Zodiac

Started by MacGuffin, January 20, 2005, 01:26:15 AM

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polkablues

Quote from: matt35mm on March 03, 2007, 09:53:34 PM
Hopefully this film can be taken as a good sign for things to come this year, especially since it was better than the Best Picture nominees from last year.

That's what I was thinking; if this movie had been released in December, it would have gotten seven or eight Oscar nominations.  As it is, here in March, who knows if it'll still be remembered by enough people at the end of this year.
My house, my rules, my coffee

MacGuffin

Dear Editor,

This is the Zodiac speaking. I just watched David Fincher's interpretation of my entire killing spree. And I have to commend him on his accomplishment. He found the perfect tone and pace; never letting the story lag for one second (which is to say the editing was superb) and keeping the focus entirely on me (as it should) and what I did to the victims and the men trying to solve the murders because when you get down to it, the film is all talking (about me, mind you). So to turn this story into a crime-drama version of All The President's Men is an incredible act of story/filmmaking. The film is like an expansion of his masterpiece, Se7en, but going even deeper into the investigation of a serial killer and how the detectives and newspapermen become so obsessed with finding out who I am. Everything clicked into place to bring that sense of time alive, even right from the start with the use of the old Paramount and WB logos. And I will never listen to Hurdy Gurdy Man the same way again. All I can tell you is, I saw it once, and I will see it again!


Sincerely,

Zodiac


"Don't think about making art, just get it done. Let everyone else decide if it's good or bad, whether they love it or hate it. While they are deciding, make even more art." - Andy Warhol


Skeleton FilmWorks

last days of gerry the elephant

I knew it was you...
Since there was a mention of the Zodiac being a film buff, I had Xixax in mind and specifically Mac.

Ghostboy

I saw it again tonight and it was even better! It was like seeing it again for the first time, because there was so much new information I picked up on.

pete

Quote from: john on March 03, 2007, 01:28:19 AM
Fuckin' astonishing.

Fincher can go either way with his completely computer generated shots. I dug Panic Room, but some of those shots left me cold and indifferent.

Then here... it was like all the love George Lucas claims to have for digital effects actually put into effect. Fincher's love for making the movie was contagious. I loved watching this movie.

You know what I didn't love though? The four young, black girls that sat behind me.

I mean, God Bless 'em for seeing Zodiac...but I didn't need to hear:

in relation to one of the victims pleas: "That dude is a faggot"

in relation to Robert Greysmith's car: "Fuckin' small ass car. Whaaaat?"

in relation to another victim: "Fuck him up."

in relation to Paul Avery: "smokin' a blunt like a pimp."

in relation to the location: "This shit is in San Francisco?" Keep in mind, the Golden Gate Bridge is featured prominently on the poster and, oh yeah, we're seeing this film in a theater....in San Francisco.

in relation to the ending: "They don't even gonna catch that motherfucker?" followed by, "That is a hella stupid ending."

I shit you not. I imagine this belongs in the "worst theatrical experiences" conversation. Sorry. It's more of a tangent because, see, regardless of their comments....that movie was fucking phenominal in every way.

I beat you, I wish I didn't, but I did.  In my theater, when they first went into whatever the facility to visit Lee, people in the back started shouting something about sitting down, and then the threats grew louder.  At the beginning, all of us thought it was some kinda real good THX work, but it went on and then I saw a fat white kid walking out, I'd seen him earlier at the bathroom and I remembered his giant manbreasts.  Then a minute later, four or five kids were laughing and all walking after him.  Though the guy might've just left to tell the security guard, while the five ensuing kids were actually four ensuing kids and one kid running, I dunno, but then those kids made about four more subsequently less distracting runs up and down the aisle.  But yeah, good thing the movie was long so a smaller percentage of the film was ruined.  Oh, and the first half of the movie consisted of the entire theater chitchatting everytime another Bay Area location was named.  Similar thing happened when I saw The Departed in Boston.  I think I saw someone pumping his fist in the air during one of the magnificent establishing shots.

