Gone Girl is a gas, and I mean that in a truly fascinating ass-wind sense. It’s a wonderfully tight, highly disciplined, utterly delightful “who killed the missing wife?” flick by a master craftsman, but don’t kid yourself about it being just on that level. It’s much more than a rote crime melodrama. Gone Girl is basically an entertaining sociology lecture from Professor Fincher. A blistering assessment of American upscale marriages and social values and self-fuckitude like you’ve never quite seen. How do I get outta here? Look at how miserable we manage to make each other…togetherness! And the pigslop tabloid media brigade…God! Women and men are going to have sharply different reactions to Gone Girl, but for openers guys are going to go “wow…whoa” and some feminists are going to howl “is this a comprehensive portrait of 2014 male misogyny or what?” This view is complicated, of course, by the fact that Gillian Flynn, a whip-smart ex-Entertainment Weekly staffer, wrote the book to begin with. On the other hand Fincher brings the shit home. Gone Girl is a deliciously cold, twisted, half-satiric portrait of elite American values — the whole rotten state of disillusioned post-2008 married yuppie barforama. And fuck me. It’s 10:18 pm on a lovely warm night in midtown Manhattan. I’ve just uploaded two pics and two short videos of the post-Gone Girl press conference at Leows Lincoln Square, and now I have about 15 minutes before heading over to the post-gala party at Tavern on the Green. Later.