it's explicitly misogynistic. Lots of really hilarious justifications going on though.

jialiangzhong
Jan 29, 2006
smile

A Gnarlacious Bro posted:

Insanely bad movie, and that dude is right that it's explicitly misogynistic. Lots of really hilarious justifications going on though.

It's not as if Fincher and co are saying Amy's actions are the norm. I mean every movie that Fincher directed has characters at the center that do transgressive things. That's why they're entertaining to watch and become the subject of the movies in the first place.

KazigluBey
Oct 30, 2011

boner

A Gnarlacious Bro posted:

Insanely bad movie, and that dude is right that it's explicitly misogynistic. Lots of really hilarious justifications going on though.

This, but ironically.

Venkmanologist
Jun 21, 2007

Human sacrifice, dogs and cats living together -- mass hysteria.
Time to add some gasoline to this fire.

"Gone Girl is the most feminist mainstream movie in years"
http://www.vox.com/2014/10/6/6905475/gone-girl-feminist-movie-david-fincher

quote:

But even if Gone Girl is just sort of accidentally feminist, so what? The film is a bracing corrective to years of thrillers on screens both big and small that reduce their female characters to victims designed to die because they were the wrong kind of woman, or married the wrong kind of man (which was completely their fault, of course). They are bait, or objects to be protected, not characters in their own right. And even when these movies try to turn their female characters into something more, they tend to fetishize those characters' suffering — as, ironically, happened in Fincher's own Girl With the Dragon Tattoo. But Gone Girl is different. It takes a character who would just be a corpse in so many other stories and turns the entire movie over to her.

fatherboxx
Mar 25, 2013

A great movie doomed to be torn apart in the critical zeitgeist and put into favmovie rotation by the same shitheads who loved Jagten for all the wrong reasons. But after Fight Club and Social Network I am sure Fincher is well accustomed to this (and maybe he gets a kick out of it?).

The white trash girl is an amazing character. She sees right through the wannabe criminal mastermind and manages to get a man to do the work for her without elaborate planning or deep psycho grudges. No surprise that Amy hates her guts, the girl is confident in herself and does not need to be defined by the presence/abscence of men in her life. I think she, Margot and the lady detective are all great female characters to balance Amy out.

Fincher's directing is perfect for the theme of narratives controlling the real life, first act is some marvelous and hypnotizing filmmaking, especially in the context of the events that follow.

DrVenkman
Dec 28, 2005

I think he can hear you, Ray.

Venkmanologist posted:

Time to add some gasoline to this fire.

"Gone Girl is the most feminist mainstream movie in years"
http://www.vox.com/2014/10/6/6905475/gone-girl-feminist-movie-david-fincher

Thing is, I love the movie, but I can't agree with that because the idea of a femme-fatale who outsmarts those around her isn't exactly new. I mean, for a time Amy basically turns into Linda Florentino from THE LAST SEDUCTION. That article only works if you ignore a lot of other movies that have done the same thing.

Adbot
ADBOT LOVES YOU

LividLiquid
Apr 13, 2002

What I find really fascinating is that Amy wanted to come back after seeing Nick's performance on the news show, because we are initially led to believe that she wanted "that Nick", which on the surface sounds like she likes who that guy is. But I think what she's actually saying is that she was into what the actual Nick does, which mirrors her own behavior.

The moment he begins playing the game by her rules, she's in. She's got somebody to go all sociopath with her.

It is deeply fascinating how this film approaches themes of surface behavior, true motive, and outside appearance.

I don't find the film specifically sexist or misogynistic, mostly due to the fact that all of the other women in the film are fully-realized characters. The film wasn't talking about women. It was talking about this woman, and took efforts to make sure we knew so. Still, some will always miss the point, adding any ammunition to the MRA handbook is always going to be a bad thing, and adding images to the cultural zeitgeist suggesting that rapes are often faked isn't the best idea ever, but again, the film went out of its way to portray several different types of women that don't fit into one of three-or-four stereotypes we're so used to seeing in media. I could see it being damaging, sure, but it told a story of a sociopathic woman in the least damaging way possible. For women, anyway.

If anything, I'd worry more about the film's ableist leanings. The antagonist has a medical problem so stigmatized that Nick will gladly spend the rest of his life playing games with her and fearing his own brutal murder instead of suggesting, "Uh, hey. Let's go see a loving doctor." This is how stigmatized mental illness is.

  • Locked thread