As for enjoyment of the movie, you beat me, I wish I could like it more, but as likable as all the actors were, I just really didn't care that much.  The filmmaking was grand, the acting was superb, I had a good time just sitting and watching, but couldn't really invest much into it.  I reckon I'll have a better explanation for why I felt the way I felt in a few days, but here it is for now.
"Tragedy is a close-up; comedy, a long shot."
- Buster Keaton

©brad

Quote from: Lucid on March 05, 2007, 12:13:50 AMThe drive home was pretty spooky.

hahah, my walk home was pretty spooky too.

i didn't want this to end, it was so freakin' awesome. definitely fincher's most mature film by far. and scary! a couple of those scenes (specially the one towards the end, you know which one) made my toes curl. there were a couple parts i didn't quite understand so i def want to see this sucker again.

john

Quote from: pete on March 05, 2007, 02:55:14 AM

I beat you, I wish I didn't, but I did.  In my theater, when they first went into whatever the facility to visit Lee, people in the back started shouting something about sitting down, and then the threats grew louder.  At the beginning, all of us thought it was some kinda real good THX work, but it went on and then I saw a fat white kid walking out, I'd seen him earlier at the bathroom and I remembered his giant manbreasts.  Then a minute later, four or five kids were laughing and all walking after him.  Though the guy might've just left to tell the security guard, while the five ensuing kids were actually four ensuing kids and one kid running, I dunno, but then those kids made about four more subsequently less distracting runs up and down the aisle.  But yeah, good thing the movie was long so a smaller percentage of the film was ruined.  Oh, and the first half of the movie consisted of the entire theater chitchatting everytime another Bay Area location was named.  Similar thing happened when I saw The Departed in Boston.  I think I saw someone pumping his fist in the air during one of the magnificent establishing shots.

As for enjoyment of the movie, you beat me, I wish I could like it more, but as likable as all the actors were, I just really didn't care that much.  The filmmaking was grand, the acting was superb, I had a good time just sitting and watching, but couldn't really invest much into it.  I reckon I'll have a better explanation for why I felt the way I felt in a few days, but here it is for now.

Yeah, that's why I get such a conflicted feeling when I'm in an empty theater. I'm a bit giddy because the chances of someone fucking up my experience of the film is slim...but, at the same time, I WANT a crowded house for a new Fincher film....even if the possibility of the audience being assholes is much higher. I just want them to shut the fuck up.

I really hope you expand on why you didn't care for this film. I did, and so did a lot of other people on the board... so I'm more intrigued about contrary opinions on this film rather than unanimous praise.

Maybe every day is Saturday morning.

w/o horse

I kind of thought I was bored by it, but that's because I kept waiting to be.  It far surpassed All the President's Man, a movie about an event and a search for the truth that doesn't cover nearly the same range of emotional ground, that doesn't cover nearly the amount of frustrations, or enter into the nature of the search through the structure of the narrative.  What about that narrative by the way, that somehow snuck in at least two major characters with separate if overlapping periods of obsession, and a large number of small characters that made punctuated entrances.  I'd call it immersing, and I've been stuck in it since I saw it.  The opening shot, the car crawling down the neighborhood street, that's how this movie is moving through my memory.
Raven haired Linda and her school mate Linnea are studying after school, when their desires take over and they kiss and strip off their clothes. They take turns fingering and licking one another's trimmed pussies on the desks, then fuck each other to intense orgasms with colorful vibrators.

MacGuffin

Fincher vs. the Zodiac Killer
David Fincher stunned us with Seven and Fight Club. Can he do it again with his take on the Zodiac killer?
Source: Premiere Magazine

In a gloomy third-floor study tucked away in a classic New Orleans mansion, oblivious to the rain that's lashing the windows, David Fincher is editing his sixth film, Zodiac. It's the story of the serial murders that plagued the Bay Area — and in particular, two San Francisco Chronicle journalists and a pair of cops — during the late '60s and early '70s.

Glimmering on his laptop is a scene featuring inspectors Dave Toschi and Bill Armstrong, played by Mark Ruffalo and Anthony Edwards, pleading for a search warrant, and Fincher pretty well knows it's headed for the director's cut on DVD.

He's trying to trim another five minutes from the film, which when he awoke this morning was clocking in at two hours and 38 minutes, and his deadline to decide what to cut is near. Meanwhile, some 20 feet away on the other side of the door is a cast and crew of more than 100 people, who, once the lighting is reset, will be waiting on Fincher's legendarily explicit instructions as they shoot a feature adaptation of an 85-year-old short story by F. Scott Fitzgerald called The Curious Case of Benjamin Button.

