Ok, this just might be the greatest interview ever given by an actor. I mentioned
The Newsroom in my last post. Jeff Daniels kills it in that show as Will McAvoy, and the reasons for that are (a) he's an amazing actor, and this interview shows why he's been able to reach the level he's reached, and (b) he fucking
is Will McAvoy. The audience breaks into applause like eight fucking times. He is, in gloriously Randian fashion, an uncompromising professional, and his work ethic is so inspiring.
@Shot, Daniels talking about acting is literally like Will talking about politics. It's awesome.
And it's a well-deserved @.
once I'm done peeling apart Closer for the movie club.
I watched that for somebody during the first movie challenge back in the day. Whoever it was, if you remember, raise your hand, because I've forgotten. I don't even remember what I thought of it. All I remember is I hate Clive Owen but Natalie Portman was worth the trouble.
Insinuating that the original
Cape Fear is not cool... man, that's low even for you. Think we may have another Chinatown conflict on our hands.
Dude, I completely missed that entire mega post of yours. I guess I got distracted by you and Irish McSnobby batting goofy artsy-fartsy shit back-and-forth and ended up missing the good shit. Backing up a bit...
I just want to begin by saying how disappointed I am about myself for not watching Gone Girl earlier.
The worst part about your not having seen
Gone Girl sooner is that you weren't able to throw your two cents in when me and
Caveat were talking about it. Better late than never, though:
Well, I've always thought Fincher was overrated and I still stand by that, but even with that qualification, I will never again be able to say that the man's resume is without at least one legitmately great film. Gone Girl was fucking fantastic. I've gotten the sense in watching Fincher's films that he really depends on his scripts. I don't think he has a single writing bone in his body, so if the script sucks, he's not going to be able to do anything about it because he's all about visuals and mood and emotion. The reason Gone Girl is so great is because it was based on a novel and the author adapted her book herself. That kind of safety net allows Fincher to work at a much higher level; give him strong material, and he'll make the shit come alive. All through high school I read books like Gone Girl voraciously, so I knew all of the beats of this one before they came, but that didn't hurt my experience because I was so impressed with Fincher's filmmaking. When I thought I'd be a filmmaker and would read three or four books a week for screenplay material, the kind of adaptations I hoped I'd be able to make were on the level of Gone Girl.
In my history of Fincher viewing, I can't recall ever really feeling any extratextual inspiration, but Gone Girl was pure Hitchcock but through Fincher's visual filter. In terms of managing the beats, it was part Suspicion and part Vertigo, and he balanced the parts masterfully. He allowed just enough doubt in the first half to make it compelling and have me running through my mental checklist of facts every five minutes, and then when he made the switch, he didn't flaunt his prestidigitation but simply went on with his storytelling with Hitchcock's surehandedness and diligence.
I also loved all of the performances. Even that piece of shit Tyler Perry was great. I was afraid I'd hate the movie when I saw his name in the credits, but I loved him ("You two are the most fucked up people I know" :icon_chee). The story itself felt was far-fetched, but it worked well enough on the surface level to not hinder how superbly it worked thematically. The darkness of that portrait of marriage had a blackness that was extremely compelling but, interestingly, it never really crossed over into the type of bitter comedy that Hitchcock would've found irresistable. Fincher told this story without finding any humor in the situation; he treated his demented heroine the way Otto Preminger treated Jean Simmons in Angel Face, and I felt as bad for Affleck in Gone Girl as I did for Mitchum in Angel Face, only Affleck played that character so fucking well in the way he figured out enough to not only know his wife's game but also to know that, by the end, he had no more moves to make. The board was hers and he knew it.
I think I'm still staying with Interstellar and Nightcrawler as my one-two punch for 2014, but with Gone Girl, I've found the third film for my pedestal. Awesome, awesome movie. I have to give it up to Fincher for that one.
