David Fincher -- c/d?

I'd like to see Palahniuk's cult-leader novel turned into a movie.

Have you read the new introduction to the book? Oddly enough, the UCI library didn't have a copy of the novel at all, from any printing, and I ended up ordering it for a class that wants it on reserve. I read through the introduction when the book arrived and it was balanced between what I thought was the agreeably casual and the almost-suffused-with-self-importance -- he seemed both bemused and arrogant regarding the cult around book and movie.

x-post I didn't much think of "bitch tits" as a gag. I thought of it as this horribly weak and unfortunate person that this even more weak and far more fortunate person has decided to draw energy from. It's just the damndest dynamic. I couldn't have thought of it.

OTM.

which is cool.

Not so OTM.

Fight Club is great if you watch it as a black comedy and nothing more (It's at least a lot better than the book, which I didn't much like at all). It does sort of fall of apart towards the end but it's still pretty funny.

The Game and Panic Room sucked.

Alien 3 I like, it's certainly no classic but it's not that bad of a movie.

I guess the best thing that can be said about Fincher is that on the visual/technical level he's one of the top Hollyood directors around.

The faux-nihilism schtick he specializes in is a love-it-or-hate-it thing I suppose.

The Game was good for its slickness too.

The others are trash.

I like Fincher well enough. he's not as visually interesting as he is often made out to be but incredibly slick (in a good sense). I enjoyed The Game and Panic Room much more than I did Fight Club or Seven, which were good in parts.

you get to see this in 2 Fincher movies, right? I hope it happens in his next one too.

Fincher slated to direct adaptation of Charles Burns' "The Black Hole". I am excited.

wowwww

http://io9.com/359193/david-fincher-catches-mutant-std-from-charles-burns

book is awesome, Fincher perfectly suited to the material. Gaiman's involvement = uhhhh, but still...

i was so drunk on this thread

yeah, does gaiman get these screenplay gigs by default now because he's worked in comics and film? it's not like any of the movies he's been involved with have been big successes.

Fincher's slated to/actually directing ratio not very encouraging.

(i guess beowulf made $$$, didn't see it)

Wait, what:

We're also interested to see what The Finch does with Rendezvous with Rama, which he's also directing.

morgan freeman, right?

Fincher's slated to/actually directing ratio not very encouraging.

-- Cosmo Vitelli, Thursday, February 21, 2008 8:51 PM (4 minutes ago) Bookmark Link

^^^

'rendezvous' has been "slated" since honeys was wearin sassoon.

i still remember his idea of a three-hour black-and-white adaptation of 'the black dahlia', which in retrospect makes me depressed.

probably woulda been better than DePalma's lolz

gaiman kinda sucks.

i love that rendezvous w rama (awesome book) is morgan freeman's dream project

I found it obvious and cloddish. No surprises except when Tyler Perry was onscreen. I wish Verhoeven had directed.

i read the book first too! i thought the movie basically removed everything i found annoying about the book

i'm not sure how to counter "obvious and cloddish" but i found it visually awesome and appropriately creepy and cold

also idk the book has a binary structure right? and fincher had to make that more like an unfolding narrative and i think he did a great job of threading everything together

Not having to read Gillian Flynn’s sentences makes the film an immediate improvement

lol essentially yes

the only thing I'd want excised is the Scott McNairy character/scene

also, v good Fincher commentary track

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CIJXB1jfB2o

Maybe the novel (I've only read Sharp Objects) offered interior monologues or a narrator who made Pike's character less...transparent? She practically twirled a mustche. idk this played like a movie whose developments were obvious and took a long time time getting to the denouement.

idk maybe knowing the twist inoculated me against noticing any mustache-twirling, pike seemed to nail the "presents a cool surface beneath which roil the thoughts of a high-key sociopath" 2 me

the book alternates the two main characters as (unreliable) narrators iirc

That's helpful. Maybe Fincher, trying to compensate, emphasized Pike's villainy as a way of reflecting the explicitness of the text.

well this was a crock of absolute shit

Be crueler.

Wouldn't go that far but this was too unfocused. Script needed a lot of work. I like pretty much everything Fincher's done but couldn't get into this one

Gary Oldman's vocal tics started to grate on me too

the performance grated for me. my main issue was that I was constantly thinking "why am I watching this?" throughout the film, which is always a bad sign. I am favourably inclined towards fincher, and the film looks fine, but I think the script just sinks this thing.

Bill Nye as Upton Sinclair was a nice surprise. Would watch that biopic.

also i was watching with headphones and i maybe i'm crazy but it sounded like the dialogue had an effect on it to make it sound like you're watching a movie in a theater - a very slight echo/reverb

I noticed this too! It was fairly disorienting thru my terrible tv speakers.

_also i was watching with headphones and i maybe i'm crazy but it sounded like the dialogue had an effect on it to make it sound like you're watching a movie in a theater - a very slight echo/reverb_


I noticed this too! It was fairly disorienting thru my terrible tv speakers.

well this was a crock of absolute shit

Was that not fairly obvious for most people?

I would imagine so. Mostly just reminded me how much better it would've been at a theater.

my main issue was that I was constantly thinking "why am I watching this?" throughout the film

yeah, I kinda enjoyed it while watching but have thought of it 0 times since

very confused at the casting of 62-year-old gary oldman to play someone who was in their 30s and early 40s during the majority of the story, especially when you also have to make him look like shit.

beyond that, what everyone else said--it's a bad script.

have you seen photos of the real mank

he looked like he was 80 when he was 30
oldman was a good choice!

https://media.newyorker.com/photos/5faeed169475b2442b5d2950/master/pass/Brody-Mank1a.jpg

if anything oldman looks too young lol

i feel like if this movie were internally consistent mank would have written his hitpiece script about louis b mayer

a bad pun ignored develops into a long, slurring ad hom attack, digging up stuff from the past. Mank is an ilxor.

Anyway, guess who finally saw a certain film thirty years after the fact. I had thoughts:

https://www.tumblr.com/nedraggett/774520708122427392/se7en-se7en-is

welcome to the club
i assume you are now familiar w the works of “Marquis de Sha-day” :D

I absolutely loved that part. A joke that will always work!

To give a sense of how time warps things, when Somerset is all confidently saying that the first note is a Milton quote I was all "Sure, he just Googled that...uh wait."

i was SO obsessed with the list of books … and with the idea that the FBI flags books

I caught it with a friend at the Alamo yesterday. Darius Khondji was really on one.

I already knew about the twist when I first saw it, and my experience was of extreme dread (which is saying something for a film already full of it).

I saw it completely cold on release and it blew my mind. I think I forgot to blink for the first thirty minutes.

It's obviously been memed, referenced and ripped-off a thousand times, but I thought "Se7en" held up pretty well. Really tight (abt. 2 hours), still unsettling, feels like its grim nihilism was undeniably influential on the more extreme French and Asian stuff that followed (not to mention a host of shitty American imitators), which often revealed or maybe even reveled in the horrific stuff Fincher generally keeps either off-screen or relatively subtle. Kurosawa's "Cure" came out, what, two years later? That's for sure one that embraced Fincher's queasy, moody restraint rather than going ott.

Watching it recently it suffered a bit from being relentlessly ripped off for three decades, what was fresh and disquieting at the time now feels a bit eye-rolly at times. The art department could have been dialled back a notch for the “creepy environments” assignments. But still looks great, leads are very well cast and natural, and strangely I have no problem finding Spacey a contemptible creep.