David Fincher -- c/d?

deeznuts the problem you ran into on this thread is that your argument ultimately leads to less thinking, writing and connection-making about how movies relate to their audience and to the world; as thinkers, writers and connection-makers the people on this thread took it personally!

And I think it's likely that you took people's harshness about FC - and specifically its arguably juvenile take on politics and insurrection - personally.

Anyway I agree with Michael White on this thread. Fincher has this knack for taking an interesting or shocking premise and somehow not quite making it pay off. Panic Room could have been incredible. The Game is just the kind of scam-within-a-scam-within-a-scam movie that I eat up. But they both just sort of sucked. And - this is just a personal dislike - I really can't stand the look of his movies. They ALL look like the "Express Yourself" video except when they're trying really hard not to (like with Zodiac).

dude Zodiac looks amazing

I really don't get the Zodiac love. It looked good, in the way that car commercials look good. Acting was okey. Mildly gripping procedural snooze-thrillz. Nicely ambigious ending. Nothing to hate, but not much to care about one way or the other.

i honestly didnt realize how great it was until my third viewing or so. granted, you have to WANT to see it that many times...

I loved "Panic Room".

His cinematography really is predictable in a way; the logical outcome of a certain slick 80's video/commercial style that carried over to film. Unfortunately, it's pretty much all he does.

fc was pretty influential w/ its 'look'

So was that Paula Abdul video.

"Opposites Attract"?

"The Promise of a New Day"

which, somehow, was my boys Catholic school's graduation theme.

ok waht

hooray $10 copy of Zodiac for me!

ok waht

yes I know, and I was the only closet fag in my class.

haha are you sure about that?

he checked at the reunion.

The Game is coming out as a Criterion release! Do I really need to see it again? bcz this revisionist take seems highly dubious to me:

http://www.salon.com/2012/09/17/the_game_david_finchers_lost_classic/

It's entertaining but it's not that great.

it's central gimmick gets a bit tiresome

It's not so much a Fincher movie as it is a Michael Douglas yuppie-crisis film.

one of my favorites movies ever

ok, I didn't think so

The mike D'Angelo take in the onion inspired me to watch it again recently. It falls apart under the weight of its concept, but it has a lot going for it.

Fincher is one of those technical geniuses,.like Kubrick and Anderson, who sometimes seems to make whole films for the sake of r&d. Like panic room.

Panic Room > The Game

Panic room is beyond solid. Grown up home alone ftw. Dwight yoakam is totally evil.

The mike D'Angelo take in the onion inspired me to watch it again recently. It falls apart under the weight of its concept, but it has a lot going for it.

for real. Zodiac's still the best thing he did but this one has a lot to recommend it, and it doesn't really have the self-seriousness that makes Panic Room (and Seven for that matter) such slogs

Josh, which Anderson do you mean?

Paul Thomas. I like all his movies, but sometimes it feels like he's working something out to get to the next something. "Punch Drunk Love" perhaps being the most glaring case in point.

people on here were always really hard on panic room for some reason. i enjoy it a lot

Zodiac's still the best thing he did

correct answer

never saw panic room, somehow i always lumped it in with that run of BRING ME BACK MY DAUGHTER movies

- even tho obv. her daughter is right there because they are locked in the PANIC ROOM

Panic Room is a tight little thriller, probably the most compact thing Fincher has ever done. Gets about its business quickly, doesn't fart around, good performances, ends when it needs to. And if you don't like Jared Leto, you'll love it.

Interesting that his go-to DP is the son of Blade Runner's DP:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeff_Cronenweth

Panic Room is a tight little thriller, probably the most compact thing Fincher has ever done. Gets about its business quickly, doesn't fart around, good performances, ends when it needs to. And if you don't like Jared Leto, you'll love it.

― a shark with a rippling six pack (Phil D.), Wednesday, September 19, 2012 2:08 PM (1 hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

agree with this except it's still maybe 15-20 minutes too long. but it's not "self-serious" as described above, the bad guys deliver some laughs and beyond that it's just a good contained thriller.

