Hi moms!
Just kidding. I’m allowed since this is literally a meta blog entry. I’m updating this article while reading the book (yes, this movie is an adaptation, how shocking!) in which many chapters are Stephanie’s blog entries (the movie has turned them into vlog entries but kept her signature “hi moms!”). Let me stop you right there. Yes, Darcey Bell has clearly jumped on the Gone Girl bandwagon, like Paula Hawkins (The Girl on the Train) with her wife-missing-husband-grieving-multiple-narrators-novel. Yes, the novel is aggressively bad and getting through it cover to cover was nothing short of an ordeal but I believe there is much more to it than meets the eye. Starting with the movie version.
Anyway. Here goes.
🏴🏴🏴🏴🏴🏴🏴🏴🏴🏴🏴🏴🏴🏴🏴
Yes, apparently they spell “favor” with an additional “u” here. “Here” is Cineworld Glasgow, Scotland, where your movie ticket costs a staggering £11 (and there I was, enjoying a vacation from Swiss prices, or so I thought). For such a fee you can probably buy the whole alphabet and rename every letter. I know, I had 5 floors, all the way up to Screen 12, one floor short of the VIP experience room, to think of a decent joke to make about such a massive ripoff and I failed to deliver. However, I had enough time to debrief and mentally write this review on my way down. Sitting through the credits on my own – it turns out local moviegoers tend not to linger – had enabled me to get my heart rate and blood pressure back to a human level so that walking could be envisioned again.
Yup, this thing is intense. My hotel is a mere two blocks from the movie theater so I wasn’t able to stop shaking before reaching my third floor room. I’ve just triple checked that my door is locked. I have the hotel reception and the cops on speed dial. Honestly, I can’t remember watching something this forked up (yes, trying to avoid profanity, The Good Place style, I wouldn’t be able to take it in my current state) in a long time. Comedy, thriller and pseudo horror rolled into one and twisted for good measure. The creepiest most sordid details share the spotlight with sheer brilliance and comic relief.
This is all set up by a trailer so misleading that it’s pure genius. Literally every ingredient is missing. None – and I mean nothing, squat, nada – of the highlights of the plot are included and yet it somehow triggers your polite interest. Well worth the risk of losing a few jaded couch potatoes – and let’s face it, regular Scottish people who can’t afford to add a third mortgage on their house to go to Moneyworld – in my humble viewer’s opinion. This trailer void is the reason why I’ll stop here – at nothing – as far as the basic scenario is concerned.
Equally misleading – and something I can definitely mention without spoiling the movie for you – is the cast. Blake Lively (Emily) is so stereotypically tall, beautiful, perfectly toothed and usually typecast (Gossip Girl, need I say more?) that her acting skills just blew me away. And this gig is no rom-com, I can tell you that. Besides, I was once told that good acting meant seeing an actor in two separate contexts without constantly thinking “hey that’s *insert character name* from *insert movie / TV show name*”. Well, Anna Kendrick pulled that off within one and the same movie by seamlessly evolving from a nerdy character to its polar opposite in the span of 117 minutes. Henry Golding (Sean) and Linda Cardellini (Diana) of ER fame (channel your inner old fart or google that prehistoric show) hold their own as supporting characters without being as stellar as their lead counterparts among an overall solid cast.
The final touch of this masterpiece is brought by an almost all-French soundtrack that will give history buffs an academic boner with a direct reference to and semi reenactment of Jesse James’s death while the final seconds of the movie will make most French speakers dizzy (try reading an English epilogue and listening to French rap at the same time). If you’re really not sure what I’m talking about but are definitely intrigued, you’ve got yourself a heck of a movie (still not cursing) to look forward to. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have to call my bank because I’m planning on watching two more movies at Priceyworld this week.
| Picture: MTV International (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/) |
Pardon my French 