Gone Girl

GONE GIRL               C                    

USA  (149 mi)  2014  ‘Scope  d:  David Fincher                      Official Site

—Cool Girl speech from the novel Gone Girl, by Gillian Flynn, 2012

That night at the Brooklyn party, I was playing the girl who was in style, the girl a man like Nick wants: the Cool Girl. Men always say that as the defining compliment, don’t they? She’s a cool girl. Being the Cool Girl means I am a hot, brilliant, funny woman who adores football, poker, dirty jokes, and burping, who plays video games, drinks cheap beer, loves threesomes and anal sex, and jams hot dogs and hamburgers into her mouth like she’s hosting the world’s biggest culinary gang bang while somehow maintaining a size 2, because Cool Girls are above all hot. Hot and understanding. Cool Girls never get angry; they only smile in a chagrined, loving manner and let their men do whatever they want. Go ahead, shit on me, I don’t mind, I’m the Cool Girl.

Men actually think this girl exists. Maybe they’re fooled because so many women are willing to pretend to be this girl…Oh, and if you’re not a Cool Girl, I beg you not to believe that your man doesn’t want the Cool Girl. It may be a slightly different version—maybe he’s vegetarian, so Cool Girl loves seitan and is great with dogs; or maybe he’s a hipster artist, so Cool Girl is a tattooed, bespectacled nerd who loves comics. There are variations to the window dressing, but believe me, he wants Cool Girl, who is basically the girl who likes every f***ing thing he likes and doesn’t ever complain. (How do you know you’re not Cool Girl? Because he says things like “I like strong women.” If he says that to you, he will at some point f*** someone else. Because “I like strong women” is code for “I hate strong women.”

One of the more cynical movies seen in awhile, ugly and calculating, a horrible comment on the vapid emptiness of American society, painting a cruel portrait of a soulless age, yet it’s a dark satiric comedy that actually pokes fun of just how clueless the public remains of the hidden truths taking place in their midst, caught up in the windstorm of the latest political hysteria that leaves them blind by the filtered bullshit that passes for news these days, where they become numbed beyond hope, like walking zombies taking the place of what were once human beings.  Fincher’s film is as infuriatingly hopeless as anything Béla Tarr ever concocted, but instead of dreary black and white social realism, it’s a trashy best selling book becoming an equally trashy best selling movie, where the Hollywood production machine is in high gear, pumping out artificiality with great relish.  It’s another marriage on the rocks movie that veers out of control into Mary Harron’s American Psycho (2000), where Ben Affleck as Nick Dunne, pilloried by the public after being suspected of killing his missing wife Amy (Rosamund Pike), is no Christian Bale, where the exaggerated absurdity of the lynch mob public out for blood never compares to the heightened excess on display from Wall Street’s impeccably stylish Me Generation, jump started by Reaganomics opening the doors for unscrupulous business entrepreneurs in the 1980’s to rake in the money like the actual thieves they were.  The difference is the 1991 Bret Easton Ellis novel is actually a hilariously clever critique of the consumer culture of the 80’s, while this unraveling marital thriller exposing the beast that lies within is more like mixing the wildly popular Jacqueline Susann books with a dose of Stephen King, as Gillian Flynn’s airport novel spent more than 71 weeks on the New York Times hardcover best-seller list, and sold more than 6 million copies before it even came out in paperback.  The book (and subsequent movie) is a pale comparison to the shattering portrait of the idealized 1950’s marriage depicted in the excruciatingly personal 1961 Richard Yates novel Revolutionary Road, seemingly the perfect couple to all outsiders, played by the idyllic TITANIC (1997) couple Kate Winslet and Leonardo DiCaprio in the 2008 Sam Mendes film version, living in their wonderful dream house in the suburbs, where clearly the foundation of their success was the male-centric world of America in the 1950’s, a deluded American Dream that quickly disintegrates into marital dysfunction, as it denies the aspirations of women. 