When Fincher looks up, however — his watchful eyes widened like those of his kindred nocturnal creature, the owl — his question is unexpectedly general and ruminative: "Do you think people are gonna come see our movie?" He seems to actually want an answer. And the query is a bit of a stumper.

"It would be nice," the 44-year-old director had said a bit earlier, "to make a movie that everybody just goes, hands down, 'Thank you for making this movie.' I don't see that happening. It's not been my experience." Although his dark and disturbing films have won Fincher a loyal cult following, he has crossed into $100 million territory with only one, the 1995 serial-killer thriller Seven. And it's been five years since Panic Room arrived to respectable box office and mixed reviews — his reward for slogging through what he calls a drag. "I like those actors so much, but I probably squeezed a lot of the juice out of it. I was trying to make something super-taut and efficient. The thing that was so great about [Sam Peckinpah's] Straw Dogs was the juice." Since then, he has flirted with a few projects (including Lords of Dogtown) but worked mostly on lucrative if largely anonymous advertising shoots. "I think he took some time off," says Jake Gyllenhaal, who plays Chronicle cartoonist Robert Graysmith in Zodiac, "to look for things that he felt like he was moved by and that were authentic to him."

Now, with the $70 million Zodiac slated for a March 2 release and the Cate Blanchett-Brad Pitt-starring Benjamin Button in production, Fincher is in the midst of what's starting to look like a second act to his career. The former music-video director (Madonna's "Express Yourself" and "Vogue," among others) had a rocky beginning in Hollywood, when he took on Alien 3 as his feature debut and ran up against the daunting legacies of Ridley Scott and James Cameron, but he hit big with Seven. His follow-up, The Game — in which Michael Douglas suffers a series of misadventures that may or may not be real — was considered murky and self-indulgent; it earned about half of Seven's take and Fincher took a similar cut in adulation. Two years later, he reteamed with his Seven star Pitt for Fight Club, which, though it earned even less than The Game, attracted a rabid fan base on home video. Fincher recalls Fight Club's painful bellyflop at the Venice film festival: "I remember being introduced to the crowd and [thinking], I don't know if this is the audience for this movie... And then this gaggle of women coming out afterwards dressed in their Venetian finery. They saw me and gave me this withering look of disapproval, which — because of the way I was raised — is kind of water off the back of a duck."

Which brings us back to the implications of the question Fincher asked in that New Orleans study: What if he follows Panic Room after all this time with another film that the crowds don't buy? The director shrugs. "You can't really worry about it," he says. "That's like saying you worry about your children and who they're hanging out with and how they spend their time. But ultimately you've made as much of an imprint as you can. You let the thing go out there, and it has its own life." Fincher's involvement with the Zodiac murders goes all the way back to his own childhood. Though he was born in Denver and went to high school in Ashland, Oregon, he spent much of his childhood in Marin County's San Anselmo, easy driving distance from the territory the killer so savagely worked. He knew the real fear that set in after the killer's threat to target a school bus full of kids. "Hired guards were following [us] to school," he says. "It was a big deal. San Francisco views itself as a sort of glittering jewel, a cosmopolitan little city. And then a guy who looks like a disgruntled postal worker with military boots writes some nasty letters and gets inside everybody's imagination and turns the whole thing upside down, two years after the summer of love. A guy with a crew cut and horn-rimmed glasses, wearing a windbreaker. You know, the FedEx man is bumming our trip."

Authorities blame the Zodiac, as he was called for short, for numerous attacks that left five dead (although the killer publicly claimed 37 victims). Fincher's film opens with the second incident, the July 4, 1969, attack on Darlene Ferrin (who was killed) and Mike Mageau (who survived) at a lovers' lane by the Blue Rock Springs golf course in Vallejo. When the assailant's clumsily written letter arrived at the Chronicle on August 1, Graysmith was intrigued; he nosed his way into the quest for answers begun by reporter Paul Avery (played by Robert Downey Jr.), churning up his own leads and pushing for clues (as well as supplying some) from cops in the four jurisdictions touched by the murders. As Avery burned out from work stress and drug use, Graysmith — a onetime Eagle Scout who had a feverish need to get to the bottom of the case — compiled the data that led to his 1986 book, Zodiac, and its follow-up, Zodiac Unmasked. These books formed the basis for the script by James Vanderbilt (The Rundown).

