One of my favorite films in the last few years is The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo. It’s one of director David Fincher’s most impressive works, a tone poem of oppression, obsession, and rejection.
Daniel Craig’s Mikael Blomkvist is an idealist who suffers at the hands of social manipulators – white collar criminals and sadistic serial killers alike – while Rooney Mara’s Lisbeth Salander plays his cynical knight in punk-goth armor, a hacker whose only care is to aggressively deconstruct – the identities of others, the clues to a mystery, the life of her abuser, the power foundation of an international bank. She’s one of my favorite heroes on film…well, ever.
Mara recently told E! that she was very doubtful the planned sequel – The Girl Who Played With Fire– would ever come to fruition. “I’m sad never to do it again,” she told Marc Malkin, “but it just doesn’t seem like it’s in the cards.”
Where the problem lies between Fincher and Sony is difficult to say. Much has been written about Fincher’s budget demands, but these may be red herrings or negotiation tactics. The impasse may rely as much on whether the last two films of the trilogy would be shot back to back, and on seemingly endless (and costly) rewrites of the screenplay. Obviously, Fincher’s the best choice to realize the sequel, but this doesn’t mean he’s the only choice.
Sony, who admittedly have created many of the problems they now face with Fincher, has got to deliver an ultimatum. If it isn’t met, they must move on. I want this movie. More importantly, I want it with this cast. I’d like to see Fincher at the helm – if you ask me, no director has changed the face of film more since the 1980s. Yet there are other choices. Here are five suggestions:
I’ve long said that if the pair can’t figure it out, Sony should give David Cronenberg a call. The franchise would exist both inside and outside of Cronenberg’s wheelhouse. He creates darkly horrific tales of mental, physical, and emotional frailty. That’s what this franchise is. Fire might creatively constrain him, though. Could he realize the thrill of discovery and risk that Fincher did? I don’t know.
Mary Harron deserves more work. She once knocked American Psycho out of the park and while she’s experienced at horror, she’s more experienced at exactingly taking the genre apart at its seams, which is the real strength Fincher brings to the table.
Could Steven Soderbergh be coaxed out of his not-really retirement? He’s a career chameleon with a rare ability to direct from the inside-out in any genre, although he can gloss a film over where Fincher is exactingly dispassionate. He’s directed Mara to stunning effect before in Side Effects.
What about Danny Boyle? It wouldn’t be the first time he took over for Fincher, as he’s doing now for the Aaron Sorkin-written Steve Jobs biopic. Boyle is a master of changing voice, pace, and style – 28 Days Later…, Sunshine, Slumdog Millionaire, 127 Hours. He’s not a precise match for the tone Fincher set, but who is?
If you want an out-of-left-field suggestion: Tomas Alfredson, director of Let the Right One Inand Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy. Few are as good at setting mood. His films are paced glacially, but they always pay off. He’s also as good a director of actors as you can find, and he lends his movies that dispassionate, exacting quality I spoke of earlier while marrying them to a worldview more hauntingly sad.
These are the five who come off the top of my head right away. Obviously, Fincher is the best choice, but with the cast assembled – with core players like Mara and Craig who realized their roles so completely in the first movie…do you really want to lose those and be forced to start over? Do you think a reboot or, oh god no, a TV series (as Mara points out, Sony’s spent too much money on the rights to do nothing with them) would be better? Sony has to figure things out with Fincher. Or do the impossible, and be brave enough to dump and replace him. I don’t want to write this up one day in our Best Movies Never Made section.
Just make sure you keep Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross on the score, and bring Karen O in for another guest vocal. Because:
(Thanks to moviecritic92 for the heads up on Mara’s comments.)
How do you split up screenplays and genres of film? Best original and adapted screenplay? The lines bleed into each other. Inception was nominated for Best Original Screenplay a few years ago despite being based on an unpublished short story. How do you judge something like Foxcatcher, which was based on real events. Certainly, it’s more adapted from existing material than, say, Birdman.
And what about Dawn of the Planet of the Apes, the film that spurred this entire conversation among us. Sure, it’s derived from Pierre Boulle’s Planet of the Apes, but does a franchise in its second reboot and third adaptation really have much to do with the original novel anymore? Or is it adapted from the first film franchise? Or Tim Burton’s second (let’s hope not). The point is, while Pierre Boulle certainly deserves credit, is Dawn of the Planet of the Apes that particularly adapted from source material, or is it more part of a franchise that chucks as much of the previous Apes baggage overboard in an effort to tell a new story?