My re-watch of Gone Girl, on the other hand, was excellent. I felt far less removed from the chaos of the second half when I was actively anticipating it. I realized that after the first watch I never questioned whether Nick really ever got violent with Amy. He denies it in front of the cops, though with some hesitation, and when she's describing how she wrote her journal she only refers to the happy early times as the true ones. Just because we saw the flashback doesn't mean it necessarily happened, imo, though I entirely believe that she witnessed the kiss between Nick and his mistress when we saw that scene unfold in her memory.
I'm curious about how we're supposed to feel about Amy once things are all said and done. I think the easy answer is that she's a psycho bitch, and that she balked at suicide only to return to Nick empty-handed to use him as another part of her developing legacy. But if we give a little credence to her claim that she returned to the version of Nick he presented in the interview she watched, maybe she doesn't have to be a complete lost cause. She still expresses a desire for intimacy with Nick in their private moments, which shows a pretty intense commitment if she's just acting to manipulate him. But her statement about marriage at the end threatens any sympathy I wanted to have for her.
I think she over-reacted initially towards Nick and tried to run away from a version of herself that she felt she hadn't been in control of creating - the same way her childhood was developed without her input in the fictional stories of Amazing Amy. In trying to escape that version of herself she pushed too far in the opposite direction and gave up maintaining any sense of virtue whatsoever - but I'm not sure that's who she really wanted to be either, it was just a reaction. Then she killed Dessie, who really was a fucked up weirdo trying to imprison her in a much worse way than Nick ever did (his line about not forcing himself on her was especially chilling as a veiled threat). She returns to her home with Nick with a new sense of power of him. But does this reversal put her in a position more like Nick's previous one, or Dessie's?
People in intimate relationships should expect to be changed by them. To be threatened by that is to misunderstand what you're getting into. Marriage shouldn't be a struggle between people trying to control each other. It should be people trying to improve themselves, and each other, through each other. Amy took the victimization thing too far and her local audience stepped out of the way to let it happen. There had to be a feminism angle there somewhere, lol.
I'll stop there, but wanted to say that I was glad I put it on to think over a second time after the discussion of re-watches earlier itt.
To your points after your rewatch (and, before I start, let me state for the record that I have still only seen it the one time, so I'll be staying at a relatively general level here):
I felt far less removed from the chaos of the second half when I was actively anticipating it.
Meaning that you were able to become more intensely involved without having to worry about playing detective? Or meaning the first time through you weren't affected but the second time you were? Just curious.
I realized that after the first watch I never questioned whether Nick really ever got violent with Amy. He denies it in front of the cops, though with some hesitation, and when she's describing how she wrote her journal she only refers to the happy early times as the true ones. Just because we saw the flashback doesn't mean it necessarily happened, imo, though I entirely believe that she witnessed the kiss between Nick and his mistress when we saw that scene unfold in her memory.
This is the Hitchcock territory I was alluding to. Hitchcock very famously included a "false flashback" in his film
Stage Fright, and he also famously denounced it as a terrible mistake on his part. I actually don't mind the false flashback, especially in the context of
Gone Girl. Unfortunately, I don't remember the film well enough to remember exactly what was going on with that flashback or how I responded.
I'm curious about how we're supposed to feel about Amy once things are all said and done.
I think the *correct answer is that she's a psycho bitch
*FTFY.
if we give a little credence to her claim that she returned to the version of Nick he presented in the interview she watched, maybe she doesn't have to be a complete lost cause.
I don't know if you're a big reader and/or a big fan of classical Hollywood, but with the way you're scrutinizing the implications of relationships/marriage, you'd probably enjoy Stanley Cavell's book
Pursuits of Happiness: The Hollywood Comedy of Remarriage (
https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=wws5ObJsUv0C&printsec=frontcover&dq=pursuits+of+happiness&hl=en&sa=X&redir_esc=y#v=onepage&q=pursuits of happiness&f=false). For Cavell, the main idea is the idea of remarriage where the "re" is meant to indicate the main issues in a marriage: First, what do the people involved understand (a/their) marriage to be (and, by extension, if their understanding changes, are they willing to continually redefine/reaffirm their marriage, i.e., are they willing to continually be remarried?), and second, is each one's "other half" a) suitable for them in terms of inspiring them to be the best person they can be and b) suited to them in terms of being inspired to be the best person they can be? And the fact that you ended your post on pretty much this exact ground is why I think you'd enjoy this book.
