GONE GIRL: The Film Babble Blog Review

Opening today at a multiplex near you...

GONE GIRL (Dir. David Fincher, 2014)

David Fincher’s adaptation of Gillian Flynn’s bestselling novel is a great, gripping piece of cinema – one of the year’s best. It’s an immaculately crafted thriller that will throw you for many loops throughout its twisty narrative, while at the same time it provides a chilling commentary on the troubling impact of public perception, and how matrimony can drive one mad.

Ben Affleck, in perhaps his most layered performance, plays Nick Dunne, who finds on the morning of his fifth wedding anniversary that his beautiful blonde Amy (Rosamund Pike) is missing, and there’s a broken glass table and traces of blood around the house to suggest foul play.

Affleck calls the cops, and a pair of detectives, Kim Dickens (THE BLIND SIDE, Treme) and Patrick Fugit (ALMOST FAMOUS), begin investigating the disappearance. Through flashbacks we see the young couple in their early courtship as young idealistic magazine writers that are “so cute I want to punch us in the face,” as Pike puts it.

We learn that after the recession left them both jobless, the married couple moved to Affleck’s hometown of North Carthage, Missouri to help take care of his dying mother. Affleck opens a local bar with his twin sister (Carrie Coon) with Pike’s trust fund money, and teaches community college, while unhappy housewife Pike, heard in voiceover, details the deterioration of their marriage in her diary.

Led by Missi Pyle as a Nancy Grace-style cable TV pundit, the media scrutinize Affleck and Pike’s relationship, with suspicions from all quarters coming in that he’s responsible for her death, even though there’s been no body found.

There’s so many tasty twists that it would be wrong to go any deeper into the ins and outs of the plot, I’ll just say that halfway through this film’s two and a half hour running time you’ll get the first of several satisfying shockers.

As somebody who has been hated in real life (see: GIGLI), Affleck nails his part as the “a corn-fed, salt-of-the-earth Missouri boy” who’s grown cynical with his deer-in-the-headlights reaction to cameras at the first press conference and his nervousness towards the crowd at a candlelight vigil are dead-on. He pulls off the attempts to take control of the situation with mighty aplomb as well.

Pike, who should be a household name after her sharply focused work here, gives us a character with whom we initially trust and sympathize, but the more we learn, the less we like.

But as Affleck and Pike are perfectly cast, so are Tyler Perry (yes, that Tyler Perry) as a slick Johnny Cochran-ish lawyer, Neil Patrick Harris as a creepy ex-boyfriend of Pike’s, and Casey Wilson (SNL, Happy Endings) as a ditzy neighbor claiming to be Pike’s best friend, and David Clennon and Lisa Barnes as Pike’s rich parents who had co-authored a series of childrens’ books inspired by their daughter (“Amazing Amy”).

Author Flynn has refashioned her novel into the film’s sprawling yet concise screenplay, which is laced with wicked wit, as well as some grotesque touches that moviegoers won’t soon forget. Fincher’s procedural skills have been well honed in films such as SE7EN and ZODIAC, and they’re on vivid and immersive display here.

GONE GIRL is Fincher’s best film since 2010’s THE SOCIAL NETWORK (his 2011 version of THE GIRL WITH THE DRAGO TATTOO wasn’t bad; just a bit redundant, since the Swedish original pretty much covered it), and it’s the most solid, intelligent thriller I’ve seen in years.

Its haunting ending had me trembling, and thinking, even though I know my marriage (coincidentally also at the five year mark) is on much better ground than theirs, that I should better watch my step.

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Crammed With Killer Comedy, THE WORLD'S END Is A Funny As Hell Finale To The Cornetto Trilogy

Now playing at a theater near you:

THE WORLD'S END (Dir. Edgar Wright, 2013)

The third installment in Simon Pegg and Edgar Wright's Cornetto Trilogy is finally here and it's fuckin' fantastic!

For those who don't know, the series, which includes the 2004 zombie rom com SHAWN OF THE DEAD, and the 2007 action movie satire HOT FUZZ is called such because of a connection to the Cornetto ice cream brand that appears in each film.

At first glance, this new entry may look a lot like a British version of this summer's THIS IS THE END, the raunchy apocalyptic Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg comedy.

But here, the cast, made up of Pegg, Nick Frost, Paddy Constadine, Martin Freeman, and Eddie Marsan, aren't playing themselves (that is, exaggerated caricatures of their personas), and the backdrop isn't that of Biblical rapture; it's an alien invasion that the blokes uncover while on a pub crawl in their home town of Newton Haven, England.

Pegg, as a 40something n'er-do-well alcoholic who never grew up (he still wears the same Sisters of Mercy t-shirt and black trenchcoat he wore as a teenager), rounds up his old gang to again attempt the “Gold Mile” crawl of 12 pubs that they never completed two decades ago.

Pegg's former pals have all moved on into responsible adulthood and roll their eyes at the idea, yet they still join in, mainly because Pegg plays the sympathy card of his mother's recent passing.