So let’s throw adapted and original screenplay out the window.
As for splitting up films, how do we judge these? The Golden Globes split films into drama and musical/comedy categories. This results in some incredible cognitive dissonance, such as In Bruges competing with Mamma Mia! or the entire 2013 slate (American Hustle, Her, Inside Llewyn Davis, Nebraska, The Wolf of Wall Street) having as much claim to dramatic status as they do comedy. Too often, the category is used for films that don’t make the cut of 5 to be considered drama, as if musical/comedy is an extended second class of dramatic film.
I’m not one to complain, either. My comedy of the year for 2014 would be Nightcrawler, the most disturbing and unsettling film I saw. It follows the structure of a rags-to-riches comedy almost to the letter, and it creates audacious moments of black humor – these are key to helping you understand the attraction of its main character’s sociopathy. Nevermind that much of the substance inside the film is dramatic – if we use the old Greek definitions, Nightcrawler is a comedy through and through.
The Oscars don’t bother with categories, but this usually results in less serious films being completely tossed to the side.
So let’s throw drama and comedy categories out the window, too.
What we decided on is budget. Screenplays are written and rewritten for specific budgets, and it’s the primary factor directors must use in shaping their film. How else are we supposed to compare Interstellar and Dawn of the Planet of the Apes to, say, Nightcrawler and Birdman?
The demarcation between Best Low Budget Film and Best Big Budget Film is a tricky one. For now, we’re going with $25 million, and our numbers are cobbled together from Box Office Mojo, The-Numbers, and Google Reports. Could someone be lying about their budget? Sure, that happens often, but no one claims a $50 million movie only cost $25 million. It’s not that egregious.
In the future, we may expand this. Right now, a $30 million film like The Grand Budapest Hotel is above the cutoff, and so is in the same category as Interstellar. That’s a little unfair. Maybe we’ll have low, mid, and big budget categories. For now, we’re just sticking to low and big, and it’s a way of recognizing and pushing smaller films while also not discounting films that have more resources and support behind them. To us, it’s a fairer way of doing things than splitting movies up along increasingly fuzzy genre lines or declarations of what is or isn’t adapted. Here we go:
BEST SCREENPLAY, LOW BUDGET
SL: Birdman (Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu, Nicolas Giacobone, Alexander Dinelaris, Armando Bo)
Eden: Selma (Paul Webb)
Cleopatra: I Origins (Mike Cahill)
Amanda: Selma (Paul Webb)
Rachel: The Double (Richard Ayoade, Avi Korine)
Vanessa: Selma (Paul Webb)
Gabe: Nightcrawler (Dan Gilroy)
WINNER Paul Webb, Selma
Birdman is a marvel of timing, and that begins with the script. I Origins is the hidden gem of 2014, a microbudget thriller that boasts two of the most beautifully break-you-down moments in film I’ve ever witnessed. The Double is based on the Fyodor Dostoevsky novel. I’ve discussed Nightcrawler above – its plot and language are a gift to its actors, filled with high tension scenes and commentary on how we produce and watch news today.
Selma wins, though. Technically, the screenplay’s by Webb alone, but both he and director Ava DuVernay have been open about the fact that she rewrote much of it on the fly. The result is undeniable – a film that considers the place of social activism in a modern world by peeling back the strategy that made it work 50 years ago. Its toughest obstacle was not having the rights to any of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s speeches – Steven Spielberg has those locked up for a film that has yet to come to fruition. This meant that they had to recreate King’s speeches without being able to quote them. In the end, they turn this into a strength of the film, allowing Webb and DuVernay to create commentary that acknowledges many of the struggles African-Americans face today, while still dealing with the plot taking place in 1965.
BEST SCREENPLAY, BIG BUDGET
SL: Gone Girl (Gillian Flynn)
Eden: Interstellar (Jonathan Nolan, Christopher Nolan)
Cleopatra: Dawn of the Planet of the Apes (Mark Bomback, Rick Jaffa, Amanda Silver)
Amanda: Noah (Darren Aronofsky, Ari Handel)
Rachel: Gone Girl (Gillian Flynn)
Vanessa: Fury (David Ayer)
Gabe: Fury (David Ayer)
WINNERS David Ayer, Fury & Gillian Flynn, Gone Girl
I don’t think we can pretend there’s any agreement here, but that’s OK. This exercise isn’t about agreement, but rather seeing where our choices converge and where they don’t. I have problems with Interstellar‘s script at points, but there’s no questioning what it achieves in the end – an audaciously philosophical journey with some of the tensest adventure scenes in recent memory. Dawn of the Planet of the Apes boasts one of the most underrated screenplays of the year. Noah is a mad creation that has moments of pure transcendence – when it works, it works like a fever dream.