Two key passages from early in the book establishing the terms of Cavell's argument:
"[Comedies of remarriage] may be understood as parables of a phase of the development of consciousness at which the struggle is for the reciprocity or equality of consciousness between a woman and a man, a study of the conditions under which this fight for recognition (as Hegel put it) or demand for acknowledgment (as I have put it) is a struggle for mutual freedom, especially of the views each holds of the other. This gives the films of our genre a Utopian cast. They harbor a vision which they know cannot fully be domesticated, inhabited, in the world we know. They are romances. Showing us our fantasies, they express the inner agenda of a nation that conceives Utopian longings and commitments for itself."
"What is it about the conversation of just these films that makes it so perfectly satisfy the appetite of talking pictures? Granted the fact, the question can only be answered by consulting the films. Evidently their conversation is the verbal medium in which, for example, questions of human creation and the absence of mothers and the battle between men and women for recognition of one another, and whatever matters turn out to entail these, are given expression. So it is not sufficient that, say, the conversation be sexually charged. If it were sufficient then the genre would begin in 1931, with Noel Coward's
Private Lives, a work patently depicting the divorce and remarrying of a rich and sophisticated pair who speak intelligently and who infuriate and appreciate one another more than anyone else. But their witty, sentimental, violent exchanges get nowhere; their makings up never add up to forgiving one another (no place they arrive at is home to them); and they have come from nowhere (their constant reminiscences never add up to a past they can admit together). They are forever stuck in an orbit around the foci of desire and contempt. This is a fairly familiar perception of what marriage is. The conversation of what I call the genre of remarriage is, judging from the films I take to define it, of a sort that leads to acknowledgment; to the reconciliation of a genuine forgiveness; a reconciliation so profound as to require the metamorphosis of death and revival, the achievement of a new perspective on existence; a perspective that presents itself as a place, one removed from the city of confusion and divorce."
From this perspective,
Gone Girl could be an allegory of remarriage run amok. Amy's heart is in the right place (that's the only olive branch I can extend, and it doesn't extend very far); she wants the kind of relationship that Cavell describes as the utopian one of the mutual acknowledgment between two people and their commitment to bettering their lives as individuals and as a couple (and you acknowledged as much when you noted that Amy "still expresses a desire for intimacy [...] which shows a pretty intense commitment"). However, when it's clear that she's not going to achieve this with Nick, that Nick is not suited to her, she loses her shit. What's more, she violates the democratic principle of remarriage: That each individual be free to pursue their own happiness, that their happiness be one freely
shared/freely shared. If she can be happy with a sham marriage that makes her husband miserable, then it's not a true marriage. The mutuality isn't there and both the concepts of marriage and of happiness are ultimately corrupted.
Now, with what you mentioned about the "feminism angle": There could be a way to interpret this less as an allegory of remarriage run amok and more as the
failure of remarriage - and a failure that is the fault of
men. Amy, the representative of Woman (not as
inherently crazy but as
driven crazy - i.e., driven crazy
by men, here by Nick, the representative of Man), gets fed up with how sucky her "perfect guy" is and just goes ape shit. I don't remember the movie well enough to actually want to take up this interpretation right now, but there was so much going on that, while I will never waver from considering Amy a psycho who should die in a very public car accident (or some other comparable scenario where Nick can in no way be implicated), her craziness doesn't invalidate an interpretation of the film that sees it as questioning, in shrewd and provocative fashion, the current state of marriage in the American context.
Meaning that you were able to become more intensely involved without having to worry about playing detective? Or meaning the first time through you weren't affected but the second time you were? Just curious.
