“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.” — posted on 9.26.14.
Posted on 10.7.14: “Two days ago a Glenn Whipp L.A. Times piece drove a stake through Gone Girl‘s Best Picture chances. The article assessed reactions to last Saturday’s Academy screening of David Fincher‘s film, and the basic take-away was that the 50-plus crowd was mostly underwhelmed or ‘subdued.’
“Nobody Whipp spoke to seemed to understand that Gone Girl is a kind of Luis Bunuel film, and that Gillian Flynn‘s story is only the half of it, that the film is really about the social-cultural undercurrent…about all of us.
“One Academy guy told Whipp that ‘this is first-class filmmaking but, like a lot of [Fincher’s] other movies, you admire it more than you enjoy it.’ In other words, first-class chops and socially pungent content aren’t enjoyable enough. This guy wants to laugh, to be charmed, hugged and caressed, to have his heart melted down. ‘What did I just see?’ one Oscar-nominated producer said to Whipp as he walked along Wilshire Boulevard to his car. ‘That’s it? Really? I’ve seen better social commentary in a good episode of Bob’s Burgers!’
“You can lead a 62 year-old Academy member to a screening, but you can’t make him ‘see’ it. Yes, I wish that just one time Academy members could stand inside my shoes. They’d know what a drag it is to report about them.” — posted on 10.7.14.
