Ben’s Affleck…

or how (pre)reviews made a mountain out of a molehill and how I got slapped

(slight spoiler alert)

There are a couple of things I want to focus on with Gone Girl.

The first one obviously being the by now so many times mentioned Affleck’s full frontal. Now, anyone reading the reviews and interviews and everything concerning this movie would expect the LittleBen to be swinging around like Fassbernder’s is in Shame. But I have to disappoint you all. I knew it was coming and that might be the only reason why I saw it during the millisecond it was actually on the screen. You see Affleck entering the shower naked as one is when talking to your psycho wife while she suspects you to be wearing a wire, and we see a nice shot of his A(ss), but the Fleck is just that, a fleck. But hey, there’s no female full frontal nudity so I’m cheering this new Hollywood fad of switching things a bit.

In addition to this win (?) for the image of women on screen there are other moments where the traditional scenes of male characters being the center of attention satisfaction-wise are replaced with women being satisfied. Now, I’m not sure this really helps the fight for equality so I’ll leave that for some other post.

These two points might tell you what the third point will be – there’s a lot of sex in this movie. Again, it seems that this too is a Hollywood fad – almost explicit scenes of sex, both romantic and non-romantic. This too deserves a post of its own, so I’ll leave it at that.

Next point I want to make is this – WHAT THE BLOODY HELL! For ages I had been ignorantly refusing to read the book this movie is based on thinking it was about a disappearance of a kid (I really can’t read stuff like that). When I did realize it was about a grown woman I thought to myself – you gotta read it before the movie comes out. But then again I was thinking – do I really want to read a book where a husband mistreats his wife and kills her? Again, I was being ignorant, but it played out for the better. The most pivotal scenes in the movie came as a surprise. Grant it, you kind of saw them coming but not from miles, more like you saw them coming 5 seconds before they were about to slap you in the face. And, boy was I slapped! And, boy did I love it!

Another thing I loved was the cast – I know, I know, the cast includes Affleck and I’m not his biggest fan, but he was surprisingly good! And Rosamund Pike was simply crazy – very believable as a psycho! She reminded me of a statement my Filmology professor made once about scary moments in movies “There’s nothing scarier than a Hitchcock blonde stepping out of the shadows”. She could easily be one of Hitchcock’c leading ladies. And even Tyler Perry, who I usually avoid like the plague, was ok in this!

The only thing I kind of resent the movie is the ending but I won’t go into detail, you should check it out for yourself I didn’t regret the money I spent on the ticket.

I will end my review here, although I might come back to this topic later on after I’ve finished the book.