In late 2003 Fincher was handed the screenplay, then 158 pages — and headed for almost 200, as the director, Vanderbilt, and producer Brad Fischer opened their own investigation into the stone-cold case. "We made multiple trips to the Bay Area," says Fischer. "We met with witnesses, family members of suspects, retired and current investigators, the mayors of San Francisco and Vallejo. David was completely involved with that process — really, leading it."

The film became a tale of investigation and obsession. "The question is," Fincher says, "when you're that far down the well, what will satisfy you? I can see how the Graysmiths of the world go, 'I don't want to sacrifice my family to do this but just let me... just give me two more weeks, and then, just give me another week after that, and then tomorrow — I'm this close!'" The mind-set was familiar, he adds. "I just drew from my own personal experiences. A lot of creative and driven and obsessive or compulsive artistic friends. My father was that way — he had projects outside of what he did [as a journalist for Life magazine] that became the focus for him. So I've seen that happen and it's hard on families, when a male authority figure kind of goes AWOL to explore this [obsession]. But it's weird — our society is sort of set up for that, 'cause most heroic characters start out misunderstood."

During his 18 months of research, Fincher kept his eye on Gyllenhaal for the Graysmith role.

"I really liked him in Donnie Darko," he says, "and I thought, He's an interesting double-sided coin. He can do that naive thing but he can also do possessed."

Gyllenhaal knew he was in for an arduous shoot ("He entered into an insane crucible," says Downey), as the central character in a production that would sprawl across some 112 shooting days — notoriously long days that the famously meticulous Fincher makes extra-long with painstaking tweaks and many, many takes. "There are two very difficult dreams that you learn a lot from as an actor," Gyllenhaal says. "One is a Shakespeare and the other is a David Fincher. Someone said to me, 'He paints with people.' The word 'perfectionist' is oversimplifying it."

"We promise you that in the course of filming Zodiac no animals were hurt," Downey says with a laugh. "That's where the humane behavior ended. No ego was left untarnished. We're doing a scene and I realized after we'd done it about 40 times, I was tied to the mast. Dave's like, 'Everything that Downey has just spent the last six hours doing? Let's delete that, go to lunch, and start over.' But that's the shit, dude. It's — Fincher."

Downey also recalls how Fincher would point out Edwards's acting chops: "'Watch this consummate professional. Every time he adds variety to it, but every time he hits his mark.' It basically came down to this ballet dance of who's the most technically proficient motherfucker on earth today."

Fincher admits that there was a delicate balance between the sparks Downey brought to the film and the demands of the story itself. "Look, Robert is brilliant, he's a genius," he says. "And I'm all for taking a certain amount of time to explore other... But there are limits to where improvisation can help a taut thriller. In certain cases, things have to be said. If there's going to be a payoff, then the legwork has to be done. I like to think that I gave Robert a lot of room." As for Fincher's reputation as a detail fanatic, "I think perfectionism has gotten a bad rap," the director says. "It's so often considered a derogatory thing. It's probably different to somebody whose name is on the movie."

Fincher's meticulousness came down to ensuring that Gyllenhaal had the felt-tip pen favored by Graysmith in his pocket, and that Ruffalo, in deference to Inspector Toschi's bleeding ulcer, would discard the tomato from a sandwich. He was similarly focused on searching out, with music supervisor George Drakoulias, the right pop songs to reflect the era. Donovan's "Hurdy Gurdy Man" is used both for its almost ominous, breathy theatricality and for the grinding instrumental break that punctuates an early, terrifying moment. As for Three Dog Night's cover of "Easy to be Hard" (from the musical Hair!), "it's so ingrained in my psyche as being what the summer of '69 sounded like in northern California," says Fincher. "When you smell the eucalyptus and the sun stays out till 8:40 at night and you're playing basketball with your friends till after dinner. And chlorine and completely being unmonitored. I heard it and I was transported."

The director makes a final tap on his keyboard; perhaps it's the valediction for the warrant scene he had marked as a possible cut, a scene that summarizes information that will later be summarized again by Gyllenhaal. "It's incumbent on the movie to cover the same ground twice, which is a hard thing for an audience to sit through," he says. "You have to have an initial idea of what's going on and then be given more detailed information and then finally it has to build to a place where you can go, 'Wow, fuck, maybe that's it.' I couldn't tell you where the three act breaks in Zodiac are. And I don't know how much I care."