Fincher's 20,000 Leagues Under The Sea remake dead

With two major blockbuster flops in two years (“John Carter,” “The Lone Ranger”), the conventional wisdom follows that Disney is probably not green-lighting any major, untested would-be franchises anytime soon (even the the trio behind “The Pirates of The Caribbean” films, Bruckheimer, Depp and Verbinski proved nothing’s a sure thing). And so eyes immediately turned to David Fincher’s ambitious $200 million-plus, 3D tentpole adaptation of “20,000 Leagues Under The Sea.” Given the recent announcement that Fincher would be directing the thriller “Gone Girl” with Ben Affleck this fall, we assumed the Jules Verne project had been scrapped, for the simple reason that Disney is not going to bankroll a potentially risky project.

However, after doing some digging, sources close to the project and the Fincher camp tell us “20,000 Leagues Under The Sea” has been dead, at least from the Fincher side of things, for months. That report in April about the film receiving its funding down under was apparently a desperate bid by the Aussie government to entice the filmmakers and producers into continuing with this project that would bring millions of dollars in jobs to their movie industry. But as “Gone Girl” suggests, Fincher has moved on and had done so months ago. Not that he didn’t try to make 'Leagues' happen

Girl Gone cast...Affleck, Tyler Perry, Neil Patrick Harris, and the blonde model from the Blurred Lines video:

http://m.imdb.com/title/tt2267998/fullcredits/cast

Quite a ways out, but creating an HBO series:

http://www.theverge.com/2014/2/13/5408012/hbo-lands-david-fincher-and-gillian-flynns-utopia-series

cool. been wondering why this hasn't run in the US anywhere yet.

i love this skot story at the top of the thread

um, alien 3 made him hated by everyone in the world. except me, actually. i didn't mind it. i liked the sound of it. in fact i went back to the theatre and taped the movie with my tape recorder and then played it for weeks on my walkman when i walked to my midnight shift at the supermarket in new milford, connecticut. then i contemplated suicide. seven was gross and rainy, but okay for a laff.

partly cuz i read the last sentence as a sinatraesque summary of being seven and imagined skot as a jaded 7-year-old slaving at the new milford supermarket listening to alien 3

You know, I did not like "Gone Girl" the book a whole lot, but the trailer for Fincher's film looks tonally totally wrong. The book I found silly. The movie likes like his usual gloom, which is weird:

http://trailers.apple.com/trailers/fox/gonegirl/

http://media.aintitcool.com/media/uploads/2014/horrorella/Gone%20Girl_large.jpg

Very long interview.

I've written for Playboy and know the editorial MO, to a degree, but that was a crap interview. The only interesting thing was broaching the notion of a subversive "20,000 Leagues Under the Sea."

We were doing Osama bin Nemo

that would have been cool

this caught my eye in the NYT Gone Girl review:

her characters share the same hard-knock fate: Nick, some kind of magazine writer, lost his New York job, as did Amy, who wrote quizzes for women’s magazines. (Was that a job? A. Yes, B. No, C. I doubt it.)

lol. why is it modern screenwriters seem to have absolutely no concept of what people actually do to earn money? This is especially true in comedies when people are always the owner of a cupcake shop or a record label talent scout or a magazine editor or something else that next to nobody actually makes a living at.

my suspicion is that the goal is not to remind anyone in the audience of their realistic, soul-crushing jobs

(tho Fight Club did, and that sank at the box office)

Dude, it was fucking cool. It was smart and crazy entertaining, with the Nautilus crew fighting every kind of gigantic Ray Harryhausen thing. But it also had this riptide to it. We were doing Osama bin Nemo, a Middle Eastern prince from a wealthy family who has decided that white imperialism is evil and should be resisted.

this isn't some 'subversive' fincher spin on the material, this is pretty much who verne's nemo is. (except he's from india, not the middle east.)

fincher came across in that interview as very fond of himself, not that this should be surprising or really that objectionable i guess