Gone Girl...

Seeing Gone Girl has blasted my cinematic psyche into the stratosphere. I've seen it three times already and the third time was with my housemates and another friend. We had a long conversation about it, and the friend raised an interesting issue regarding misogyny. I think it's a simplistic way of looking at something that is clearly using audience perception of the world against that very same audience to make a statement about how people react based on their own worldviews, and how we try and relate to each other through tropes and cliches rather than honesty. It's a scathing indictment of mass media and the culture it's created in all of us who watch MSNBC, CNN, Fox News, scroll through facebook and twitter reacting to surfaces of things rather than understanding something through context, which can only come by actually delving into the subject matter yourself and taking a thousand foot view of the situation. Gone Girl is like a Rorschach test of the psyche. It's a brilliant cinematic molotov cocktail that takes the hyper aware audience expectation of the modern era of know-everything-see-everything-googl'ing and uses it as a mirror to said audience, thrilling and chilling at the same time. Only David Fincher could take what is admittedly trashy, soap-opera, low brow subject matter and elevate it to high brow art through masterful, virtuoso technique. My favorite films are ones that take lurid, pulpy, genre material and mix it with social commentary to make a point that couldn't be made otherwise. The best films do it. From Psycho to Dirty Harry to Robocop to Fight Club. Gone Girl is a film for the ages