Gone Girland Fury are the only two that come away with more than one vote. Gone Girl is such a precise creation, it’s difficult not to marvel at just how well constructed it all is – as a thriller, as a put on, as a takedown of marriage. It’s a beautiful film, and it boggles the mind that it only received one Oscar nomination. Fury, on the other hand, is a singular conceit that uses war to define how men are broken down and retrained in a patriarchal image. It recalls films like Full Metal Jacket not in style, but in how completely it breaks down how men are taught to hate and possess.
BEST DIRECTOR, LOW BUDGET
SL: Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu, Birdman
Eden: Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu, Birdman
Cleopatra: Mike Cahill, I Origins
Amanda: Ava DuVernay, Selma
Rachel: Ava DuVernay, Selma
Vanessa: Jonathan Glazer, Under the Skin
Gabe: Ava DuVernay, Selma
WINNER Ava DuVernay, Selma
I’m glad to see Cleopatra sticking up for I Origins. It really is something special, and if we had a microbudget category, I’m pretty sure it would walk away with everything we could give it. Jonathan Glazer was winning this for me most of the year – he lets his artists and performers loose inside the structure of Under the Skin, allowing them each to create elements of it from their own perspective, and then he manages to marry it all together so that those unique perspectives remain intact inside the larger, fused film.
Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu almost takes this for Birdman, which is an incredible vision, but I think Ava DuVernay simply cannot be denied this year – unless it’s by, you know, the Academy. Her framing, the Edmund Pettus bridge sequence, and how she uses one early moment to completely define the lens through which she wants the viewer to inhabit the rest of the film…there’s as sure a hand to Selma as in any film this year.
BEST DIRECTOR, BIG BUDGET
SL: David Fincher, Gone Girl
Eden: Christopher Nolan, Interstellar
Cleopatra: Christopher Nolan, Interstellar
Amanda: Wes Anderson, The Grand Budapest Hotel
Rachel: David Fincher, Gone Girl
Vanessa: David Fincher, Gone Girl
Gabe: Christopher Nolan, Interstellar
WINNERS David Fincher, Gone Girl
& Christopher Nolan, Interstellar
Well I guess that’s it. David Fincher and Christopher Nolan in a death match. Sorry Wes Anderson. In contrast to our low budget directors, Fincher and Nolan are two very tightly controlling personalities. Fincher, especially, has a reputation for obsessing over every small detail in each scene. This carries over into his films – they each boast a suffocating atmosphere that seems half-intentional, half-artistic byproduct.
Our low budget directors – DuVernay and Glazer, especially – seem to create out of a sort of organized chaos. There’s less opportunity for control when you have less money, and there’s more room to let a day go because things aren’t absolutely perfect when the budget can afford it.
For the next two awards – Best Film for low and big budget – I asked everyone to name their top 3 of the year.
BEST THREE FILMS, LOW BUDGET
SL: Birdman, I Origins, Whiplash
Eden: Under the Skin, The Raid 2, Birdman
Cleopatra: I Origins, Under the Skin, Selma
Amanda: Selma, Only Lovers Left Alive, Belle
Rachel: Selma, Nightcrawler, A Most Violent Year
Vanessa: Under the Skin, Selma, The Raid 2
Gabe: Under the Skin, Selma, I Origins
WINNERS Selma (5) Under the Skin (4) I Origins (3)
Surreal comedy Birdman and Indonesian martial arts epic The Raid 2 both get 2 mentions. Old-fashioned crime epic A Most Violent Year, period drama Belle, Nightcrawler, vampire rock meditation Only Lovers Left Alive, and Black Swan-for-drummers Whiplash also get a mention apiece. I’m surprised there’s nothing her for Foxcatcher.
I’m happy to see that I Origins is being remembered by others, too. It knocked The Raid 2 and The Rover out of that third and fourth place for me, and I Origins makes me lose it (i.e. cry) as much as any film since Requiem for a Dream– albeit for very different reasons.
