Hacker Cinema
Gone Girl
2014 · Film · 149 min
Directed by David Fincher
With his wife's disappearance having become the focus of an intense media circus, a man sees the spotlight turned on him when it's suspected that he may not be innocent.
7 positive14 neutralfrom 21 commenters
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21 comments on Hacker News
Then maybe Boîte Noire https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Box_(2021_film)
or
Das Leben der Anderen https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Lives_of_Others
I can't think of many contemporary American films that exactly fit the bill (which I interpret as: enthralling, everyday dialogue, without a pop singer's voice on the soundtrack competing for attention, or production like a music video).
Maybe Gone Girl, or Marriage Story, or something.
> Five months before Monterrosa was killed, the V.P.O.A. had replaced its president, Detective Mat Mustard, who had run the union for ten years. Mustard was notorious in Vallejo for the investigation he led into the kidnapping of a woman named Denise Huskins, in 2015. Someone broke into the house where she and her boyfriend were sleeping, blindfolded and drugged them, and put her in the trunk of a car. When the boyfriend reported the crime, Mustard suspected that he had killed Huskins and invented the kidnapping story. At the police station, the boyfriend said, officers dressed him in jail clothes, then Mustard and others interrogated him for eighteen hours, calling him a murderer. Huskins, who was being held a hundred and sixty miles away, was raped repeatedly. After she was released, the Vallejo police publicly accused her and her boyfriend of faking the kidnapping, comparing the situation to the movie “Gone Girl.” The police threatened to press charges against the couple, and after the rapist e-mailed the San Francisco Chronicle, confessing to the kidnapping, the police accused Huskins and her boyfriend of writing the e-mail. Soon, the rapist was arrested in South Lake Tahoe, after trying to repeat the crime. Even then, the Vallejo police insisted that Huskins and her boyfriend were lying. The couple sued Mustard and the city, eventually winning a $2.5-million settlement. In a show of defiance, the police department named Mustard officer of the year.
Jesus Christ. Besides being absolutely vile, apparently just complete, very expensive incompetence from top to bottom.
I definitely did not imply there should be a moral imperative.
Moroever, the 'making the audience contemplate her culpability' in having attacked a man before she was hit, is definitely the 'verbotten' form of depiction, the reason being too many people would feel that would somehow justify domestic violence.
This is the essence of 'what cannot be put on screen' - ideas that are counter narrative or don't fit nicely.
A man hitting a woman is tricky, but a man hitting a woman who is harrassing him is much worse because it might seem to imply the 'guy had a good reason to hit her', even if that 'implication' isn't necessarily obvious, lot of people would freak out anyhow.
In 'Gone Girl' the film, you can see the woman was the villain, making 'fake claims' of being raped etc. - this was met with severe blowback, because some people didn't want to see the depiction (and therefore possible justification of the narrative) of woman lying abour rape. The 'social justice imperative' is to 'believe women' and so from their view, it's not something they want on the big screen. The blow back is strong enough that it pushes producers and writers away from those kinds of things. Nobody in the industry wants to be see as 'that guy' aka that 'guy' who may secrety be a 'trump guy' etc..
Unlesss they have a lot of power and people give them the benefit of the doubt, aka Scorsese.
We have this kind of censorship in India as well, even the in weirdly innocous places. In James Bond movies, and I think Gone Girl as well, scenes were by zooming into character's faces or just straight cuts.
This is probably the only reason I maintain a US iTunes accounts (used to have to buy gift cards from sketchy sites online to keep this going, but I recently discovered that my Indian Amex card works fine with a US address).
Also trivia for those who are wondering how cuts are made, at least for cinema content: all video and audio assets are usually sent to theatres in full, but there's an XML file called the CPL (composition playlist) that specifies which file is played from which to which frame / timestamp in what sequence. Pure cuts or audio censorship can be handled by just adding an entry to skip the relevant frames or timestamp, or by specifying a censor beep as the audio track for a particular time range.
https://cinepedia.com/packaging/composition/
Plenty of recent movies do that. Sorting by release date: The Father, Joker, Parasite, Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri, Hacksaw Ridge, Room, Gone Girl, Whiplash, Prisoners, 12 Years a Slave, Django Unchained.
* https://www.imdb.com/chart/top/?sort=us,desc
And that's just going back ten years.
