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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Girl_on_the_Train_(2016_film) Movie has come in at #1 for the weekend, looks like it'll easily break past it's $45 million budget. I thought I'd open up a thread on it and see what CineD thought about something a bit out of usual topics. Too bad that the reception isn't so great: http://www.salon.com/2016/10/07/off-the-rails-the-mystery-of-the-girl-on-the-train-is-why-it-never-gets-on-track/ http://www.usatoday.com/story/life/entertainthis/2016/10/09/girl-on-the-train-book-fans-disappointed-by-movie/91826664/ https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/the_girl_on_the_train_2016 Saw it the other day, and honestly - this movie is boring and poorly written. It's directed competently, and the acting (particularly Emily Blunt's role) is well done enough, but the dialog of the other leads is pretty bad. It suffers strongly from what I suspect to be studio meddling after Blunt's character is revealed to be innocent and right about everything, another character turns to camera and says 'she was right all along, as if we could've missed the point of a pretty simple story. Stylistically, my GF remarked that it was a bit of a Gone Girl clone, which I haven't seen yet. Any recommendations for domestic thrillers that are worth watching? What does the poor reception mean for films of this ilk? well why not fucked around with this message at 14:34 on Oct 10, 2016 |
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Oct 10, 2016 10:54
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| # ? May 4, 2024 06:55 |
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The book is fantastic but the movie was kind of a mess. Blunt absolutely knocked it out of the park and Haley Bennett was pretty good but everyone else was pretty hollow and came off like a caricature. What made the book so good was how things unfolded gradually and how they really spent a good deal of time fleshing everyone out. This movie moves at such a breakneck pace and is focused on nothing but Rachel and it makes everything just seem trivial. Almost nothing is given time to digest or make any sort of impact.
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Oct 10, 2016 18:58
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I really like the thread title, especially because 2014 is literally the only year from 2013-16 which hasn't had a project called "The Girl on the Train" released.
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Oct 11, 2016 10:13
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sportsgenius86 posted:The book is fantastic but the movie was kind of a mess. Blunt absolutely knocked it out of the park and Haley Bennett was pretty good but everyone else was pretty hollow and came off like a caricature. That's what I'm hearing - the book seems to be universally appreciated, but the movie getting a pretty resounding shrug. The pacing is definitely something I didn't realise - there's dozens of shots of Rachel wandering around glassy eyed, but the plot seems to be hurried along pretty well. I think in a novel things can unfold so much slower, where as having a movie like this take more than two hours is pretty unlikely. Escobarbarian posted:I really like the thread title, especially because 2014 is literally the only year from 2013-16 which hasn't had a project called "The Girl on the Train" released.  No idea how I managed that.
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Oct 11, 2016 10:33
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Yo why did massive chunks of this poo poo film seem to be in 48fps (or some fancy imitation of it) and others in 12fps? At first I thought it was just the drunk segments but then it seemed to be totally random. Weird as gently caress.
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Oct 20, 2016 21:04
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The problem with this film is that it's at exactly the wrong position tonally. It either should have exercised more care, taken itself more seriously and developed its characters and themes in more detail as I heard the book does, or it should have veered more towards schlock and pumped up the black comedy which is inherent in the premise (or, potentially, both - but it doesn't take either risk). Justin Theroux's current wife driving in the corkscrew was the one truly great black comedy moment. The three women being described as "inextricably linked together" with with the imagery of the statutes was also way too silly, and not in a good way - that's something else that could have been played for dark humour but wasn't. The actual murder scene of Megan was surprisingly brutal, though.
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Oct 31, 2016 04:46
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Emily Blunt's drunk acting was A1 comedy. I had no idea she had it in her.
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Oct 31, 2016 14:45
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This film has the distinction of having a twist so unconvincing that I still believe Anna is the murderer. Like, the 'reveal' happens in a dream sequence. There's no proof that hubby did anything. So it's basically the story of Rachel psyching herself up to kill her ex-husband - "he's the cause of everything bad, and everything will be perfect once he's dead!" - and then Anna gets a new nanny to replace the old one.