More the first part. I think I expected something a little more mundane on the first watch and when things opened up (Desy's neck in particular - LOL) I was too taken aback to fit everything into proper context. The second time through I couldn't wait to get past all the typical murder-mystery stuff to watch the craziness unfold at the end - and I was better able to process it all at a coherent whole.
This is the Hitchcock territory I was alluding to. Hitchcock very famously included a "false flashback" in his film Stage Fright, and he also famously denounced it as a terrible mistake on his part. I actually don't mind the false flashback, especially in the context of Gone Girl. Unfortunately, I don't remember the film well enough to remember exactly what was going on with that flashback or how I responded.
That's interesting, I hadn't considered the false flashback before. I'm not sure what to make of it because I feel inconsistent immediately accepting the truth of one flashback but not another.
She is crazy but that's
too easy. I want to - as you say later - extend the olive branch to see where she's coming from.
I don't know if you're a big reader and/or a big fan of classical Hollywood, but with the way you're scrutinizing the implications of relationships/marriage, you'd probably enjoy Stanley Cavell's book
Pursuits of Happiness: The Hollywood Comedy of Remarriage (
https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=wws5ObJsUv0C&printsec=frontcover&dq=pursuits+of+happiness&hl=en&sa=X&redir_esc=y#v=onepage&q=pursuits of happiness&f=false). For Cavell, the main idea is the idea of remarriage where the "re" is meant to indicate the main issues in a marriage: First, what do the people involved understand (a/their) marriage to be (and, by extension, if their understanding changes, are they willing to continually redefine/reaffirm their marriage, i.e., are they willing to continually be remarried?), and second, is each one's "other half" a) suitable for them in terms of inspiring them to be the best person they can be and b) suited to them in terms of being inspired to be the best person they can be? And the fact that you ended your post on pretty much this exact ground is why I think you'd enjoy this book.
Two key passages from early in the book establishing the terms of Cavell's argument:
"[Comedies of remarriage] may be understood as parables of a phase of the development of consciousness at which the struggle is for the reciprocity or equality of consciousness between a woman and a man, a study of the conditions under which this fight for recognition (as Hegel put it) or demand for acknowledgment (as I have put it) is a struggle for mutual freedom, especially of the views each holds of the other. This gives the films of our genre a Utopian cast. They harbor a vision which they know cannot fully be domesticated, inhabited, in the world we know. They are romances. Showing us our fantasies, they express the inner agenda of a nation that conceives Utopian longings and commitments for itself."
"What is it about the conversation of just these films that makes it so perfectly satisfy the appetite of talking pictures? Granted the fact, the question can only be answered by consulting the films. Evidently their conversation is the verbal medium in which, for example, questions of human creation and the absence of mothers and the battle between men and women for recognition of one another, and whatever matters turn out to entail these, are given expression. So it is not sufficient that, say, the conversation be sexually charged. If it were sufficient then the genre would begin in 1931, with Noel Coward's
Private Lives, a work patently depicting the divorce and remarrying of a rich and sophisticated pair who speak intelligently and who infuriate and appreciate one another more than anyone else. But their witty, sentimental, violent exchanges get nowhere; their makings up never add up to forgiving one another (no place they arrive at is home to them); and they have come from nowhere (their constant reminiscences never add up to a past they can admit together). They are forever stuck in an orbit around the foci of desire and contempt. This is a fairly familiar perception of what marriage is. The conversation of what I call the genre of remarriage is, judging from the films I take to define it, of a sort that leads to acknowledgment; to the reconciliation of a genuine forgiveness; a reconciliation so profound as to require the metamorphosis of death and revival, the achievement of a new perspective on existence; a perspective that presents itself as a place, one removed from the city of confusion and divorce."
