Gone Girl

Yeah, you're probably right. Good obseravation. But I'm not writing for any publication and there are so many reviews of films out there that just recite the plot that I thought I'd take another perspective. And 40 years from now, people will still be talking about Fincher and no one will even remember Gone Girl. Longevity, longevity! It's actually mostly also about my secret hatred for thrillers. My mother trained me as a child to guess what was going to happen in thrillsers, so twists and surprises just annoy me, as you can usually spot them well before the movie ends. It turns what could be the rich experience of watching a film into a parlor game. I think surprise endings are great for half hour tv shows, but I hate spending 2 hours only to be hit in the face with a silly twist ending.

 

You caught only Doogie's? I saw both of them. Affleck's is there, though only for a split second.

This is one of those cases where if I'd known the direction the movie was going to take, I would have skipped it. And I generally like Fincher's work.

 

I saw it last night without knowing a thing about it and liked it a lot, although the ending is perplexing from Affleck's perspective. I won't say anything more than that.

 

I agree. I had trouble making sense of it from his view.

 

Without trying to give anything away, I think in the end the thrill was back for him. Maybe that's it, but still a little unrealistic I think. Still, anytime I think fiction is implausible, reality trumps it

 

Loved the first 3/4 of the film... then it degenerated into silliness. Neil Harris' character, I don't believe, would be that dumb. It just got silly...

And the ending... well, Zodiac, Fincher's superior film had an ambiguous ending. And it was handled incredibly well with the final scene. Still stays with me. This ending?

Spoiler: Ending Issues

Nonsense. All that build up so he's with the baby? Huh? Neil Harris was a fascinating Third Man type character. I was sure he had not only gotten his "revenge"/what he wanted by locking her away forever, not only physically, but unable to escape because she showed the world she was "dead"... (I think would have made a far better ending)

Anyway, well done, but 3/4 of a great movie. Fincher hangs up much of his technical CG moves for a character study. As cool as he can frame shots, he did not let his technical-invention mind get in the way of the story.

Jeff

 

I'm definitely with you on this - well, maybe I'd say I loved the first HALF of the film, then the third quarter a bit less, and then the fourth quarter just sort of ruined things.

 

Regarding your spoiler: That's exactly WHY she had to do what she did to him

 

Small correction: I attend a post presentation on the work of the editors, colorist, and visual effects people on Gone Girl, and they mentioned that there were more than 2200 CG effects in the finished film.

 

Oh, no doubt they were there - my God, every shot has a VFX of some kind in it these days - color correction aside. I just meant it didn't feel technical and cold for the sake of being overly "creative".

2200 CG effects? Well done because we didn't notice!

Jeff

 

jesus, there were about that many in The Avengers!

 

Yes, for a movie that doesn't look on the surface to be very effects intensive, Gone Girl has a ton of tricky shots in it. A great deal of the movie was recomposed in post, changing the camera angle tighter or looser as required or making a pan or tilt on a different direction; a number of scenes combined multiple takes into a single shot, which is very complicated to do. I may have already mentioned that the shoot of the deer standing in the middle of the road is a green screen composite. There's also a scene where a certain character spatters blood all over a stove, and the blood is all CG because they couldn't get the spatter "just right" in production.

So there's a lot of very sneaky CG VFX shots in this movie.

I agree -- "invisible" effects are the best kind, where you have absolutely no idea an effect is going on. Fincher is a very, very hip and creative guy, always pushing his technical crew into coming up with state-of-the-art solutions for very difficult creative problems.

 

It's an amazing achievement, no doubt, since it's more or less totally seamless. On the other hand, I wonder whether Fincher could save some money by just making a good movie on set, more or less. I know it's unfashionable these days and even Scorsese is doing the 1000 CGI shots thing, but 2200 for a movie of this kind strikes me as wasteful, like an excuse not to anticipate editing/coverage problems on set, like directors used to.

One result of this dependence on CGI to solve these kinds of problems is that you get a movie like Transcendence--made by a much lesser craftsman than Fincher admittedly--that has a whole host of editing problems that no amount of CGI can solve, on the assumption that they could be "fixed in post".

 

I said the same thing, but as the example about the splash of blood on the oven above: the editor said that it might have taken 3 or 4 hours to get just the right splash at the right moment. This way, all they had to do was "pretend" the splash happen and just put it in later in post, with absolute precision.

The same thing with the take combining: if they did a scene in a restaurant with three people and the best take with the guy on the left was take 9, the best take with the guy in the middle was take 2, and the best take with the woman on the right was take 20, they could combine all 3 seamlessly to the point where it looked like a single scene. Sure, you could have kept shooting and shooting and shooting until all three actors did one perfect take, but that might require 89 takes and 12 hours of shooting. This way, Fincher got the pieces of what he needed in 1/3 of that time.

At least... that's what we were told. You could make a good argument that Fincher changed all these shots in post because he could, but since the movie's gotten great reviews and made lots of money, the trouble seemed to be worth it.

 

I think Fincher is a master of CGI, using it quietly and effectively and for the sake of the story rather than it's detriment. It goes back to Zodiac where a lot of CGI camera moves helped to establish the tone at the beginning of the movie, yet you'd never know until you watched the behind the scenes.

 

One of my fave films with tons of CGI that doesn't seem like it was Children of Men

 

And more so in Panic Room

 

It figures when you consider one of his first jobs early in his career was working as a VFX cameraman for ILM back in the 1980s. Fincher knows VFX backwards, forwards, and sideways.

 

Have to agree with several people here. Excellent movie for about an hour then a real steaming pile of s---.

 

Saw Gone Girl last night and thoroughly enjoyed it. I went knowing nothing about the plot, only that it was by Fincher and had very good reviews.
A gripping drama/thriller with good twists and turns. Brilliantly directed and acted, except for Affleck who is pretty wooden and wears the same expression all the way throught the movie.

 

The film ending is basically the same ending as the book so blame it on the author.

 

I despised the book. And I had no excuse for starting it as I felt the same about a prior book by the same author. Not surprisingly, I will not see the movie.

 

I thought this flick was pretty good! Nothing earth-shattering, but I'd have a hard time agreeing with anyone who called this a "bad" movie. Fabulous production values, and hey, you don't see stories like this too often. And it held my attention for two-and-a-half- hours, not an easy thing to do. I dug the ending too. The callback to the first shot and opening lines of "I always think of her head. I think of cracking open her skull" was brilliant -- left me thinking that something even worse than what already happened is on the horizon, but they didn't come right out and say it.

Also, I normally hate Tyler Perry but he was a scene stealer. His "showcase showdown" line might have been the highlight of the movie for me.

 

Well, I finally saw 'Gone Girl'. It's a terrible film. There are many, many things wrong with it - preposterous plot, miscast lead actress, excessive running time, excruciating soundtrack, etc. - but overall the key flaw, present from the first scene, is that it never manages to cross the line between feeling like we're watching some actors (not to mention a director) working, and being immersed in a story. It just doesn't work.

 

I'm much more interested in the soundtrack than the movie itself. I tend to hate pretty much all movies other than kids movies and comedies though so who knows.