In pointed contrast, the superficiality on display in Fincher’s film may turn off many viewers, as it thrives on the artificiality of the surface, literally mocking the shallowness of society while the unhappy lives of the featured couple takes a turn into the dark side, even delving into horror as Fincher’s vision seems designed to make the audience feel as uncomfortable as possible and then leave them in the lurch by providing few answers.  The offensiveness of the smug, overly detached tone, however, may hit everyone differently, where it’s reminiscent of the exaggerated sarcasm of von Trier’s DOGVILLE (2003), which couldn’t be more irritating.  Using a back and forth dual narrative scheme of he said, she said, where we’re privy to his interior narration and also what she writes in her diary, including flashback sequences that reveal her perspective on a crumbling romance, what’s immediately clear is that both narrators are consummate liars and cannot be trusted to convey the truth about their own stories.  Their home is a house of mirrors where they continually pretend to be something they’re not, fuming with displeasure underneath while both playing the part in public of a perfect marriage.  Whatever love or attraction may have been there at the outset has been twisted and contorted into a marriage that is a big lie, where the original romance was a con job, and once their guard has been let down what’s exposed are the frayed nerves, where these two have little use for one another except for keeping up appearances.  While there’s plenty of glib back and forth conversation when they first meet, each trying to be more clever than the other, they are apparently easily charmed, where Nick proposes as if on cue, and the next thing you know they’re married, moving away from their beloved New York to Missouri to be near Nick’s seriously ill mother who dies of cancer, leaving them alone in a gigantic house that feels unlived in and empty most of the time.  While Nick is more comfortable in the Midwest, having grown up there with friends and acquaintances, he runs a non-descript neighborhood bar with his twin sister Margo (Carrie Coon) that gives him an excuse to get away from Amy as much as possible, while she scribbles in her diary (with perfect penmanship) aimless thoughts that barely touch on the extent of her growing resentment. 

Amy’s parents “plagiarized” her life, actually improving upon it in a popular series of children’s books called Amazing Amy, leaving her unsure of her real identity, but always struggling to be better than the rest, where she has become an ice princess that continually speaks in a calm, reassuring, overly breathy voice that feels very much like an over-controlled robotic Stepford wife from THE STEPFORD WIVES (1975), where she has to emote perfection with every spoken word.  Certainly that would drive any man crazy after awhile, especially when used in a patronizing manner of never-ending superiority, where Nick is contemplating walking out on the marriage.  A clue for the audience is the sound of Blue Öyster Cult on the radio singing “(Don't Fear) The Reaper” (Don't Fear) Halloween You Tube (5:11), which figures so prominently in John Carpenter’s slasher horror film HALLOWEEN (1978).  On their 5th wedding anniversary, the date of his planned breakup announcement, he returns home from work in the early afternoon and finds his house broken into, a coffee table smashed, a few blood stains on the wall, and his wife missing.  Within days, he’s the chief suspect, where the investigative team of Detective Boney (Kim Dickens) and Officer Gilpin (Patrick Fugit) keep unearthing new evidence, much of which Nick has no knowledge about.  His sense of indifference to his wife’s life and subsequent absence is more reflective of his lazy and distant self, but once the cameras are parked outside his door, it opens the floodgates to media speculation, where he is raked over the coals in the tabloids and on a FOX TV style station run by a vicious rumor mill host (Missi Pyle) hellbent on using him to avenge all wronged women, where her continual diatribes run endlessly on the neverending TV news cycle, playing even in the local police precinct.  This lynch mob mentality has convicted the guy in public, plastering his face all over the airwaves, destroying his character, calling him a wife killer, reminiscent of the blanket national coverage surrounding Drew Peterson, who was alleged to have killed his third and fourth wives, where the body of the latter has never been found.  A 30-year police veteran, Peterson was familiar with forensic evidence, wasn’t bashful with reporters, and seemed to thrive on all the attention he was receiving in the national spotlight.  

