Gone Girl really is the ideal movie for David Fincher at this point in time. A stylist who transitioned from music videos to lurid, gloomy B-thrillers, he perfected his crime film aspirations with the deliriously good clinical descent into the mundane in Zodiac, an attempt at “serious-mindedness” that implicitly challenges all other so-called “serious-minded” films for their audience-baiting emotion. More than anything, it was a deeply cold film, a complete re-reading of every grandiose stylistic convention he’d use to make B-thrillers “fun” by taking the same kind of B-thriller and making it deliberately anti-fun to the core. Then, not one year later, he went “warm” with The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, an attempt at Oscar glory, followed by an actual success at Oscarbait with The Social Network (despite, you know, not winning the consummate Oscars, but those matter little anyway).
At this point, mainstream respect firmly in tow and an essential carte blanche to take on any project he wanted, he made the only logical decision: reclaim some of his lost genre “cred” while still capturing the hearts of milquetoast suburban parents everywhere, stealing the best of both worlds in the process. Thus came The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo. 2014’s Gone Girl is more of the same, an attempt to marry the black-hearted twists of a mystery thriller with the respectable professionalism of an “important, serious film”. And like that 2011 film, it shows that the two genres exist at war with each other, rather than in unison.
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For the grand denouement of Simon Pegg, Nick Frost, and Edgar Wright’s “Three Flavors Cornetto” trilogy, everything implicit in the first two acts is pushed right up to the forefront to the point where it hurts. Namely, what we’ve all been suspecting for a while is now crystal-clear: this is one of the great filmic commentaries on the modern male, as much as it is a parody of the genres of film called home by that particular subset of humanity. In this tripartite comedy reworking of horror, action, and now science fiction tropes, the cheery bad-boys of the UK are exploring the mindset of the male through the genres of film men put their lives on hold for. They give us men, epitomized by Nick Frost and Simon Pegg, who play out the male fantasy of these films, and we get a genial mockery of their childish in-fighting snuggling cuddly with a light-hearted homage to the youthful spirit that keeps these guys so young and alive. It’s filmic cognitive dissonance, nervy and anxious to the core. But, like main character Gary King, it plays it so cool we’d never know if we weren’t looking.
Once upon a time there was a genre of film called the Bible Epic. More devourers of money than movies proper, they went the way all such genres eventually do: imploding on their own gluttonous mass and dragged kicking and screaming into a hell of their own making. The rise of European cinema in America had a lot to do with it. The American New Wave had much more. But the Bible Epic was doomed just like its dear bedfellow, the sword-and-sandal film, both with nowhere to go but the way of the Romans so often depicted with a curious confusion in both genres: self-immolation, a death from inside attempts to fly closer and closer to the sun without any sense of themselves. If the Bible Epic needed a few extraneous factors circling like vultures to truly crash-and-burn, that’s only insofar as reacting to these outside influences caused a need for even more strained, draggy, self-indulgent screenplays that insisted all the louder and prouder that they were just hot shit to increasingly deaf ears. 
Public Enemies
District 9 is not a nuanced film, nor is its metaphor. Filmed in the slums of Johannesburg, there’s an eerie, earthen verisimilitude to the film’s physicality that simultaneously lends South Africa a depressing gritty realism and expounds upon its alienized social distance. But it is very obviously a parable of human exclusion and prejudice, literalizing the alien in the “other” of race by fitting it into a sci-fi story about actual space travelers. Parable isn’t quite right though – the film is more a vague satire, not particularly pinpoint but workmanlike in its broad-based feeling. Nonetheless, sharp it is not. If it really wants to stake its claim as something more than a bit o’ fun with new filmic toys propping up the seams, it’s on less sure-footing.
Science fiction was in vogue in the late ’70s, largely due to the success of George Lucas’ Star Wars, which kick-started perhaps the greatest popular revolution in American film history and drove the medium to new commercial heights. Of course, it saw mixed results for the art-form: a rebirth of genre filmmaking married to the deadening and eventual end of the New Hollywood drama which had married classical themes to European New Wave modes of storytelling to brilliant effect and which, in fact, made American film interesting after a long drop-off in the ’60s. After Star Wars, many studios grew less interested in drama and shifted toward pop commercialism, aiming for big, big, and bigger at the expense of nuance.
For this week’s Midnight Screenings, being that Halloween is upon us and all, here are reviews of three modern would-be Halloween films destined for years of “Midnight” Screenings all throughout the land.
For this week’s Midnight Screenings, being that Halloween is upon us and all, here are reviews of three modern would-be Halloween films destined for years of “Midnight” Screenings all throughout the land.
For this week’s Midnight Screenings, being that Halloween is upon us and all, here are reviews of three modern would-be Halloween films destined for years of “Midnight” Screenings all throughout the land. 
The Long Take 