Overall, says Downey, "this wasn't just 'a Fincher movie.' This was very personal to him. I guess the only thing I can really compare it to is doing Natural Born Killers with Oliver Stone, because Oliver felt he really had something to say about the state of the American psyche and the media. But I think more than that, it was a bit of a curve ball for [Fincher] to throw his fans because it's not Seven and it's not Fight Club. It's a very straightforward, chilling, and humanely paced character study of these guys."
"There's a lot of talk in [Zodiac] about how investigations proceed," Fincher says with a kind of resignation. "That stuff's interesting to me. And that's a tricky thing. They had a screening for international [Paramount is releasing the film domestically, Warner Bros. overseas]; apparently the word was, 'Well, this isn't Seven.' And you go, 'Huh. No, it's not.' It's a serial killer movie in a different way."

He seems reconciled to whatever fate awaits in the marketplace. But, not unlike his protagonists — who are "resolute in their belief that they found their man," even though the crimes were never officially solved — he wants his efforts to be understood for what they mean in a larger sense. "Ultimately the movie isn't about knowing. It's about belief," he says. "Really, the drama is about people who won't let go."



-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Zodiac
by Larry Gross

Zodiac is an important postmodern work. It's an authentically "new" and even experimental thing attempting, to quote from Susan Sontag's essay Against Interpretation, to put content in its place. It's very very much a film constructed on a 21st century conception of information as a non-substantive, purely relational digital phenomenon, and the fact that it was shot on video and exists immaterially as digital information is thus not a merely decorative issue but crucial to its meaning.

In the seventies conceptual artists referred almost apocalyptically, to the dematerialization of the work of art. Zodiac is one of the first mainstream movies (The Matrix would be another, JFK from an entirely different direction, another) moving to embrace some of that aspiration.

Zodiac stands to Se7en very much the way Inland Empire stands to Mulholland Drive. It's auto-critique. It takes an artist's admirable if relatively conventional accomplishment and smashes it deliberately into several oddly shaped but ultimately connected pieces.

The most important disturbing, disconcerting aspect of the film is that, despite competent dialogue, and an excellent cast, it is not character centered, but structure and theme centred
...the major theme is representation itself.

How do you represent representation? Fincher does it by telling the story of someone who resists representation, someone who is unknowable, someone about whom there is only a history of not-knowing.

As the two recent major works by Van Sant also photographed by Harris Savides, (A coincidence? I think not.), Last Days and Elephant, demonstrate, when you work with the limits of representation, you seem invariably to be engaged with Death. Death is the real world or thematic term for the problem of representation.

Zodiac is more an elaborate anthology of episodes than a story. In the course of it the problematic of this strange "extraordinary" killer, turns out to be that like Death itself, the more you scrutinize him, the more he merges with the ordinary.

Death is the most extreme thing in life, yet it happens to everybody, everywhere, all the time. In a crucial line of information Downey reminds Gyllenhaal and us that more people die in random traffic accidents than at the hands of mythic devils like Zodiac. But revealing the banality of evil in the Zodiac himself, is far from the main point of the film, only one of its juicy incidental thematic by products.

The great triumphant device strategy is the ordinariness of everything about it, from editing and lighting patterns to down everyone in it, bit players to leads. Gyllenhaal, Downey, Ruffalo and Edwards are directed so that they are just above the water line as "leads". In fact they are as close to being background characters like Elias Koteas, Philp Baker Hall, Donal Logue and Dermot Mulroney as they can be without disappearing into that background. And if you hadn't noticed that this was the case, Fincher points patiently in the background to the conventional moveistar versions, of those characters who stand out beyond their situations in (classic) movies like Bullitt and Dirty Harry.

At the moment of every dramatic "heightened" moment Fincher subtly and expertly slides by any conclusive revelation of character or defining content. There are four fascinating examples of this; Ruffalo's confrontation with Downey over procedure, the three police detectives interrogation of their most likely suspect, Gyllenhaal and Ruffalo piecing together a network of data old and new into a convincing narrative, and finally, Gyllenhaal facing the guy he thinks is the killer.