Movies: - 12 angry men - Whiplash - Prestige - American Beauty - The Thing - V for Vendetta - The Grand Budapest Hotel - Gone Girl - Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri - Parasite - ... Tarantino or Scorsese movies
Anime: - Howl's Moving Castle - Spirited Away
Not a movie but both great series: - Love, Death & Robots - Black Mirror
Sociopaths fascinate me.
I'm sure that defense could work. It's even moderately working in this very thread.
I see that she's now married to a rich guy and has a child. You could made a Gone Girl 2 movie based on her life.
Movies in the 90s and early 2000's were much better than the garbage we get today.
From T2, to Jurassic Park, to the Matrix, Lord of the Rings, Pulp Fiction, Eyes Wide Shut, Fight Club, Cruel Intentions, Mean Girls, 5th Element, Independence Day, etc.. etc..
Something happened after 2007-2008, perhaps it was the shift to digital, where filmmakers started relying more and more on special effects, and less on good acting and storytelling.
The first Iron Man and Avengers were great, but then the formula got very repetitive. None of the DC movies were good, Fast and the Furious are the same story on repeat, both comedies and romantic movies became dumber/more simplistic etc.. etc..
Movies became more like a circus show of forgettable digital effects and less about a good story that teaches something or leaves an impression.
I think streaming might be part of the problem (just lots of churn of a large quantity of low quality movies), but also the box industry started revolving too much around few large franchises, and everything else became a low budget niche.
I think there were still few good movies (Interstellar, Gone Girl, Midsommar, and Parasite), but still much fewer than the previous generation (91-2007), which I think it was a golden time for the movies.
I do like them both very much, and find both incredibly talented. Sorry if my comment came of as negative towards them. (But I also like Marvel movies, for what it's worth.) Just wanted to point out Fincher is not art cinema as the top comment suggested. (And Spielberg is not just family friendly subjects either.)
I don't know about "multiplex pleaser" - Gone Girl, Finchers previous movie, "topped the box office for two consecutive weekends" according to Wikipedia.
True originality will be so different that barely anyone will like it.
Evolution is the way to go.
I'm an aspiring writer and when a random internet person comments on my short stories, they're focused on "oh it is like X Y" "oh it is like Z movie"
They're obsessed with finding which story it relates to rather than enjoying the story (and it isn't like I'm a pathetic writer)
I'm not saying I'm the best writers ever, but why I don't like such morons is that they don't have any otger constructive criticism like "your character sucked ass" or "dogs don't fall in love with cows"
No. Their entire problem is "oh I saw a movie like this and that's why this is a shitty story"
These morons fail to realise that LoTR derives heavily from Mythology, GoT is literally a fiction version of War of Roses
But these snobs will love and swear by LoTR because "that's original" and other books are "copy cats"
The idea doesn't matter, execution does.
Sure Gone Girl came first but girl on the train is also a good book. It isn't "copy cat" just because it has a untrustworthy narrator. Gone girl wasn't the first one to have untrustworthy narrator, I think
If friend were to say that, I'd have them watch "Gone Girl"
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt2267998/
There were like 100 major-publisher books that clearly modeled their title, if nothing else, on Gone Girl in the years after it came out. Didn't see that with 50 Shades. Both got a movie. Gone Girl seemed to have wider and more lasting cultural impact outside its immediate readership, as more than a joke or rapidly-fading reference.
For the record I haven't read either nor seen their movies, but I see the influence of Gone Girl around way more than I see 50 Shades.
Another entirely valid reason is escapism. The world can be a really crappy place. I can say the certain movies/shows have absolutely helped me through some bad times. I've got terminal cancer, sometimes the only way you can really escape the constant malaise of having to forcibly work towards another day is by borrowing strength from the characters on screen.
As to what you're saying about studying the shows I do that too. Gone Girl is a movie that realistically is pretty easy to figure out the twist. But the way that it's written and acted is stunningly wonderful. It's rare to see solid stories elevated.
Comedians have always been and will always be about holding a mirror to society and pointing out the flaws in a way that makes people realise societies flaws, but make the solutions seem comically trivial. I'd wager it's a highly undervalued skill.
These days it seems movie making is about taking the least risk. Most if not all the big budget flicks are either fantasy/scifi or reboots of old franchises or superhero movies or a combination of them. There seems to be a lack of a tight script and good storytelling. The last movie which was not a marvel/dino/superhero genre and enticed me to watch in the theatre was "gone girl". I wish we see more of those movies again.