To a large extent, this is a film about character assassination juxtaposed against a murderous assassination, where the impact of the first is a whole lot more damning than the second (where you actually have a day in court), which is a dangerous comment on a society that overlooks reality in order to exist in a self-induced fantasy, continually blaming the other guys for all of society’s woes, while refusing to look in the mirror and take any responsibility.  It has pretensions to Gus van Sant’s To Die For (1995), veering into the crazy psychopathic territory of Tuesday Weld in Pretty Poison (1968), as it plays with this seemingly fixated need for attention, where you’re willing to do anything to get it, which will leave at least some viewers literally refusing to be scammed and manipulated once again by Hollywood’s pretend version of reality.  It ends up being an exaggerated murder farce where the act of murder doesn’t remotely match the damage done by outright lies and misinformation produced by the made-up hypotheses of so-called experts in creating a whirlwind of mass hysteria generated by the media, usually in attack mode smearing someone’s character, for which they take no responsibility, hiding behind 1st amendment rights that it’s only freedom of speech, where people have the right to say anything they please.  Nick is caught up in an illusionary maze of deceit, a puzzle-like trap where he’s left trying to figure out why all this is happening to him and how he can escape.  Turning to an ace defense attorney Tanner Bolt (Tyler Perry) with an expertise in representing maligned offenders who are perceived as being the most vile and contemptible creatures on the planet, he slowly tries to gather some semblance of his life back as the noose is tightened around his neck by this continuing police investigation fed by malicious rumors.  Bolt delivers perhaps the sanest line in the film:  “You two are the most fucked up people I've ever met and I deal with fucked up people for a living.”  Reminiscent of Rolf de Heer’s ALEXANDRA’S PROJECT (2003), another film that turns the tables on an the idea of male idealization, this $61 million dollar Hollywood fiasco feels more like a B-movie where The Stepford Wives meets The Twilight Zone through a wretchedly overwrought Scarlett O’Hara style melodrama that veers into sci-fi territory where aliens are the species pretending to be human, as people have already lost all semblance of their humanity.  While this is obviously the work of a control freak who delights in conniving and manipulating the lives of others, where every film is a variation of PANIC ROOM (2002), Fincher has a reputation as being a perfectionist, where according to producer Ceán Chaffin, Fincher took, on average, as many as 50 takes for each scene, where it should also be pointed out that on the first day on the set, Ben Affleck changed the lens setting on the camera by the slightest degree, betting the crew Fincher wouldn’t notice, only to have Fincher take a look through the lens and exclaim, “Why does the camera look a little dim?” 

Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage
And then is heard no more. It is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury
Signifying nothing.

—Shakespeare’s Macbeth, Act 5, Scene 5, 1606

American Psycho

AMERICAN PSYCHO           B        

USA  Canada  (101 mi)  2000  ‘Scope  d:  Mary Harron

I have to return some videotapes.     —Patrick Bateman (Christian Bale)

A film that seems to have been inspired by both Ronald Reagan’s right-leaning seismic shift on the social consciousness of America and David Lynch’s LOST HIGHWAY (1997), both of which suggest near inexplicable psychotic ruptures.  Meet Patrick Bateman (Christian Bale), an anonymous man in a perfectly chosen, well-tailored suit working on Wall Street which is suddenly aflush with money in the late 80’s, given the green light by the Reagan administration where portfolios skyrocket through the roof.  In this competitive era, jealousies are bound to exist, as it’s each man for himself, yet each yearns to be the alpha male in the corporate world, which is seen as a soulless, empty universe of rampant consumerism and hedonism, all fighting to be the star player with the biggest office, the sexiest secretary, an open ended expense account, and the apartment with a giant picture window overlooking Central Park.  Bateman narrates his existential sense of detachment to this meaningless existence (“I simply am not there”), as he spends all his income on expensive clothes, fancy restaurants, and upscale bars as well as high end drugs, pornography and prostitutes, all in an attempt to fit in.  It’s as if he’s a stranger in a strange land, feeling completely alien to the world around him. Harron does an exquisite job with space, exaggerating the influence of exteriors and interiors to reveal a pervading sense of vacuousness flooding the screen, as the near mindless chatter signifies the extent to which nothing matters to these people except themselves.  There’s a defining sequence where the men compare business cards, examining each with the care and consideration as they might a fragile art object, each man wanting theirs to be the best, then growing downbeat and dejected when people prefer someone else’s.  It’s all about making a name for themselves, being the center of attention, being the person other people want to be.  

