Gone Girl (3/5 Stars)

This is a problem film for movie critics. I could dance around all the plot twists that I am not supposed to give away and focus on the skillful directing of David Fincher, the good performances by Ben Affleck and Rosamund Pike, or the beautiful cinematography, seamless editing, and brooding score, etc. But that would give the reader a false sense of confidence in my opinion of the movie. The one thing I can’t talk about is the thing I’m not supposed to talk about. I have a problem with the plot itself and in the end I felt that overwhelmed the otherwise technical merits of this movie. A student of film would be satisfied to watch ‘Gone Girl’ merely for its technical education but I’m not about to recommend it to anyone.

 The stoy opens with two concurrent storylines. One is in the present and follows Nick Dunne (Ben Afflek) on the day of his 5^th Anniversary. He comes home to discover that his house has been broken into and his wife is gone. He calls the police and an investigation starts. The second storyline concerns journal entries written by his wife Amy Dunne (Rosamund Pike). It starts the day they meet and portrays a good marriage until the Great Recession hit, he lost his job, she lost her trust fund, and they moved from New York City to his hometown in Missouri. She does not like it there and he knows it. In fact, he was about to ask for a divorce the day of his anniversary. Or was he? Because she says he had different plans in her journal. It is a bit of a he said she said and after she cannot be found and other things develop a media circus descends on the small town. The question from the press is thus: Did Nick Dunne kill his wife?

There is a certain guilt that goes along with seeing Ben Affleck hounded by television cameras and unscrupulous reporters that don’t seem to particularly care whether he is guilty or innocent. For those with memories that go back a decade, this sort of thing really did happen to Ben Affleck or ‘Benniffer’ to be exact, the moniker given to the celebrity pair of Ben Affleck and Jennifer Lopez. There was an unmistakably meanspirtedness to the whole proceeding. The general public had something against Ben Affleck and the press hounded him until his marriage fell apart and his career floundered. Did he deserve it? Well, he did win Oscar gold at the age of 27 that many people thought (and I include myself here) belonged almost entirely to Matt Damon (who had not paid any dues either) and then followed that up with a lot of big paychecks in bad movies and then he married arguably the hottest woman on the planet. That sort of unfairness earned him plenty of envy.

Why am I bringing this up? I bring it up because Ben Affleck in this movie is a perfect example of the power of good casting. (In fact, I have spoken about this exact topic with Ben Affleck before in my ‘Argo’ review.) It is impossible for the audience to completely block out what they know about a well-known actor when they see a movie so even though the character they are playing may be somebody completely different from whom they played before or who they are in real life, the audience will at least subconsciously project upon the character all that they know about the actor. Now there are three ways to deal with this fact when making a movie. One, you could do what Milos Forman did when he made ‘Amadeus’ and just side step the whole issue. He did not want any well-known actor to overshadow the character of Mozart or Salieri so he went and cast unknown actors. Two, you could use the audience’s preconceptions to save time. As I once heard in a director’s commentary, using a film star saves about fifteen minutes of exposition. You want a tough leader guy: cast Bruce Willis. All he has to do is show up and you know what the character is about. Thirdly, and my favorite, you can use the audience’s preconceptions not to simplify but to distract. You deliberately set up a kind of character played by a particular actor to set up an expectation of behavior. You deviate from that expectation in a believable way and boom you got a good story twist going on. Think Cameron Diaz in Vanilla Sky or Neil Patrick Harris in Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle. There are plenty of others as well.

Ben Affleck is the perfect casting choice for this movie. Unfortunately the plot of the story takes the 2^nd way down the casting choice road. I do not believe it is really a spoiler to tell you something that happens in the middle of the movie but here is the warning anyway: Nothing but spoilers from here on out. Nick Dunne did not kill his wife. Seriously, did any of us really think Ben Affleck was a wife killer. No, we expect him to be the hapless victim of disgraceful media frenzy. But what if he did. Now that would be a plot twist.

Okay I’m sorry. I can’t actually argue that everything past the midpoint of the movie should be changed. Let me just explain how it was not particularly good. The whole thing, and boy is it elaborate, was planned out by the wife to frame her philandering husband. It is so intricate in fact that the perpetrator needs to be a psychopath. Let’s put aside the whole feminist argument that a woman would never be capable of this sort of thing (even though to my knowledge no living woman ever has been capable of this sort of thing.) And we also can’t say that this movie is another woman-hating exercise perpetrated by the male establishment of Hollywood after all the screenplay was written by a woman (Gillian Flynn) and adapted by a best-selling book written by the same woman. Let us just ask this, does the Rosamund Pike character make sense as a psychopath? I would argue she does not. She makes a big decision about 3/4ths of the way through the movie on the basis of pure emotion. Perhaps I need to brush up on my psychopathic profiling but I don’t think that these people kill out of love all that often. The movie does not work for the same reason that other David Fincher movies sometimes don’t work. It was certainly the difference in his inferior version of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. The women characters in his movies tend to lack humanity. That’s a rather rough thing to level at a master director (and David Fincher certainly is that) but I think it is true. There is a void where something else should be and taking up that space is a paranoia that takes what should be a complex portrait of a woman and makes it into something that is simply heartless. Not helping is his tendency to cast supermodels in supporting roles that do not call for it. Do you have Netflix? Watch a few episodes of David Fincher’s House of Cards and compare it to how the women look in Orange is the New Black. The difference could contain a multitude of worlds.