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Oct 31, 2016 17:42
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SuperMechagodzilla posted:This film has the distinction of having a twist so unconvincing that I still believe Anna is the murderer. Like, the 'reveal' happens in a dream sequence. There's no proof that hubby did anything. So it's basically the story of Rachel psyching herself up to kill her ex-husband - "he's the cause of everything bad, and everything will be perfect once he's dead!" - and then Anna gets a new nanny to replace the old one. Yeah, and the movie even knows this by the fact that the detectives are only convinced by Anna concurring with Rachel's story. There's no evidence and the phone was thrown away. It seems weirdly neat given the earlier part of the film setting up the unreliable narrator. I think you could have mined this a little without changing much by having the husband, in the final scene when Rachel wakes up on the kitchen floor , talk with her - claim he was having an affair, but didn't kill her. And to say some of the stories he told of her drunken actions were true bit some weren't - like "Okay, you didn't throw that plate of eggs, but you did smash a mirror and threaten me with a golf club", or pointing out that Rachel's memory is no more reliable than before and she's just constructing memories around new things she's learned and then the rest of the film could play out exactly the same and Anna would have a choice with more agency over who to believe. That way the ending could have some ambiguity and you could either accept that the husband was lying or that Rachel still isn't seeing things with complete clarity. While that would be more interesting the reason the film doesn't go for it because it wants to play out as a wronged women's power fantasy for the audience where not only is the ex-husband completely evil, but everything you thought you did wrong never actually happened - you were completely in the right!
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Oct 31, 2016 21:35
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100% agree - the conclusion was very much on the nose - it's really not satisfying that the film reveals it was misdirecting you without any chance of figuring it out yourself. It's like, if you tell me something wrong yet believable - and I believe you - I'm not necessarily gullible, but you're definitely a liar.
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Nov 1, 2016 12:47
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well why not posted:100% agree - the conclusion was very much on the nose - it's really not satisfying that the film reveals it was misdirecting you without any chance of figuring it out yourself. Sometimes literally. I was really annoyed by the extended death scene of Megan. Did we really have to be shown every gruesome detail? Was there no room for a little ambiguity? Is "blunt force trauma" too difficult to understand? I'm not even squeamish, but it's just stupid. The entire movie was about lies and perception of reality and mystery and drama, but at the end it wanted to make reeeeeaaal sure that we know exactly what happened in every excruciating detail. And probably only to set up Tom's death which is something that annoyed me even more. I don't watch many movies of this type, but it still feels like a cheap cliché. Possibly because it's not a cliché exclusive to relationship drama, but also to action movies, crime dramas, superhero schlock et cetera. We even had the criminal investigation going, we had a vital piece of damning evidence (the phone, but then that never gets used again - as if throwing it somewhere in her garden, no way she managed to get it over the train tracks and into the water, was "getting rid of it"), stories are starting to check out, the investigators are personally invested...then all of a sudden the violence escalates and the guy gets killed. I think the "power fantasy" analysis is dead-on, because wish fulfilment is the only explanation for why the late tonal shift happens that makes sense to me. Cheap wish fulfilment at that. It just feels neater if the criminal dies, and gruesomely, and so deservedly, no?, but is this really more satisfying than having him rot in prison forever? Is this true justice? I'm sure that it's possible to argue that yes, this doesn't really solve things and the ending doesn't want to be optimistic, but I don't believe it considering the film's sunshiny language as the takes the train a final time, and her monologue about having changed. Because I don't like just complaining, how about a backhanded compliment? I was probably just quite so disappointed because there was a far better movie hidden underneath all the stupidity. It could have been a gripping tale of various forms of abuse and one of the best examples for gaslighting I personally have seen, two of the female characters (Megan and Rachel) were wonderfully complex and Emily Blunt acted as if her life depended on it, it was so good. The true failing is anything involving Anna, she could have used so much more screentime, and to not overinflate the movie, one could easily cut all the violence and double and triple explanations of obvious things to focus more on her ongoing abuse and acceptance of it, in the face of being the mother of a young child, to contrast so much better with Rachel's past abuse. Because guess what? All this poo poo cuts far deeper than some blood splatters on a rainy forest floor.
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Nov 4, 2016 14:35
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You're definitely right about the gaslighting. If this movie was done better, I could imagine it being used to teach young people about the dangers of spousal and alcohol abuse. Instead it's kinda of just weak and poorly paced. Big old near miss of a movie.
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Nov 4, 2016 16:32
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| # ? May 4, 2024 06:55 |
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Really didn't like this film, but then I read the book and thought that was a load of rubbish too.
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Nov 5, 2016 09:35
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