Gone Girl Can't Help But Be Good in Movie Form

I wonder what the people in the theater who hadn't already read Gone Girl thought of the movie.

I loved the book as an enjoyable page-turner, and I enjoyed the movie as well. But it followed the book almost exactly, so all the Hitchcockian suspense was a little ruined by my prior knowledge of what was coming next.

Leaving that behind, Ben Affleck and Rosamund Pike turn in really good performances as a fairly unlikeable man and his disappeared wife. Especially Pike, whose deep-throated blonde-bombshell performance clearly echoes and pays homage to the great Alfred Hitchcock leading ladies Grace Kelly, Kim Novak, Eva Marie Saint, Janet Leigh, and Tippi Hedren.

David Fincher certainly doesn't hurt his already impressive resume of film direction, which includes Seven, Fight Club, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, The Social Network, and The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo.

That said, Gone Girl was such a great book that it was a bit of a softball of an easy home run to turn into a movie.

**** out of ***** stars

Mind Bending Among the High-School Cheerleaders

Being a reader of lots of classics and most recently a somber tale of laborious life in North Korea, it's necessary to break it up with some good old-fashioned trash every once in a while.

Dare Me by Megan Abbott is actually relatively high-minded writing and in many ways a psychological tour de force. Because it's billed as "Lord of the Flies cheerleader-style," it also qualifies as a trashy novel about high-school life.

The common-sense-stoked person in the video above describes the story well. I particularly like how she notes that Gillian Flynn of Gone Girl-fame recommends the book and that fans of the classic 80s movie "The Heathers" (ha) will approve.

I'll contribute: Addy and Beth are leaders of the cheerleading squad and their BFF status comes under pressure when Beth becomes jealous of Addy's relationship with their young new coach named Colette. A very bad thing happens (actually, lots of bad things happen, soccer and tennis were never this interesting) that nearly unravels the team and certainly unravels the ties between Addy and Beth. The tables get turned again and again and Abbott (pictured) does a good job of keeping the reader on edge, uncomfortable, and in suspense of what will happen next throughout the nearly 300 pages of the novel.

There is a lot of cheerleading lingo and action that could be trimmed from the story, although Abbott is clearly using it to metaphorical effect and to describe the shifting mindset of the squad girls over the course of the novel. I'm not sure if this book would have been as brilliant without that lingo, but either way, this one is a keeper that will be tough to beat for "best cheerleader book, like, evah."

On a rating, I agree with the reviewer above: **** out of ***** stars

Gone Girl is a Page-Turning Mystery Thriller for Anyone Who Doesn't Have Much Time to Read

Gillian Flynn took her straight-forward style as a former writer for the non-intellectual (but great) Entertainment Weekly to compose New York Times Bestseller Gone Girl. 

It's excellent fiction, and the kind of T.C. Boyle-like breezy, quick-read storytelling (as opposed to that of more difficult scribes like David Foster Wallace or Don DeLillo) that I increasingly find myself drawn to at the point in my life when I'm raising one kid and have another on the way and have less time to read.

I suppose to truly conserve time, I could have waited for the movie, which is set to be produced by Reese Witherspoon's film company. But this was well worth reading ahead of time.

Nick and Amy Dunne are writers in New York City who lose their jobs and have to move back to Nick's hometown not far from Hannibal and St. Louis, Missouri. Their marriage begins to show major cracks until Amy suddenly disappears and Nick becomes the focal point of a homicide investigation.

The trick of making the story alternately narrated by Nick and Amy provides the suspense, as the reader doesn't know whose conflicting story to trust. But both are tremendously well fleshed-out characters. Gone Girl is an innovative who-done-it crime mystery.

***** out of ***** stars