It starts with rude comments that are so over the top one actually wonders if they heard correctly, but Bateman’s inner thoughts begin seeping out loud, yet these coarse, vulgar thoughts reflect the bullying nature of a man who thinks everyone else is subservient to him.  But where this film veers into its own unique territory is when the things people sometimes think to themselves start happening onscreen.  With visions of the surreal, Bateman takes on psychopathic behavior by picking up prostitutes and becoming a sex phenom in bed, especially provocative when he looks in the mirror at himself as he is fucking two women.  Here and only here, in a kind of wish fulfillment universe, Bateman has thrust himself into the center of attention, where he’s the master of the universe.  All the men in Bateman’s world ever talk about sounds like magazine descriptions of the best food, the best dish, the most perfect restaurant, or the “in” place to be.  The use of music complements this hyperbole, as Bateman begins describing in meticulous detail, which may as well be a psychological indicator, the music he is about to play before his lurid sex scenes, which include Huey Lewis & the News singing “Hip to Be Square” Hip to be Square - American Psycho (3/12) Movie CLIP ... - YouTube (2:56), which leads to an ax murder of his chief business rival, or the overpraised but inescapably monotonous Phil Collins song “Sussudio” American Psycho: Funniest Sex Scene Ever - YouTube (6:23), something bound to have been heard incessantly on the Miami Vice TV show, but used here to beef up Bateman’s overhyped sense of masculinity and swagger. 

When Bateman starts going after naked women with chainsaws, we know he’s taken a dive into a dark void, which leads to still more elaborately staged, near comic book mentality sequences that simply blow out of proportion, as the guy is starting to believe he might be getting into trouble.  But this is the 80’s, an era of high deficits where no one takes any responsibility, where Reagan is seen on TV defending the Iran-Contra scandal, where his government publicly told the nation one thing while secretly performing other actions out of sight from the public eye, suggestions of a secret government that answers to no one and exists outside any democratic measures.  If the President can say one thing on TV, but then do what he wants offscreen, then why can’t normal citizens?  All roads lead to self-serving measures, until the excess baggage begins backing up with dead and mutilated bodies that have been stashed somewhere, and suddenly those occasionally hilarious private fantasies, where the schism between fantasy and reality becomes seamless after while, explode into something so damaging and brutal that he begins to believe he can no longer handle it alone.  This is a creepy and bizarre nightmare of Reaganomics, where this sterile existence is completely insulated and protected from the outside world by huge amounts of money and influence, remaining out of bounds to the normal citizen, yet it is still portrayed as that promised land at the end of the rainbow, where the American dream is seen as little more than selfish greed, envisioned here in a scathing social satire where everyone wants to worship at the altar of its all consuming powers.    