Under the Skin is a unique experience. It’s been compared to the work of Stanley Kubrick and David Lynch, but it’s very different from each, and it’s not “art house” either, no matter how many people like to abuse the term. It has more to do with Scotland’s visual arts movement than any of those other comparisons. It gets three first places where Selma gets two, but Selma gets more mentions, so take that however you like. They’re both must-see films if you’re anything of a cinephile. Selma feels like it speaks directly to this moment in U.S. history by offering us a defining look at another.
BEST THREE FILMS, BIG BUDGET
SL: Gone Girl, Interstellar, Dawn of the Planet of the Apes
Eden: Interstellar, The Grand Budapest Hotel, Captain America: The Winter Soldier
Cleopatra: Interstellar, Captain America: The Winter Soldier, Dawn of the Planet of the Apes
Amanda: The Grand Budapest Hotel, The Tale of Princess Kaguya, Interstellar
Rachel: Gone Girl, The Grand Budapest Hotel, Unbroken
Vanessa: Gone Girl, Interstellar, Fury
Gabe: Interstellar, Fury, Gone Girl
WINNERS Interstellar (6) Gone Girl (4) The Grand Budapest Hotel (3)
Captain America: The Winter Soldierand Dawn of the Planet of the Apes both get two mentions, which goes to show you just how far our comic book and action movies have come in reflecting harder messages (Captain America‘s real assault is against the relationship the military, private contractors, and government hold with each other, while Dawn creates a commentary on the wars of race and hate we can’t seem to escape right now). Fury also gets two mentions, and I really do think it’s the military movie for our time. Hmm, there seems to be an awful lot of commentary on how our military is misused these days.
The Tale of Princess Kaguya, a beautiful animated movie, and Unbroken, Angelina Jolie’s big budget directorial debut about a World War II POW also get a mention. Not many have seen Kaguya, and Unbroken‘s interesting in that critics were repulsed by it and audiences loved it. Go figure.
The Grand Budapest Hotel, the kind of time-hopping, deeply personal confection of a frame story only Wes Anderson could create, gets three votes, and deservedly so.
Gone Girl and Interstellar both get three first places, although Interstellar is on 6 of our lists while Gone Girl only on 4. Again, interpret how you will and, again, both are musts if you’re a cinephile.
Gone Girl is the tightest thriller of the year and suffers mostly because of its intentionally cold exterior. It’s a film that tricks and misleads you the way the best thrillers do, but that values its meta commentary more than the plot and couldn’t care less. Few masterpieces are built around so willfully and unabashedly manipulating their audience.
Interstellar, on the other hand, wears its heart on its sleeve and, if you still don’t see it, will have Matthew McConaughey weep until you do. It’s a brilliantly felt movie, complex and elusive at times, but simple and accessible when you need it to be. Few masterpieces are this honestly emotional without being cloying. Like Under the Skin and Selma, Gone Girl and Interstellar are about as opposite as movie experiences can be.
We hope this is useful to you. It’s not meant to necessarily declare “the best” in something as it is to introduce films you may not have heard, and to remind you of some of the films we liked that were overlooked by awards ceremonies this year.
Gone Girl is the movie you go to in order to have your mind race, and to keep yourself up well past any reasonable bedtime because you’re still thinking about and discussing it afterward. It’s the chill up your spine you feel not when something is lurking in the shadows, but rather when everything is in the light, smiling at you, and you still can’t shake the feeling that it’s not quite right.
The plot for director David Fincher’s latest movie can only be described in basics. A couple’s marriage goes south. She disappears. We see the evolution of their relationship via flashbacks from her diary. As these flashbacks turn violent, we begin to suspect that the husband Nick (Ben Affleck) has killed his wife Amy (Rosamund Pike). The police, and the public, slowly turn on him.
To say any more would be to ruin any of the mystery’s dozen twists and turns. Based on the novel by Gillian Flynn, who also adapts the screenplay, Gone Girl is a tone poem of steadily mounting tension and gradually revealed half-truths.
While I’m a fan of the Fincher who directed Se7en, and The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, dark films that batter your defenses down and overwhelm you, Gone Girl is his gentlest delivery yet, and at the same time his least sentimental. The film is uncomfortably cold in the way a brutally honest truth is.
