Tag / david fincher

by Jaime Rebanal

In Conversation with Amanda Kramer: A Talk About Female Perspectives on Cinema

CONTENT WARNING: The following conversation includes talks of sexual assault and toxic masculinity, which may be potentially upsetting for certain readers and listeners.

Following TIFF Next Wave, I had the chance to talk with Ladyworld writer-director Amanda Kramer about her creative process and her many influences. What soon followed was a long conversation about the state of the film industry and how important it is for female voices to climb higher up within in a male-dominant field. You can listen to the conversation below and also read it down below.

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by Jaime Rebanal

David Fincher’s Gone Girl, and Gillian Flynn’s Understanding of Female Psychopathy: A Review

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The very idea of Gone Girl would already suggest one thing, but the actual film suggests another right from Ben Affleck’s opening narration: “When I think of my wife, I always think of the back of her head. I picture cracking her lovely skull, unspooling her brain, trying to get answers.” In a story that would traditionally place emphasis on the first-person perspective of the husband, who is also a prime suspect in the murder of Amy Elliott-Dunne, you would want to see him being the victim of mass hysteria. But what makes David Fincher’s Gone Girl so amazing is what it manages to create with this very idea, because it tells you what sort of person Nick Dunne is right before we get to the driving focus of the film. From adapting the writing of Gillian Flynn, what Fincher has managed to create is also one of his finest accomplishments, a film that sets your expectations right from the get go and twists them around at moments when you least expect them. But if that already isn’t the material for a great thriller, I wouldn’t even know what is – because for all I know, this film just carries everything that I love most in watching a film by him.

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by Jaime Rebanal

The Curious Case of Benjamin Button – Review

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Less offensive than Forrest Gump in terms of how it alters history for the sake of its own self-important sense of sentimentality, but at the hands of David Fincher – it was the most that one can hope for with The Curious Case of Benjamin Button. Granted, Forrest Gump will be among the first films that one will think of when one talks about David Fincher’s The Curious Case of Benjamin Button because the similarities within the sort of narrative experimentation which they are working with are not limited from the fact that the two of them share Eric Roth as a screenwriter but also from what they make of their setting. And for as much as I love the work of David Fincher, this was always one of my biggest struggles in regards to his filmography for by my own personal experience, it took me three attempts to make it through The Curious Case of Benjamin Button without feeling a need to fall asleep, but even describing such a film as “bloated” doesn’t even begin to cover why it’s such a frustrating, even annoying experience.

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by Jaime Rebanal

The Social Network – Review

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Aaron Sorkin’s scripts, for how much cleverness they incorporate through their wording, can also carry a flair of being too in love with the pen. With the right filmmaker, however, something more arises in order to really show how clever they actually can be and the furthest that they have ever managed to reach was in 2010 when David Fincher released The Social Network, a film recounting the events that led to the creation of one of the most used websites in recent history (arguably the most used and most common social media website in that regard). In spite of some obvious contrivances with actuality, the film’s relevance has only managed to grow.

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by Jaime Rebanal

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (2011) – Review

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Stylistically, a more appealing take on the same story compared to Niels Arden Oplev’s original interpretation and also a more compelling one at that. It’s worth addressing that I have a rather complicated history with Stieg Larsson’s original trilogy of books, for even with their convoluted storylines I still found The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo an ever-so-fascinating story, something that the original trilogy of films had failed to capture (I greatly dislike The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest with my original distaste of the book coming into play). The idea that David Fincher would go on to direct an adaptation of the same story was something that had me intrigued and what was captured in Fincher’s own take on The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo proved itself to become what I wanted out of the same story compared to the monotony of the original trilogy.

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