Depriving these 'big" moments of their conventional dramatic explosiveness is risky but central to Fincher's project: Partly he wants in a very clear and simple way to prepare the audience for the dissatisfaction of not literally catching the bad guy but what is also going on here is a careful mimicking of conventional thriller tropes, in a processs that patiently and exhaustively empties them of all there regular power to console or edify,

Thus if the Zodiac unknowable, that is only because he is an emblem of the entirety of the universe. What is masterful about Zodiac is that every aspect of its structure plays back upon its central disturbing theme. "Knowing" the tiniest thing in the world, precisely, is depicted over and over and in each and every fresh instance, and character perspetive until the very end, as fragmentary, incomplete, frustrated, frustrating.

What is fascinating and so perplexingly compelling about the last three or four scenes in the film is that cognitively we are given a solution, but it is now empty of affect, reversing and upending all conventional narrative results. The Graysmith character, a cartoonist, works through with the cop played by Ruffalo, a kind of schematic of all the events we have seen over and over, handled, mishandled, misinterpreted,, knowledge has become pure form, stretched out precariously as an abstract "story" across the abyss of the lives that have been swallowed up in the failure to become its content. The haunting final scene exquisitely utilizing characters we barely know and can identify, "completes" the abstract search for truth. An i.d. is judged eight on a scale of ten, ten being positive. It and the subsequent crawl gives us everything and nothing.

In any event, Zodiac is far more about our present and future than about our past.

I agree with a number of people who are already descrbing this as a film of/about the information age we're living in now. It is in no way a meaningful "statement" about the late sixties seventies, except in so far as it reminds us that millions of people went through that period leading utterly humdrum non-revolutionary non-counter cultural lives, not particularly pschedelic lives. The Zodiac is a purely timeless monster, and hence utterly askew to, if not satiric of, the period's self-consciousness about itself as historic. Much in the manner of Kubrick's forays into "period," it uses the past as a theatre on which to get out our current and future anxieties and fears, into clearer simpler more mythic focus.

Just for the record, I doubt David Fincher personally knows from or much cares about Conceptual Art or avant guard rhetoric about the Dematerialization of the artwork. He has said he was intent on telling a good story as cleanly and simply as he knew how and I see no reason not to take him at his word. There are certain ways in which the film nearly/almost works at that immediate non-reflective level, though its failures there are conspicuous too-and too obvious I would say not to be (artistically) deliberate. Just a good story told directly? And I'm sure Hitchcock was content to be labeled the 'master of suspense.' He WAS that, but he was the critic of all that at the same time.

Even when he's a nice and sincere guy, never trust the teller, trust the tale.

Larry Gross is a 25 year screenwriting veteran and Winner of Sundance's Waldo Salt Screenwriting Award for his most recent release, We Don't Live Here Anymore.
"Don't think about making art, just get it done. Let everyone else decide if it's good or bad, whether they love it or hate it. While they are deciding, make even more art." - Andy Warhol


Skeleton FilmWorks

SHAFTR

I'm torn on this movie, but in a good way.  I can't decide if I feel it is a 4 star film or a 5 star.  As of last night, I was thinking 4 stars because it is a bit long at 2hrs 40minutes and lacks a satisfying conclusion.  After a night to sleep on it, I've changed to 5 because I cannot think of anything that could have been cut or scenes that dragged.  It was then that I realized that the film's major flaw isn't really anyone's fault.  The performances and direction are great and as I said before, the script is very tight even with the long running time.  The problem lies in the source since the case itself doesn't have a satisfying payoff.  I just look at Zodiac as an incredibly challenging project, and considering all of that, the result is a film that probably couldn't be any better.

I noticed a lot of you mentioned All the Presidents Men, and I would agree but throughout the movie I was thinking of a different 70s film, The Conversation.  Zodiac is kind of like The Conversation x 4, with the Zodiac obsessed with murder, and the other 3 main characters obsessed with the Zodiac and the different avenues they pursue him with.
"Talking shit about a pretty sunset
Blanketing opinions that i'll probably regret soon"

matt35mm

Quote from: SHAFTR on March 07, 2007, 11:07:56 AM
The problem lies in the source since the case itself doesn't have a satisfying payoff.  I just look at Zodiac as an incredibly challenging project, and considering all of that, the result is a film that probably couldn't be any better.

