Daily Archives: March 5, 2015

Gone Girl

Movies

gone girl

I have such mixed feelings on Gone Girl. In order to get into them, this is going to be rather spoiler rich review.

There’s nothing to say about the technical mastery (director David Fincher) and quality acting in this movie. This is all about the content. Nick Dunne (Ben Afleck) comes home one average day to the glass coffee table in the living room flipped over. His wife, Amy (Rosamund Pike) isn’t there, but all her stuff is. He saw her that morning and alarmed at the scene, calls the police right away.

Amy is missing. Her parents fly into town, hotlines are set up, candle light vigils are started, police and volunteers search for her. Amy is faux famous, her parents use her name, likeness and life as the source of an incredibly popular children’s book series. It isn’t long before the story goes national. Then the police start finding evidence…

This evidence points to Nick being the murder. Blood splatters on kitchen walls, a massive blood pool on the kitchen floor poorly cleaned, a diary, a mistress, his temper flare ups. Nick seems to be telling a lot of lies, it doesn’t look good for him. Part of the Gone Girl story is the power of the media. Once they decide Nick is guilty, he works hard with his lawyer to turn the public opinion around on him. That’s  a tall order that requires a lot of coaching (I like the Nancy Grace doppelganger. Them using each other at the end is very true and telling of news stations today).

Gone Girl has a few hooks. It starts off as this missing person story and it seems to be pretty straight forward. Amy narrates quite a bit of the story, as if she’s talking from the grave. But things seem odd, the pieces of the puzzle are bent a bit. You question if Nick did it, the treasure hunt she has him on for their anniversary is really weird. Then it’s revealed that Amy has set him up. She goes from sympathetic narrator to diabolical sociopath.

Amy’s set up this really clever murder plot to get revenge on her cheating husband. She’s furious at all the time she’s wasted on him. For awhile it looks like she has all the bases covered, down to going to the extreme of killing herself to get him on death row. Turns out, she’s not as smart as she thinks she is. She screws up and has to come up with a contingency plan on the fly.

Up until this point, Gone Girl is really great. All this stuff is unfolding in front of you, and you switch sides on who to hate a few times. It’s a great detective/mystery plot that would do Batman proud. Once that first hook releases, you’re on Nick’s side for the rest of the movie. Watching him and his sister put things together is great. Seeing Amy screw up is so satisfying. She’s so arrogant she never thought her plan wouldn’t work.

Now, my problem comes with what she does to salvage her plan. The first half of the movie is crazy and dark. Then it goes over the deep end. You think everything up to that point was twisted, but that’s just the tip of the lithium infused iceberg. She frames an old flame for her disappearance. This opens up so many variables for her to get caught, that it’s unbelievable (the treasure hunt clues are pretty damning alone and the tons of surveillance footage at his house). It all boils down to the authorities not following up on anything because they completely buy her story from the get go. It’s a sensitive road to walk for sure, but Detective Rhonda Boney raises all sorts of good points and they all give her the immediate stink eye. The scenes with just Amy and Nick when she gets back is the stuff of nightmares, it’s so messed up.

Writing that just made me realize what really bothers me. Amy turns out to be The Joker and Batman never shows up to make her pay for her crimes (Batfleck pun not intended). It is a successful movie though. It accomplishes what it intended to do, but boy do you feel gross at the end of it.

Justified S6E6

TV

Alive Day

Somehow I missed recapping episode 6 the week it aired, so let me fill the void real quick.

Raylan swings by Boyd and Ava’s home to inquire about the where abouts of Dewey, something Boyd isn’t too keen on answering. He tells Raylan to go bug Avery about it and Raylan leaves without getting anything that can help him. He does bug Boyd with his presence though, he doesn’t like Raylan around Ava alone. He gets Earl to babysit her.

We get to hear a bit about Ava’s father and her past from her Uncle Zachariah in a nice conversation on the front porch before he goes off to the mine with Boyd. Knowing full well that Zach is about as shady as they come (and the bad blood between him and Boyd) she talks to Boyd about if he can really trust him. Boyd is confident he can, but later he nearly falls to his death in the mine. Zach helps him up and convinces Boyd to take the rest of the day off after the near death experience. With Boyd gone, Pig notices that it looks like the planks Boyd fell through were cut, not rotted out. With Zach’s trap exposed, he shoves Pig down the hole head first and yells for Carl to come to help.