Much of the film’s intrigue is in learning how every character starts off a sociopath, or learns (or remembers) to become one in order to survive and cope. In order to deal with a predatory media, the honest learn how to act honest for TV. The liars don’t need to; they already know how. Even the film itself adopts these traits – half the fun as a viewer is in realizing exactly how you’ve been played, by characters and by the filmmakers alike.
This may sound unappealing, and it would be in a lesser director’s hands, but Fincher takes a haunting snapshot of modern society. I’d be willing to call Gone Girl a dark comedy in places, but this is comedy that scars. The national media culture lampooned here, tripping over each other for exclusives and making up stories on the fly, bears close resemblances to our own. The film’s most disturbing elements have little to do with murder, and everything to do with the appetite we’ve developed for it. In one scene, a ridiculous Nancy Grace analogue and guest experts judge public figures they’ve never met by analyzing brief mannerisms, as if you can judge a human being’s makeup by how they raise their hand or nod their head.
Gone Girl is a Rorschach Test of a movie that everybody’s meant to fail. Like the ink blots you’re asked to assign shapes and stories to, Gone Girl can reveal where your head is in its mystery. How much do you base assumptions of guilt on facts, and how much do you base those same assumptions on personality, presentation, and narrative?
This is complicated by using actors we’re familiar with more for their status than their talent. Affleck is a lightning rod, in the news more often as a celebrity than as an actor. Pike is best known for her role as a Bond girl in Die Another Day. Comedians like Tyler Perry (the Madea franchise) and Neil Patrick Harris (How I Met Your Mother) hold serious roles, and are quite good. Even Emily Ratajkowski, best known for her role in Robin Thicke’s controversial “Blurred Lines” music video, plays a crucial supporting role. We can’t help but bring our presumptions about these actors into our experience watching the movie. Fincher knows this, plays with our assumptions, and never misses a chance to undermine you as a viewer.
Gone Girl is a masterful thriller that stuns with its complete ability to misdirect you. Staging, casting, editing, the musical score by Trent Reznor – Fincher may not want to coddle his audience, but there’s no mistaking that every detail here is built around the viewer. That’s what makes a consummate storyteller. Gone Girl is not the Fincher thriller I expected; it’s something far more subversive. There is no way to anticipate how it evolves, but its twists and turns are handled deftly and the film’s satirical elements are discomforting in all the best ways.
This is one to experience in the theater, with a picture three stories tall and the sound coming out of dozens of speakers. Be warned, it’s not a movie for kids.
Does it Pass the Bechdel Test?
This section helps us discuss one aspect of movies that we’d like to see improved – the representation of women. Read why we’re including this section here.
1. Does Gone Girl have more than one woman in it?
Yes. It stars Rosamund Pike, an incredible turn by Carrie Coon, Kim Dickens, Lisa Banes, Missi Pyle, Emily Ratajkowski, Casey Wilson, Lola Kirke, and Sela Ward. In fact, women outnumber the men nearly 2-to-1 in the picture.
2. Do they talk to each other?
Yes. This would ordinarily be the section where I name the conversation or two that women have together in the film, but Gone Girl has too many to cite.
3. About something other than a man?
Yes. The mystery of the film – investigating the murder of a woman – means that conversations center around Amy as often as they do her husband Nick.
The lone difficulty lies in Nick’s resentment of being molded by Amy over the years. It’s made a point in Nick’s mind, and I have no doubt that some viewers out there will hold sections of the film up as banners for Male Rights. This would represent a complete misreading of Gone Girl, however.
As I said earlier, everyone learns to be a sociopath by the end of the film, but Nick and Amy start that way. He writes for a men’s magazine, she writes online quizzes for women. The two are meant to represent what we teach young men and women to be, what we teach them to value. As such exemplary students of these lessons, they act the way those magazines always tell us to act.
As creepy, walking satire so dark it’s chilling, the murder investigation on hand interacts with the satire of our media and celebrity culture. So yes, you could insist that Nick is a Men’s Rights hero or a victim of Feminism, as some have, but it would mean you have a blind spot a mile wide when it comes to his character. If you do that, you’re either the most selective viewer I’ve ever met, or you have an agenda.
If anything, most of the women in Gone Girl are by the end forced to act counter to their natures. The film’s very critical of how society forces both men and women into preconceived roles. Most of the film is spent watching characters perfect the roles society expects them to play, regardless of who a character really is. I spoke with Eden, S.L., and Vanessa after the movie. We’ve each had an opportunity to see the film, and we all agree – Gone Girl is a deeply Feminist movie. It’s a vicious indictment of what movements like Men’s Rights Activism have made of us, the roles our most conservative critics expect men and women to play, and how those roles make us so much easier to exploit.
