Gone Girl

[sonetka]

Before starting, let it be known that today is the ninety-second anniversary of W.W. Sterrett's unsolved murder by arsenical wedding cake, which I wrote a post about here. As I recently edited it to include what happened to his wife, which I didn't know at the time I wrote it last year, I think this justifies linking to it again. Short version of

Comments

[sonetka]

The thing is, I really did enjoy the movie; it was one of those things where everyone involved is a horrible person, including the husband, but the fact is that he's being set up by the wife for something he didn't do (she's angry at him for moving her out to the sticks, ignoring her, and screwing around, so she makes sure to stage things carefully in a way that makes him look very suspect). It had some great moments satirizing the weird semi-celebrity culture surrounding famous crimes -- the husband's sister is despairing over internet commenters who are pronouncing him guilty because he smiled in a photograph, the Nancy Grace lookalike TV host who loves convicting people on not much more evidence than "he acted really strange", people trying to take selfies with him, people at the candlelight vigil who are obviously there more for the drama and the cameras than because they give a damn about the missing woman ... I think that's why I was so disappointed by the ending, because it started off so well. To summarize quickly: Amy's plan of hiding out goes haywire after she gets robbed and she's stranded in rural Missouri with no resources, so she calls her very wealthy, not-entirely-sane, rather obsessive former boyfriend to ask for help with the implication that now she'll be his at last, and he puts her up in his private lake house after showing her the crazy number of security cameras all over. It's clear that he's very paranoid in daily life. Later, for various reasons, she gets tired of the arrangement and decides to go back to her husband and pretend she was kidnapped, after murdering Desi the obsessive ex and pretending it was self-defense. Except that since this was a last-minute plan, she has no idea what he was doing at the time of her "kidnapping" since she didn't originally plan it with him in mind as a fall guy. Like you said, if they'd even thrown a bone to the effect of "He's always hung over on Sundays" or "Desi thinks the government could use a cellphone to track his movements" it would be one thing, but as it was we were presented with a wealthy, paranoid man who loves his security cameras and has no apparent aversion to the latest technology in everything else and ... no. Something would have cropped up. I like a good pulpy thriller as much as anyone but there was just nothing plausible about the final coverup.

I had no idea the McCann pursuit was still going on! Over here the tabloids are entering the second decade of the Aniston/Jolie/Pitt triangle, but at least those are people who sought celebrity to begin with.