Corporate Video Production: What Film Are We Watching?
This week at Crash Symphony Productions, in order to inform our approach to corporate video production, we’re watching Gone Girl. The film based on the book by Gillian Flynn.
This film is one of my favourites in recent years, and it does great justice to the book, though it’s not perfect and leaves out nuance as well as altering the ending. The film is still controversial, people squabble over whether it’s astoundingly feminist or whether it’s actually highly misogynist. Either way, it’s a fantastic book and film and it has some prescient things to say about heterosexual domestic love, the power dynamics of it, the abuses of it, and the violence of it–psychologically and emotionally, more than anything physically. And it does so in the context of a murder-mystery thriller, what better context is there for the terrors of married life?
Rosamund Pike gives an incredible performance as Amy Dunne, the brilliant and broken only-child wunderkind of hyper-critical parents. Ben Affleck plays her husband.
Corporate Video Production: Gone Girl (2014)
To stage the interpersonal violence of domestic life in a murder mystery is significant because it points to the other kinds of murders committed in the novel, the existential murders, the emotional murders. Amy Dunne narrates this killer quote: “Nick Dunne took my pride and my dignity and my hope and my money. He took and took from me until I no longer existed. That’s murder.”
The cinematography is fantastic, greys and blue predominate the colour palette and Rosamund Pike’s smooth voice perfectly suits Amy Dunne’s cool, detached and highly articulate emotionality.
“Men always say that as the defining compliment, don’t they? She’s a cool girl. Being the Cool Girl means I am a hot, brilliant, funny woman who adores football, poker, dirty jokes, and burping, who plays video games, drinks cheap beer, loves threesomes and anal sex, and jams hot dogs and hamburgers into her mouth like she’s hosting the world’s biggest culinary gang bang while somehow maintaining a size 2, because Cool Girls are above all hot. Hot and understanding. Cool Girls never get angry; they only smile in a chagrined, loving manner and let their men do whatever they want. Go ahead, shit on me, I don’t mind, I’m the Cool Girl.”