American Mary

AMERICAN MARY               D+   

Canada  (100 mi)  2012  d:  Jen and Sylvia Soska         Official site

Doesn’t everybody just love a good horror movie?  Well, that’s not exactly what this is, as instead it’s kind of a tongue-in-cheek stab at torture porn, a subgenre of one of the most hideously gruesome forms of sadistic horror, and one that seems to have little if any redeeming value.  Apparently some find this sort of thing entertaining, however, as evidenced by Eli Roth’s two HOSTEL (2005, 2007) movies, the first grossing ten times the initial budget, and the highly profitable SAW (2004) franchise, where the original was made for $1.2 million but grossed over $100 million dollars worldwide, churning out nearly one movie a year ever since, where the latest, SAW VII (2010), is a 3D effort.  While torture porn appeals to the basest form of crude and grotesque behavior, featuring explicit scenes of sadistic torture, dismemberment, and mutilation, where the gory action sequences are presented as freak-show sensationalism, the effects of watching this stuff is largely unknown, though one would think the mentally unstable should stay away.  Some films, like Rob Zombie’s THE DEVIL’S REJECTS (2005), initially thrown into the mix, probably don’t belong, as they pay homage to earlier 70’s era drive-in, grindhouse B-movies, representative of the golden age of exploitation, schlock films filled with buckets of blood and gore, where the melodramatic hysteria is met with equally over-the-top visualizations, all made for next to nothing, usually for satiric effect.  The Kuchar Brothers, for instance, were masters of the low budget aesthetic, working alongside 60’s underground legends Andy Warhol and Kenneth Anger, which eventually spawned John Waters and his outsiderist cult films of the 70’s, a director who expressed an equal amount of joy and influence from highbrow “art” films and sleazy exploitation films.  But the father of modern horror pictures is Dario Argento, who interestingly began his career as a screenwriter teamed up with Bernardo Bertolucci and Sergio Leone for the spaghetti western ONCE UPON A TIME IN THE WEST (1968) before venturing out on his own, where his claim to fame is giallo films combining high quality, art film production values with nudity, gore, and shocking horror, not the least of which might feature throat slashings or decapitations along with unusually stylish camerawork.  It’s the unflinching content of high production slasher or splatter films that establishes a connection to torture porn, where only snuff films remain an untapped exploitive resource. 

Unbelievably, even a snuff film was presented for the first time at the Cannes Film festival this year, according to Scott Roxborough and Patrick Brzeski from The Hollywood Reporter (Cannes: Ultra-Violence Peppers Competition Selection - The ...). 

Pushing the envelope furthest is Atrocity Exhibition, showing in the Short Film corner, which its director Ebadur Rahman has described as “Cannes’ first snuff film.” Says Rahman: “Cannes has been showing fake ‘extreme content’ for ages: Any film by Tarantino, Takeshi Miike, or Kim Ki Duk is at least as violent as mine. What’s different about Atrocity Exhibition is, I didn’t fake it.” Asked whether viewers might have to look away during screenings, Rahman says: “I would hope so.”

Not only has the SAW franchise legitimized torture porn, providing a large audience and a new avenue into horror films, always a lucrative movie business,  but South Korean filmmakers Park Chan-wook’s OLD BOY (2003) winning the Jury Prize at Cannes (a Tarantino favorite) and Kim Ki-duk’s Pieta (2012) winning the Best Film at the 2012 Venice Film Festival, all but give the genre the artistic seal of approval.  Not so fast, some may scream, as some parted company with Park Chan-wook’s next offering, SYMPATHY FOR LADY VENGEANCE (2005), where Cinema Scope and freelance writer Michael Sicinski writes an open letter of protest to New York Times critic Manohla Dargis in condemnation of the film (see reviews dated 9/15, 2005 Toronto International Film Festival), calling it “a repugnant piece of shit.”  This kind of outrage is a natural extension of the product, as it’s meant to be revolting, just as Mary Harron’s over-the-top use of surreal horror in American Psycho (2000), something this slightly resembles, is meant to be outrageous, which brings us to Canada’s the Soska sisters, Sylvia and Jen, interviewed here by The Guardian’s Steve Rose (Guardian: Soska Sisters):    

Horror was a natural direction for the Soskas. As kids, they'd lurk in the horror section of the video store looking at the backs of the boxes, they say. "Mom eventually caved in and let us watch Poltergeist when we were 10," says Sylvia. "We were like, 'We can handle it mom.' Then bedtime came and we were scared… fucking… shitless. And my mother did something that would forever change the way we look at horror movies. She sat Jen and me down and explained what we had actually seen. She explained the director, the actors, the prosthetics, the sets, everything. And she told us how these were very talented artists who collaborated with the intention of scaring the audience. We were like, 'Wait a minute. It can be your job to scare people for a living?'"

The eventual film-making course didn't go well, though. They became so disillusioned that their graduation project was a fake trailer, partly inspired by Tarantino and Rodriguez's Grindhouse and partly by the film school's list of things not to put in a graduation movie. "Necrophilia, bestiality, vomiting… we put in everything we could," says Jen. "Half the audience walked out, and the other half was laughing so hard you couldn't hear the intentionally disgusting language."