From this perspective,
Gone Girl could be an allegory of remarriage run amok. Amy's heart is in the right place (that's the only olive branch I can extend, and it doesn't extend very far); she wants the kind of relationship that Cavell describes as the utopian one of the mutual acknowledgment between two people and their commitment to bettering their lives as individuals and as a couple (and you acknowledged as much when you noted that Amy "still expresses a desire for intimacy [...] which shows a pretty intense commitment"). However, when it's clear that she's not going to achieve this with Nick, that Nick is not suited to her, she loses her shit. What's more, she violates the democratic principle of remarriage: That each individual be free to pursue their own happiness, that their happiness be one freely
shared/freely shared. If she can be happy with a sham marriage that makes her husband miserable, then it's not a true marriage. The mutuality isn't there and both the concepts of marriage and of happiness are ultimately corrupted.
Hmmm, that does sound like me. I've never heard the term "re-marriage" before but I've expressed it in different language. People change, and we should expect that, but continuous assent to a committed union can still be had so long at the union is doing the job it's supposed to.
I agree with you about Amy's starting point but I think I break with her in how she responds to Nick being an asshole. He clearly has a bunch of insecurities that she should have been able to identify and talk about rather than delving into her own psychopathology to design a murder-suicide mission.
But I can also see that she's acted as a effective tool to push some of those domestic questions into the limelight where a more balanced girl - a "cool girl" perhaps - may have felt the frustration without being able to provoke the response.
So she's a crazy psycho, but a functional crazy psycho.
Now, with what you mentioned about the "feminism angle": There could be a way to interpret this less as an allegory of remarriage run amok and more as the failure of remarriage - and a failure that is the fault of men. Amy, the representative of Woman (not as inherently crazy but as driven crazy - i.e., driven crazy by men, here by Nick, the representative of Man), gets fed up with how sucky her "perfect guy" is and just goes ape shit. I don't remember the movie well enough to actually want to take up this interpretation right now, but there was so much going on that, while I will never waver from considering Amy a psycho who should die in a very public car accident (or some other comparable scenario where Nick can in no way be implicated), her craziness doesn't invalidate an interpretation of the film that sees it as questioning, in shrewd and provocative fashion, the current state of marriage in the American context.
Exactly what I was getting at.
That said, I was actually thinking of the feminist angle more in the sense of a pendulum of harmful over-reactions swinging back and forth. Amy is treated poorly, as are many other women, she responds by setting Nick up to get killed, the way some expressions of feminism today are very anti-men. Nick responds by trying to strike back at her full-force, MRA-style, but she's already moved on to a world where his value to her doesn't require his personhood, and where she's played the system properly to her own advantage (maybe a warning?). The kid fits the analogy somewhere too, in a way I can't think up right now.
Reading through the reviews a little more, it seems there was actually some controversy about whether
Gone Girl should be understood as a feminist film. Supporters appreciated seeing a truly malicious, nonredeemable female character free of her obligations to some feminine virtue, while detractors thought she fit too perfectly into the fictional threatening-female mold devised by MRAs and other groups that could potentially be described at anti-women.
I think the answer is probably somewhere in between, but like we sort of agreed above, it definitely prompted an interesting set of questions.
I've always been one of those guys that undervalues Fincher (except Se7en, obviously)
Ha, I undervalue Fincher
because of Se7en, which is beyond overrated. It's just a shitty fucking movie.
I finally caught the Original Cape Fear [...] I was ages since I saw the Scorsese remake, but I think I like the original more.
I'm going to hold off on telling you why the remake is better until you don't just
think you like the original more. And, if you have the time/inclination, I'd say hurry up and rewatch the remake while the original is still (relatively) fresh in your mind.
Cady isn't just predatory towards Bowden's daughter, there is some unholy attraction for her side too, with her budding sexuality and all.
Damn it,
europe, I can't get into nitty-gritty shit like this with the remake fuzzy in your mind, but if you rewatch the remake, remember that you said this so that either (a) you can realize yourself as you're watching that this isn't quite accurate or (b) you can strengthen your position on this point and argue with me about it.
