The setting of Gone Girl
So this movie was like 80% filmed in the town I grew up in and it's the most important thing to ever happen to us (aside from being the portal to hell that Rush Limbaugh emerged from) so I'm gonna provide way more useless information than any of you could ever ask for about how the geography of the town was manipulated, what that experience was like for people living in town, and my personal experiences with filming. The Two Friends call themselves connoisseurs of context, but I guarantee that this context will be missing from their episode.
Also, yes, I know that what I'm writing is insane but this was important to me and my town so let me have this.
Assuming that the fictional town of North Carthage functions the same as the town it's based on, here are some facts that probably didn't make it into JJ's dossier:
The Dunne family is in violation of city ordinances regarding their trash and recycling cans. Last time I lived there you were only allowed to have your cans out on the street after 5:00pm the night before the weekly pickup, and the cans had to be either just in front of, or on the very end of, your driveway. They placed their cans well outside of the designated zone, and in that neighborhood, trash day was Tuesday and recycling was Friday during the time of filming. Therefore it is a violation of city ordinance to have both cans out on the street at the same time, and a further violation because of their placement.
Nick and Amy are really bad at navigation. They cross the bridge far too often, and they cross it to get to places that the bridge doesn't lead to. Amy crosses the Mississippi River to get to the Ozarks, she's headed in the complete opposite direction. Nick heads up to St. Louis like 3-4 times in the movie and crosses the bridge each time. The only even semi-reasonable route to get to STL if you are heading accross the bridge involves heading up to Chester Illinois (setting for parts of The Fugitive although it wasn't filmed there) and then crossing the bridge to drive through Perryville just to end up on I-55 heading north to STL. This is a batshit route to take, it turns an hour and forty-five minute drive into a nearly two hours and thirty minute drive, plus on the return journey they are adding an additional fifteen minutes through town to get back to their house after a long, stressful day. If they would just get on I-55 heading straight from their house they could be on the interstate in less than six minutes. The only reasons someone crosses that bridge are to either A: go to a parking lot for a carpet warehouse where a sweet old man used to sell cookies (not sure if he still does, haven't lived there in a few years now) or B: go to the worst strip club in America.
I saw Emily Ratajkowski at the gym one day and holy fucking shit. As weird as this sounds, especially for one of the most well-known models in the world, she's actually somehow not photogenic. In videos and pictures she's like, maybe the most beautiful person in the world, in person you realize that she is not the same species as the rest of us. This also holds true for Rosario Dawson and Jon Hamm.
The house that Nick and Amy lived in was home to some very nice people who were excellent candy-givers at Halloween.
The Bar was an unocupied building that they completely renovated just for the movie. The most unrealistic part of the movie was at the beginning when Nick asks for a bourbon and Margo pours him some Blanton's. Blanton's is very tough to acquire around there, and regardless, no bar in town would have had something that nice at the time. In the last year or so some bullshit awful fuckin "high-end cocktail bar" opened so maybe they would have something nice. After filming was done, someone bought the place and just left everything exactly as it was and opened up "The Bar" for real. Nice place, too nice for that shithole, especially as a college town. They weren't really a popular spot to drink at, but they had some insanely good Thai Chili wings.
Filming of this movie pressured the Drury family to renovate Drury Lodge because they saw how shitty it looked on screen. The Drurys are the feudal overlords of the town and they are also incredibly thin-skinned so they couldn't let that go.
There's a short scene where Amy is sleeping in her car and gets woken up by a security guard at a motel. At the time, that motel shared a parking lot with an amazing little diner called Sand's Pancake House. I used to eat there every Sunday with my family after church as a kid. Then, probably like seven years back, Sand's moved to a new location across town and my family hasn't been there since. This is because my dad, a racist, is scared because its new location is too close to "the hood" (that just means poor black people live like three blocks away). When I go back to visit my parents, I always make sure to stop in there and get breakfast.
Nick's run from his house to Margo's house is about a 3 mile run. Not unreasonable by any means, until you consider that his only possible route required him to run across the busiest intersection in town, a place where there are no sidewalks, and in over 20 years of living there I never once saw a pedestrian cross. If he wanted to run on a sidewalk he would've had to go a little bit out of his way to get on the biking/walking trail, which would add about an extra quarter mile to his distance. Not unfathomable, just not very likely, especially given where his head was at. His angle of approach to Margo's house also implies that he ran down multiple streets that are very unfriendly to pedestrians.
When Amy makes a call on the payphone at the gas station, she's at the store I used to work at in college. There are several issues with this scene. The main one was that there were two semi-trucks at the store. This makes absolutely zero sense logistically. First off, we didn't have diesel fuel, so the trucks would not have been getting gas there. Second, this store was too far out of the way for any trucks to just stop in there to get a soda or something. Our store was located right next to the college campus, the complete opposite side of town from the interstate, and was the last commercial property on Sprigg St, so there was no way they would've been passing through there to make deliveries. The only trucks that ever stopped there were our vendors, and neither of the trucks in the scene were our vendors. Also it was way too dark for them to be making deliveries around town. The film largely takes place in July and based on how dark it was it was probably 9:00 P.M. or later. All of our deliveries were made no later than 2:00 P.M. the entire time I worked there.
I saw Rosamund Pike and Casey Wilson at Andy's Frozen Custard enjoying some ice cream. I regret to inform you that I do not remember what flavors they were getting. I didn't recognize Casey Wilson until I saw the movie, but I did recognize Rosamund Pike and told her that I loved her in Jack Reacher. She seemed genuinely suprised and happy that someone recognized her, because most of the town still thought that Reese Witherspoon was playing her role. She was very nice.
I found my friend's missing dog at Margo's house once.
Various members of the crew hung out at a Mexican restaurant basically every day of the shoot. It was probably the best Mexican place in town, but that isn't exactly a high bar for rural Missouri.
In conclusion, I'm disappointed that David Fincher didn't put more effort into perfectly capturing the nuances of a small regional micropolitan area in the asshole of the worst area of the worst state in the country. The movie gets one star because it's unrealistic, and that's how YouTube told me that media criticism works.