Not just encoding, but it also depends on a number of things like color depth, chroma subsampling (4:2:2), and so on. It's not uncommon for a single film to approach half a petabyte of raw in a digital world with a "typical" setup (4:2:2, ProRes maybe, 10-bit, etc). To use an example, I think I read somewhere that Gone Girl shot a few hundred TB for a technically straightforward film. Some cameras, particularly when you start getting to digital cinema (which is > "4K"), can shoot as much as a terabyte and a half per hour. There are 8K sensors in common availability now; RED has one that can shoot 75fps 8K at 2.4:1, which I don't even want to calculate, but that I know for a fact it can't write to its own storage at native bitrate. Productions eat storage these days and moving that data around is a challenge.
Hint, hint, to clever founders: hard drives in Hollywood.
I haven't seen this yet, but for anyone that's interested: Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross (Nine Inch Nails, Social Network, Gone Girl, Girl w/ the Dragon Tattoo, and more) provide the score for this film.
Absolutely. Another anecdote: I just recently watched Gone Girl about two days after finishing the book. At this point I have no idea if I liked the movie or not - basically my brain was just comparing and contrasting story points and dialog from each. I wasn't really experiencing the movie.
In my case I didn't bother rating it because it A) didn't seem fair, and B) rating stuff with any more precision than "like/didn't like" seems really pointless to me.
I didn't read the article but by reading your comment, The movie "Gone Girl" comes to my mind.
> "Most people are just looking for some simple thrills"
This is patently untrue. Two of the top films in theaters right now are Interstellar and Gone Girl, neither of which can reasonably fit under the umbrella of "simple thrills". In fact Gone Girl has been widely described as a very difficult film to watch in terms of its emotional impact on its audience - suffice it to say the appreciation of that film goes above and beyond mere entertainment, yet both are "popular art" in the sense that they are widely consumed by the mainstream.
The general public is capable of a substantial amount of artistic understanding, and there are more experts out there than you acknowledge. Appreciation of different types, genres, and subgenres of art change over time as a reflection of culture.
One good modern example of this is the comic book movie - comic books have unique thematic, structural, and aesthetic elements to them that were previously the exclusive territory of comic book nerds. In recent years this has gone spectacularly mainstream - and hundreds of millions of people now better understand stuff that used to be pretty inscrutable.
All art exist in a spectrum between the novice and the expert, mainstream society is quite expert at some (see: music, cinema) but not currently practiced in others (see: postmodernism). To boil the artistic sensibilities of the mainstream down to "simple thrills" is not only grossly cynical, it's grossly incorrect.
"Popular art" is not mere entertainment - and it has never been, and has always been a reflection of the time and place in which it's created. Captain America - popular right now - was a nationalistic symbol created during the midst of WW2 when it was felt that such a symbol be needed. The utopian portrayal of the future in the original Star Trek attracted viewers as an optimistic opposite to the Cold War. Heck, the conflict between the Federation and the Klingons is a direct analogy between the USA and the USSR (and naturally, the Federation always prevails).
And these art forms evolve - just this year we've had two massively profitable films between the X-Men and Captain America where the US government was portrayed as openly malevolent, and one of them directly addressed governmental spying. These works transparently reflect the times in which they were made. With the increasing media attention on drone strikes worldwide, even the RoboCop remake wasn't spared - the movie went from a reflection of 1980s crime anxiety to a reflection of 2010s morality re: drone strikes.
This isn't just movies either - Tupac built a huge mainstream career and long-standing legacy on works that plainly and openly commented on crime, race, and equality in the context of 1990s America. He's far from the only one - the general public is much more capable of expert artistic appreciation than you give them credit.
People seek commentary, understanding, belonging, and even escape from the world and times in which they live, and popular art has provided this, and in this way they are not substitutable. The notion that people can or should subsist on past art exclusively is plainly false, as is the basis assumption that "popular art" is merely entertainment.
Of particular interest:
[Gone Girl] now becomes the first major feature to have been edited using Adobe Premiere Pro CC. Industry insiders consider this Adobe’s Cold Mountain moment. That refers to when Walter Murch used an early version of Apple Final Cut Pro to edit the film Cold Mountain, instantly raising the application’s awareness among the editing community as a viable tool for long-form post production. Now it’s Adobe’s turn.
Incidentally, Gone Girl is also one of the best movies I've seen recently: http://jakeseliger.com/2014/10/05/thoughts-on-the-movie-gone-girl-by-david-fincher/
Am I the only one with the feeling like i'm reading the "diary" of Amy Dunne, in Gone Girl? Like i'm in the middle of the movie, and the plot could tip either way.