Horror tends to be an exclusively all-male domain, where women are used as fetishistic objects to scare out of their wits, from Fay Wray in KING KONG (1933) to Jamie Lee Curtis in HALLOWEEN (1978), where scantily clad girls are seen staying in a secluded cabin in the woods from I SPIT ON YOUR GRAVE (1978) to THE CABIN IN THE WOODS (2011), but there are notable exceptions, such as Takashi Miike’s AUDITION (1999) where the roles are reversed.  AMERICAN MARY will not be for everyone, as it’s graphically disturbing throughout, but it is a horror film with a uniquely female perspective.  Much like Tarantino, the Soska sisters not only have an admiration for the horror genre, but a certain reverence for its form, where the film is basically a series of horror set pieces filled with twisted and strangely unlikable characters.  Seen almost entirely through the impressionable eyes of Katharine Isabelle as Mary (talk about a working actress, IMDb lists 10 movies made after this one with another four either filming or in post production), an attractive young medical student who is having trouble making ends meet, painting a much rosier picture to her Hungarian grandmother on the phone, but despite getting harassed by an over-controlling professor, even though she’s the best and most promising student in class, she needs to make money fast.  So she answers an ad for what she thinks is a dancer at a strip club, but due to her meticulously detailed resumé that indicates she’s in medical school, the sleazy owner Billy (Antonio Cupo) pays $5000 cash up front and sucks her into an under-the-table, highly specialized offer of stitching up mutilated bodies that have been pulverized and left for dead from vicious beatings.  Afterwards, she immediately starts receiving calls from the Diane Arbus world of the bizarre requesting “extreme body modification.” While Mary is a professed innocent to this looming underworld of desired body disfigurement and mutilation, where despite the unpleasantness associated with the often gruesome task, the lucrative offers are extremely generous, making it difficult to turn down. 

The film’s saving grace is the exaggerated tone throughout, something of a satirical spoof, where Mary has an absurdly comic dialogue with many of her patients, some of whom feel more like a childlike collection of dolls or specimens than human beings, where it’s as if her subconscious has a voice through her exotic bodywork, giving her a titillating sense of empowerment.  Dressed in skimpy outfits, stalkings and stilleto’s, she’s always dressed for the male idealization, as if Xena the Warrior Princess has suddenly been transformed into someone’s idea of a male sexual fantasy, where working out of her own apartment, she becomes an underground cult sensation, dropping out of medical school and maintaining a thriving practice, where she quickly picks up the affectionate online nickname “Bloody Mary.”  The Soska sisters themselves appear onscreen as a pair of batshit crazy sisters that surgically wish to exchange arms with one another, so there are obviously other issues at play here, all of them disturbing, including an underlying thread throughout of nonchalant sadism, becoming an anatomically precise horror show of disfigurement.  Delving into SAW territory, Mary even holds her professor captive (as it was after all he who crossed the line), as she experiments with particularly difficult procedures on him just for practice, leaving him something of a whimpering human stump.  Where the film does tread new ground, expressed with demented relish, is portraying a highly distinctive, feminist sense of controlling one’s own body image while also adding, just for good measure, a righteous sense of feminist anger and revenge, going where no one has gone before, so to speak, as it has the desired effect the sisters are looking for, where much of what we see is pretty disgusting.  The heavily artistic production design might actually be called outlaw biker fantasy porn, as biker guys get off on drinking heavily, naked girls, and beating the crap out of people, and here they get to watch their fantasy sweetheart stitch their mangled victims back together again, where every last detail is explicitly prohibited outlaw behavior.  While the underlying comic element may be subversive, there were no laughs heard in the theater, as the experience is meant to be nauseating and revolting.  This may be highly appealing for deviants of all kinds, or people who enjoy watching sadistic behavior for their theatrical entertainment, but there remains an open question whether this graphically grotesque material adds anything significant to the world of cinema.