This is the “Come on in, I’ll make you a drink” at the end of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, extended into a frightening movie of people playing into the deep expectations our society mines.
How did ’50s musical star Gene Kelly play a part in launching David Fincher’s career? To explain that, we’ve got to rewind all the way back to 1989. Before Paula Abdul was a beloved reality show superstar, she was a singer and dancer.
Back then, David Fincher wasn’t an Oscar-winning director responsible for Fight Club, The Social Network, and The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo. He was a sought-after commercial and music video director who had worked with ’80s musical artists like Rick Springfield, Foreigner, and Gipsy Kings.
Neither Abdul nor Fincher needed the other, but they would each make the other’s career. Abdul got her start through a try-out for the Laker Girls, the L.A. Lakers’ cheerleading squad. She was quickly promoted as their head choreographer, shortly after which she was nabbed by the Jackson family to do their music video and tour choreography. Fans now think of her just as an 80s singer with a handful of hits, but Abdul’s history as a choreographer – especially with Michael and Janet Jackson – is often overlooked. She was one of the most important choreographers of the ’80s and ’90s.
Abdul made a demo in 1987 and – on the strength of her dance ability at a time when music videos were king – her singing career kicked off. Her single “Straight Up” was a megahit in 1988, fourth on the year-end Billboard Hot 100. It hardly needed a music video to make it relevant. She had worked with Fincher that year, creating a solid – but largely ignored – video for “(It’s Just) The Way That You Love Me.”
Fincher made his money directing commercials. He had made a name for himself as an edgy, subversive director whose ads could stand on their own as half-minute films. Sometimes, they barely featured a brand’s name.
“I’m totally anti-commercialism,” Fincher said. “I would never do commercials where people hold the product by their head and tell you how great it is, I just wouldn’t do that stuff. It’s all about inference.”
Fincher had also co-founded Propaganda Films with, among others, Michael Bay. He knew at a time when MTV made or broke careers overnight that the quickest route into feature film directing was music videos. He’d been at it since 1985, he was solid, incredibly productive, and he had vision, but he had yet to break out as a music video director the way he had as a director of commercials.
Then came “Straight Up.”
Aside from featuring Arsenio Hall and introducing America to Djimon Hounsou, it became one of the most heavily played videos on MTV, winning four 1989 MTV Video Music Awards – Best Female Video, Best Dance Video, Best Choreography, and Best Editing. It’s often forgotten because it was overshadowed by a music video Fincher directed later that year – Madonna’s “Express Yourself” – and one that was released the next year – Aerosmith’s “Janie’s Got a Gun.”
It’s worth noting the video that stuck the longest in people’s minds from 1989, however, was Madonna’s “Like a Prayer,” directed by Mary Lambert and winner of MTV’s Viewer’s Choice award. Lambert had earlier in the decade earned notice working with choreographer Abdul on a handful of Janet Jackson’s music videos. The ’80s were a small world.
Paula Abdul had already spent years as one of the music industry’s go-to choreographers, and she had a major hit on her hands before filming with Fincher. Fincher was, perhaps, inevitable – a year later, he held three of the four nominations for best direction in MTV’s 1990 Video Music Awards (for Madonna’s “Vogue” and Don Henley’s “The End of the Innocence,” in addition to the one for Aerosmith).
Yet Fincher’s first music video to truly catch the public’s attention was “Straight Up,” and the battlefield of MTV was littered with productive directors who never broke through. Paula Abdul was the route Fincher took in stepping up to major artists like Madonna and Aerosmith, and “Straight Up” was the music video that truly announced him, the connective tissue between one phase of his career and the next.
But before Paula Abdul was a reality show superstar, she was a singer, and before she was a singer, she was a choreographer, and before that – as she once told an interviewer – she was a little girl who had no idea she wanted to dance until she saw Gene Kelly in Singin’ in the Rain, and then it’s all she ever wanted to do. So thank you, Gene Kelly, I really liked The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo.
Get to the Part About Ariana Grande Already!
Look at this. If you haven’t watched “Straight Up” yet, watch it after. (On certain browsers, you’ll have to click through to YouTube.)
Congratulations, you’ll now have that song cycling through your head for the next month.