I think that this is part of what makes it better source material than most, and a better film.  The lure, the continuing obsession... some people have said that the movie keeps going in their mind, which I don't feel would be the case if the killer was caught, convicted, and put in jail or executed.  The last few scenes are haunting and evocative, and I have the feeling that repeat viewings are going to be far stronger than they would be if they had caught the murderer.

After all, why is the idea of the Zodiac killer still so interesting to us today?  Or Jack the Ripper?  In these cases, there still remains enough fuel to fire up an obsession, or keep an old obsession going, and it also forces us to confront our limitations, in seeking justice and, I think, in a deeper sense as well.

And so Zodiac plays as more than just a serial killer movie, with much richer philosophical subtext than would have been possible if there was any real conclusion at all, and makes a very real connection to the present day instead of just playing as a contained period piece.

That, and also because of the tight screenplay, direction, and great performances that you've mentioned, is why Zodiac is really a very strong film, and better than The Departed...

SPOILERS FOR THE DEPARTED

When everybody just dies by the end of The Departed, there's just nothing more to talk or think about.  Nothing is left continuing, and as far as I could see, there was no deeper philosophy than simply: if you fuck around in the cops and mob crew then you're gonna die.  I liked the film as I was watching it, but really, it went no further than the last frame of the film.  That's fine, and it was a decent romp, but all I'm saying is that Zodiac is a richer, deeper film, which justified its 2 hours and 40 minutes, and didn't have a nearly entirely pointless female character.

And also it looked too CG when DiCaprio and Damon were shot in the head.

MacGuffin

Quote from: SHAFTR on March 07, 2007, 11:07:56 AMThe problem lies in the source since the case itself doesn't have a satisfying payoff.

*SPOILERS*

But at that point the film becomes more about Graysmith's obsession to find out who Zodiac is. The payoff for him is finally putting all the pieces together at the diner and then, as he said he wanted to do, look into the eyes of the killer and know that it is him. And he got his chance to do just that at the hardware store. That's the film's conclusion, knowing the identity; not the catching of the killer.
"Don't think about making art, just get it done. Let everyone else decide if it's good or bad, whether they love it or hate it. While they are deciding, make even more art." - Andy Warhol


Skeleton FilmWorks

pete

I dunno, it was a very nice film to look at, a lot of great filmmaking and performances went into this.  but I just didn't feel it.  I liked how they de-bunked the myths of the killer, how he started out all ominous and then turned out to be a lot less powerful than he pretended to be, that was cool, but then what?  I watched the film because it was watchable, but nothing about it particularly moved me or stayed with me.  in that sense it was exactly like The Departed.  I was never fully convinced why I oughta care about the guy's obsession aside from it'd be kinda a waste if he gave it up then.  there were all these scenes that had little to do with each other--scene in the projectionist's home being the best. 

spoiler

it's a movie that looked and sounded like a period piece, like it was about to say something about the times, which it never did.  in the end it was just another true crime, with apparently some kinda payoff just because the dude stood there and looked at the other dude, just as he promised earlier in the script.  So what? 
I've been obsessed with David Simon (of The Wire fame) and Werner Herzog lately, so I'll first recommend y'all David Simon's book "Homicide: A Year in the Killing Streets" which goes way more intensely into the psychology and mechanics behind a homicide than any movie could afford.  Then, Herzog's always been a big fan of this "Facts vs. truth" battle, in which he laughed at people obsessed with facts, because facts, as he loves to state, "contain only the superficial truths."
"Tragedy is a close-up; comedy, a long shot."
- Buster Keaton

SiliasRuby

I recently saw this again. All the cuts that david made from the 3 hour cut I saw last year were the right ones. I am glad with the finished film and none of the scenes dragged or were there just to be there. Man, can wait to see what they do for the DVD.
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tpfkabi

i hope they have a feature length extra of Fincher and his research and all the real life people they interviewed, etc.


*spoiler*




one thing that sticks out in my mind - in the first murder of the couple in the car, isn't the male still alive when the cop arrives? the cop just looks at him and does nothing. why is he not trying to stop blood with a towel or something? did this victim live? the one that picks the man out of the lineup towards the end is the man from the couple by the lake, right?
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