Onto the side story. Avery proposes to Hale and asks her if she was the snitch that got him and her late husband arrest years ago. She denies it. She later tells Duffy about it and he asks her the same question. She denies it. The plan to kill Avery still goes ahead (Hale is looking forward to it). Art, board with being sidelined at home pokes around the office to get info on who the informant was in that Hale case. It’s not known for sure, but Hale’s name sure does come up a lot.

The big run for this episode was the fallout from Choo Choo killing Calhoun. It turns out that Avery’s mercs, ” know killing, but they don’t know crime.” These idiots did the bare minimum at hiding the murder. Calhoun’s body was quickly discovered with knuckle marks on his temple and Raylan’s business card on his person. This points them directly to Avery and Choo Choo. Ty and Seabass have tried to hide this info from Avery, so when Raylan shows up at the pizza place, Avery rightfully plays dumb about the news. Ty has a lot of explaining to do when Raylan leaves.

Pissed that they have another body on their hands due to ineptitude, Avery wants Choo Choo finished. Ty pleads his case, but when he gets a phone call from Choo about not killing Chalhoun’s girl, Caprice, he realizes Avery is right. Choo Choo is all liability. My favorite new character this season has made too many mistakes and everyone pays for it. Raylan and Tim followed the mercs to Choo Choo in the woods who has Caprice tied to a tree. To his credit, Choo argues as best as he can to keep her alive. “She shouldn’t have to die for my mistake.” When Raylan and Tim pop into the conversation, things go south real quick. One merc is shot and killed, Choo Choo gets hit multiple times and flees and Ty gets one in the gut and manages to escape too. Few shows do shootouts as well as Justified.

With all these guys in the wind, Avery has some serious issues on his hands and he doesn’t even know about the Hale/Duffy/Boyd plan.

At the very end, Ellistin Limehouse gives Boyd a call. He drops a dime on Ava as a “good faith gesture.” The cat is out of the bag, Boyd is living with a snitch.

Justified S6E7

TV

The Hunt

This week we got to see Raylan take a break from the case (a very rare occasion). He puts in some quality time in with Winona and his baby girl for the first time in months. Seeing Raylan carrying around a baby instead of a gun is something we never get to see. It brought out a different side to him…for once it looked like he’s actually thinking about his future. It’s something that Winona has been thinking about too and before he goes back to chasing Boyd and what’s left of Avery’s squad of hired guns, confesses that she misses him being in her life. She wants to give their life together another shot. It looked like Raylan thought this was a pretty good idea.

With Raylan’s domestic life on the upswing, Ty Walker is fighting to stay alive and keep from getting caught and after Avery convinced Seabass to leave him in wind, he really is on his own now. Ty makes some military moves, throwing a data trail away from him to keep the feds away and patches himself up in a bathroom as best as he can. But a busted car puts him back on the map and with two more bodies on his wrap sheet. It doesn’t look like Ty has much longer.

Zachariah, still down in the mine, did his best to keep Carl from calling Boyd about the “accident.” It didn’t exactly work, but I think Zach is still in good shape. He should be able to sell the “loose ground” story to Boyd without making him suspicious and come up with a new way to kill him. Time isn’t on his side though and Carl’s days are probably numbered too.

After receiving the tip of Ava’s movements, Boyd gets Ava alone in the woods. Really reminded me of The Sopranos as we (and Ava) were waiting for Boyd to pull the trigger from the moment he told her they were going to the family’s cabin. She’s on pins and needles the whole trip and he wakes her up before the sun comes up to go hunting. That doesn’t end well for many people (on TV and movies anyway).

Finally, it all comes up. Ava confesses and Boyd actually takes it pretty well. While Boyd has done a lot of terrible things, he always manages to keep his wits about him so he doesn’t do anything rash and stupid. Ava does have a good mark on him though, he completely left her in lurch when she was in prison. Their bond and loyalty together took a major hit. Acknowledging that, he had to know if she really betrayed him. Seeing Raylan alone in their house with her made him angrier than finding out she was a CI. When Ava tells him they didn’t sleep together, he;s relieved. He finds solace knowing that she is still his girl, he still has someone to turn to in this world. With that list getting smaller and smaller, that’s really important for Boyd.