You know who also had this trademark? Alfred Hitchcock. The gorgeous chilly blonde of Hitchcock is definitely comparable to Fincher’s dangerous and calculating beauties. To an extent this is not good casting. Why? Because if it is noticeable to the extent of cliché than the director distacts the audience from the story. That is unless the story is not all that good, then I suppose the more distractions the better. And there are plenty in this movie. 

A Very Harold and Kumar 3D Christmas (4/5 Stars)

The weird thing about the duo of Harold and Kumar is that the two actors playing them, John Cho and Kal Penn respectively, haven’t really found greater success outside of the “White Castle,” movies. If these trio of stoner road-trip movies prove anything it is that these two can carry a movie with just enough warmth and gravity to allow an audience to forgive an absolutely ridiculous plot and plenty of material that should be offensive but somehow comes off as normal good fun. That should put them in demand one would think. Perhaps it really has to do with their ethnicity (John Cho is Korean and Kal Penn is Indian) even though these movies are a sort of debunking of whatever theory that belongs too. It couldn’t be more plain that the pair are 100% American. They have no accents, enjoy fast food and getting high, and constantly find themselves in road-trip movies, that most American of movie genres. But great success in movies these two have not had (actually Kal Penn now works for the White House. Success? Yes. In movies? No) so I suppose it was inevitable that they answered the call for another “Harold & Kumar” movie, this time in 3D because well, why not.

The beginning of “A Very Harold and Kumar Christmas in 3D,” begins the duo split up. Harold has become a well-to-do wall street worker newly married to Maria from the 1^st movie. Kumar still lives in the same apartment as before and gets just as high as before. His girlfriend just left him over two months ago and the place looks like he hasn’t bothered to clean it since. Impending maturity knocks on the door when his girlfriend comes over to tell him that she is pregnant. There is also a slight problem in that Harold is throwing a Christmas party and has not invited Kumar. It is to the movie’s credit that it takes these problems semi-seriously because it adds some realistic weight to another completely ridiculous plot involving guys now in their thirties.

The humor in this movie is all over the place and though not all of the jokes hit home, there are enough of them for the movie to be truly funny. In addition, the road trip plot is segmented in such a way that new characters and situations easily come in, have their moment, and exit. New to the series is Danny Trejo, perhaps a name you don’t recall but a face you have definitely seen somewhere, who plays Harold’s father-in-law. Here is a guy on the level of a Christopher Walken or a Sam Rockwell that makes me smile simply by showing up. He sets the plot in motion by letting Harold know that it is a crime against Christmas to decorate a faux tree instead of a real one and sharing how his mother was killed by a Korean street gang while walking home with Christmas tree decorations. Harold better have a real tree to decorate by the time everybody gets back from midnight mass, or else! For the record, we get to see all of Danny Trejo’s tattoos and they are still super bad-ass. Then, of course, stopping in for a musical number and to save the day is the actor Neil Patrick Harris as Neil Patrick Harris, the actor. This calls for an explanation because as you may recall NPH was shotgunned to death while escaping from a Texan whorehouse in the second movie. If he can be believed, he is back on Earth via some sort of divine cockblock. I’m not explaining that any further as it might spoil the outrageous of it all, but will mention that it is hilarious.

There is something rather special about NPH’s performances in these movies. The big joke is that he is playing “himself.” So when we see him snorting cocaine and employing hookers, he is basically winking at the camera and saying that he, NPH of Doogie Houser M.D. fame, does all of that in “real life.” It is his “reputation” that he is bravely throwing under the bus for our amusement, sort of. One of the more outrageous things about NPH is that he is simply pretending to be a homosexual in public in order to sexually harass women. He does this by inviting the actresses he works with into his dressing room to rehearse scenes, remarking how tense they look, offering a massage to loosen them up, and innocently remarking that he is just one of the “girls” when things start getting weird. According to him, most publicly “gay” guys do this and Clay Aiken is the worst. All of this is done with such a gleeful and brazen smugness that it somehow completely obliterates the line of what should probably be very offensive. The sexual harassment is funny not because sexual harassment is funny. It’s funny because the “real” NPH would never do that, and we “know” that he is only “pretending” to be a sex fiend even though up on the screen is NPH is playing NPH, “himself,” as a sex fiend. It is a brilliant piece of comic misdirection, which makes NPH’s entire performance feel like it is getting away with something (which he is!). It’s on the level with Robert Downey Jr. getting away with wearing blackface in “Tropic Thunder.” As Mel Brooks would say, “It rises below vulgarity.” It’s a great character and performance and NPH should get an Oscar Nomination for Best Supporting Actor.

Other jokes that perhaps they only sort of get away with are all the ethnic stereotypes. I say sort of because the variety of stereotypes make them okay simply because everybody (White, Asian, Indian, Jewish, Russian, Black) is being targeted. However, there are still plenty of these jokes that fall flat because they are just old. A general rule of humor is that jokes should never be told twice. I have heard the “All Asians look alike,” joke about a thousand times. The one in this movie I saw coming miles away. Saying Asians all look the same is a lazy joke nowadays. It’s time we came up with a new way to make fun of Asian people.

Finally the 3D employed in the movie is probably how 3D should be used: and by that I mean, as a joke. 3D generally speaking is more distracting than engrossing and as such should be used to break the 4^th wall, not to simply supplement a story. There are plenty of 3D jokes in this movie. Some are better than others. On the whole though, it is not worth the extra money to see a 3D movie in a theater. You would have as much fun with this one if you saw it streaming on Netflix.