Many pints are consumed by the group, except by the teetotaling Frost who orders water to Pegg's chagrin (“A man of your legendary prowess drinking fucking rain! It's like a lion eating Hummus.”), as they make their way from pub to pub, but they find that Thomas Wolfe was right about not being able to go home again.

Pub culture has been devoured by chains making the establishments all look alike, the aging bartenders don't recognize “the return of the prodigal sons” (as Pegg puts it), and, oh yeah, it appears that many of the townfolk have been replaced with robots.

Another similarity to THIS IS THE END is that THE WORLD'S END (the title comes from the name of the last pub on the crawl) is crammed with killer comedy.

Ultra comical fight scenes, rapid fire one-liners, and sight gags all hit their marks, while the characters' individual dilemmas - Constadine pines for Freeman's sister Rosamund Pike, Frost reveals his wife has left him, Marsan deals with running into a former schoolmate who bullied him, while Pegg is only concerned with partying (no matter what danger surrounds the fellows, Pegg's always pouring himself another pint) - don't get short shrift in the mist of all the silly sci-fi-tinged chaos.

The second in the trilogy, HOT FUZZ, had a juicy extended cameo by former 007 Timothy Dalton, but this tops it by having a better known Bond on hand: Pierce Brosnan as the band of blokes' former professor.

I love how the film never let ups or drags. Director Wright and lead protagonist Pegg, who co-wrote the screenplay as they did for SHAWN and HOT FUZZ, provide an infectious energy, which the rest of the ensemble is entirely up to the task of. It had everything I wanted from it: tons of solid laughs, likable relatable characters, and satisfying story beats all wrapped up together in a package that's as witty as it is rowdy.

THE WORLD'S END is a fitting, funny as Hell, end to a what will surely come to be known as a classic comedy trilogy. A pint and a cone of Cornetto ice cream would be ideal to consume while viewing it for sure, but the movie is incredibly filling all by itself.

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Tom Cruise Confidently Strides Through Another Action Thriller Formula In JACK REACHER

Opening today at a multiplex near you: 

JACK REACHER (Dir. Christopher McQuarrie, 2012) 

As the tough as nails title character, Tom Cruise confidently strides through this overly familiar yet still solid action thriller formula.

Based on Lee Child’s 2005 bestseller “One Shot,” one of 17 novels featuring the army trained badass Jack Reacher, Christopher McQuarrie’s third film as director, concerns Cruise investigating what, at first, appears to be the random daylight killing of 5 people by a mysterious military sniper at PNC Park in downtown Pittsburgh.

“Get Jack Reacher!” the suspected shooter (Joseph Sikora) writes on a pad instead of confessing right before slipping into a coma, and before you know it, the suspect’s Defense Attorney (the Disney doe-eyed Rosamund Pike) is in Cruise’s company, as they both try to uncover the truth about the killings.

Cruise’s character, a self described drifter living off the grid, arouses suspicion from lead detective (David Oyelowo) and district attorney (Richard Jenkins), who happens to be Pike’s father.

While Pike goes to talk to the families of the victims, Cruise starts sniffing out a conspiracy, especially after being targeted by some thugs in a bar who were paid to put him down. The unflinching Cruise, puts them all down (except for the two that ran), of course, in a street-set fight scene that shows off the characters’ skills. Pretty standard stuff, we’ve seen lots of times before, but still entertaining in a tongue-in-cheek way.

Better is a brutally funny fight set in a tiny skuzzy bathroom, in which Cruise battles a couple of beefy boneheads wielding a baseball bat and a crowbar, but as amusing as this is, it’s a typical example of how the odds are always in our hero’s favor.

Cruise’s chief adversary is the almost as confident Jai Courtney, who’s the henchman of sorts to Werner Herzog, yes that Werner Herzog - the acclaimed German filmmaker, as the one-eyed, one fingered villain (definitely one of the better elements here), so we know exactly who’ll Cruise will have to face down in the construction site climax.

In the midst of the finale, in which Cruise is aided by the grizzled wise-cracking Robert Duvall as the owner of a nearby gun range (their first film together since DAYS OF THUNDER), I had more vivid feelings of déjà vu that I had experienced before in a movie. Its ultra derivative third act was so by-the-numbers, that I swore every single second has been done to death, right down to the dialog and deaths of the bad guys.

Director McQuarrie, who co-wrote VALKRIE also starring Cruise, is working from an established source, but he’s outfitted it to be just another standard movie star action vehicle. It’s got more class and style, largely due to Caleb Deschanel’s gritty yet sleek cinematography, than many of the recent offerings of the genre (the BOURNE re-boot, TAKEN 2, JOHN CARTER, et al), but it never reaches the heights of Sam Mendes excellent 007 entry SKYFALL, my choice for best action film of 2012. 

However, if you’re a fan of Cruise, it’s a must see. Now that it seems criticism of his crazy couch jumping, and scientology silliness, has faded, the man stands tall (yes, I know how short he actually is) as a major presence in the movies. 

As it was in last year’s far superior MISSION IMPOSSIBLE: GHOST PROTOCOL, it’s again a blast to go along on a ride with him, even through such a cookie-cutter crowd pleaser like this.

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