Posts tagged Kathy Sweeney-Meadows

“Hotshots” looks at a movie!

GONE GIRL is an excellent mystery thriller based on the 2012 best-selling novel by Gillian Flynn, who also wrote the screenplay, and if you haven’t read the novel, you are in for a surprise.

No, you are in for more than one surprise, maybe even shockers.

Ben Affleck stars as Nick, Rosamund Pike stars as Amy, his wife, and one morning Amy goes missing from their home in Missouri under mysterious circumstances.

Evidence left in the living room of the house suggests to the police that Amy might have been murdered, and of course in cases like this, the husband is always the prime suspect.

Kim Dickens plays Detective Rhonda Boney, who is investigating the case, and she and her partner provide what little comic relief occurs in the movie, along with Tyler Perry, who plays Nick’s high-priced, high-profile, and high-powered defense attorney.

One of the many problems for the police is that Nick is not acting as they believe a husband would if his wife was missing and believed to have been murdered, as well as the fact that Amy went missing on their fifth wedding anniversary, and Amy’s present to Nick was a game in which she left clues for him labeled “Clue One,” “Clue Two,” and so on.

Also, when they question Nick, his answers don’t strike them as being filled with the sort of information that they believe a husband should know about his wife.

Nick has a twin sister, Margo, and she tells Nick, “Everyone knows ‘complicated’ is code for ‘bitch.'”

Amy left a diary behind, and we hear Amy’s voice as she reads excerpts from the diary and see flashbacks to when they met in New York City, where they were both writers, and then when they both got laid off and moved to Nick’s hometown in Missouri to take care of Nick’s ailing mother.

From the entries in Amy’s diary, we get the impression that their marriage was not as happy as Nick has been telling the police it was.

Finally, Neil Patrick Harris plays an important role as a former suitor of Amy’s, whose departure from her life was not under the most pleasant circumstances.

GONE GIRL ties all these complicated loose ends up at the end in which some people might believe is a bit ambiguous and messy.

I’m Dan Culberson and this is “Hotshots.”