Notice anything? The two music videos are incredibly similar, down to the cutting philosophy of isolating featured dancers. It’s not as if no one’s used these techniques between “Straight Up” and “Problem,” but few music videos have echoed “Straight Up” so proudly.
They’re both edited with what I think of as rhythm editing – this isn’t a term used very widely in editing – but I liken it to choreographies themselves. A rhythm choreography is something that’s based on the music. You cut to the hard beats. “Problem” is a superb example of this. From the moment Grande starts singing, nearly every cut is made to either two or four beats. As she crescendos and we approach the chorus “I got one less problem without you,” the editing reflects the increased intensity, suddenly cutting on every one or two beats. Later in the song, we’re cutting on half-beats, as well.
How exactly does this reflect rhythm choreography? In many styles – jazz, tap, and hip hop – a rhythm choreography broadly means that the choreo is based on the musicality of a piece. Its inverse is lyrical choreography, which means the choreo is based on the meaning or story of a piece. They’re not mutually exclusive, but choreographers often prioritize one over the other based on the dance they want to create. As Dance Spirit described the difference between hip hop and lyrical hip hop, “hip-hop dancers hit the beat (one, two, stop). Lyrical hip-hop dancers ride through the beat while still accenting it (one, two-ooo).”
These are broad definitions. Hip hop, jazz, tap they each have countless style permutations, but for the purposes of understanding how a music video is edited, I think rhythm and lyrical editing fit very well. Rhythm values editing to the hard beat, reflecting the pace and intensity of the music itself. Lyrical editing prioritizes the story; you edit to the timing the narrative demands.
“Problem” wants a softer tone, but it still wants to be a rhythm-edited dance video, so it can’t use the severe overexposures and underexposures Fincher uses on “Straight Up.” Such severe contrasts are a dated effect anyway, evoking a style of glamor photography that is today more closely associated with commercial style – it’s the way we shoot iPads, Big Macs, and tractors now. Glamor photography in 2014 is far more informed by fashion photography, tabloid coverage, and theatre. “Problem” does reference Fincher’s black-and-white effects in Grande’s two-tone main set and pinwheel backdrop, while evolving it in the psychedelic tunnel effect of Azalea’s solos. (The pinwheel is used as a lighting effect in Grande’s separate lyric video for “Problem.”)
Grande (who, unlike some singers, is reportedly very involved in the editing process) and director Nev Todorovic also double down on Fincher’s film scratches, most notably at the edges of frame, while updating other imperfections to the digital era – those scratches are joined by digital artifacting (when pieces of information are dropped from the image, often in the form of visual static). A few faux-signal losses, like you might see on an old-fashioned TV, mimic edits as a way of simultaneously prolonging a single shot while maintaining the quicker pace of editing – your brain registers a cut, but the shot hasn’t changed. The psychedelic effect for Azalea further echoes the digital concept of constant screen refreshes.
Similarly, the dance styles are updated. The tap and isolation jazz in “Straight Up” – styles that typically require professional training – are replaced with styles more closely associated with street performance, like breakdancing and flexing (also called bone breaking). Abdul’s motorcycle is updated to some fancy Vespas.
From a song standpoint, a couple of quick notes – I appreciate that the song “Problem” itself is about a woman cutting off a difficult relationship, rather than pining for one or trying to get the guy. Iggy Azalea’s line “I got 99 problems, but you won’t be one” is the conclusive rejection to Jay-Z’s infamous and oft-repeated “I got 99 problems, but a bitch ain’t one” that I’ve been waiting 10 years to hear. The saxophone loop has seen credit given to Macklemore’s use of sax in songs like “Thrift Shop.” That’s fitting, but the sax loop in “Problem” has far more in common with the baseline electric guitar riff from C&C Music Factory’s “Everybody Dance Now.”
As we understand the evolution of storytelling on film, it’s important to understand the evolution of music videos as well. It’s still the medium from which many of our future directors arise, and through which endless new editing, design, and cinematography techniques are forged.
As a viewer, “Problem” is even more enjoyable when I can recognize all the little details that come together to make it. Like “Straight Up,” it may be popular for a year before fading away, but the artistry behind it deserves better. Most will never give these music videos credit for being smart, nuanced, studied pieces of filmmaking. They’re bubble gum, and that makes it easy not to afford them their places in the history of the medium. It’s too bad. The technique behind “Problem” is masterful.
Gabriel Diego Valdez 