For my money, it's not that "Cady isn't just predatory," it's that De Niro's Cady is a
different kind of predatory than Mitchum's. And, needless to say, a better kind.
That said, working off memory, Mitchum's restrained performance is just more effective than Niro's extroverted, bombastic display in eliciting a reaction.
I saw Bonjour Triesse as a natural springboard to having watched Breatless in the previous mega-post... and it was very stimulating!
I was giving you shit in my last post for basically not watching any more Preminger, and in this mega post, you talk about the additional Preminger movie you watched.
My bad. I'm glad you enjoyed
Bonjour Tristesse. I just love the way Preminger tells stories.
One of those movies where the candy was in how the characters related to one-another and the psychology that had been spawned from that.
What you call "one of those movies" is
every Preminger movie. Jacques Rivette, in one of my favorite pieces of film criticism ever, describes what he loves about Preminger's movies (inspired by the recent release at the time of
Angel Face) and he says exactly what you're saying:
"Preminger does see in the script primarily an opportunity to create certain characters, studying them with painstaking attention, observing their reactions to one another, and finally drawing from them particular gestures, attitudes and reflexes - which are the
raison d'être of his film, and its real subject."
You should watch
Whirlpool and
Angel Face next. Along with
Laura, those two really illuminate the essential kernel of Preminger's cinema (the piece of criticism from Rivette that I quoted is actually entitled "The Essential") and they'll provide you with the foundation you need to then move on to his bigger movies like
Anatomy of a Murder and
Advise & Consent.
Can't say that Seberg reminded me much of Seberg from Breathless though. In Bonjour she's happy-go-go and frivilous high-society girl. Not the philosophical, inwards-looking, yet still very glad and happily-minded girl from Breathless.
For Godard, it wasn't that, in
Bonjour Tristesse, she
already was who he wanted her to be in
Breathless. Rather, I think who he wanted her to be in
Breathless was who he thought the girl in
Bonjour Tristesse would become.
my Bogart fix for the week was Dead Reckoning [...] Sort of a movie that worked better in parts than as a whole.
And I don't even really remember the parts. Very disappointing outing, especially considering it was directed by John Cromwell, an unsung hero of classical Hollywood.
Also... that funny gif coaxed me into watching The Bride Came C.O.D. [...] Fine as it is but nothing really special.
<{monica}>
This is why I like you,
europe. You don't just think it'd be a cool idea to watch a movie after seeing a gif. You actually watch the movie.
I sacrificed untold hours and saw Godfather One and Two once again.
I haven't watched those in years, but I was always on team Godfather II and it was never even close. Coppola II > Coppola I, Pacino II > Pacino I, and De Niro > Brando.
Also finally got my paws on that book "Heroes in Hard Times: Cop Action Movies in the U.S"
If you're like me, you're going to find it very hard just
reading about Lethal Weapon and
The Last Boy Scout
Anyway, back to the present day...
conserning your efforts to try and get
@Rimbaud82 to watch
Out For Justice.
Even though I remember quite enjoying Out For Justice. But it's been over 10 years or something so... I dunno.
Seagal will come up more than once in
Heroes in Hard Times
I did find it intresting that he would take such an extreme position. That he fundementally disagreed with the film because it was -- in his mind -- about violence and not love. He must have felt rather passionate about the subject matter/material if that detail meant so much to him that it prevented him from signing on.
I agree with him. That "detail" is a make it or break it detail. The Will Smith version would've been a fundamentally different movie. And he was right to indicate that the love story was little more to Tarantino than the hook on which to hang the revenge arc. Hell, of the many reasons the ending of that movie sucks so hard, the fact that Tarantino invested nothing in the actual love story is one of the big ones.
That's not to say the Smith version would've been better. I honestly don't know that Tarantino is equipped to make a movie like that. But I do think he could've at least made a better version of the movie he did make
I must confess that it's quite unlikely that I will watch
Out For Justice.
