Come anticipate David Fincher's "Zodiac"

Latebloomer I'm having a read of that site - it's very interesting.

Ebert's review is up.

so if they ever re-make columbo, mark ruffalo is a shoe-in!!!

this looked really good but i couldn't understand what anyone was saying. i spent the whole thing going "what was that?" "what he he just say there?" and re-winding it to try and catch the bits i missed and still not hearing them.

"Fincher decorates background walls with classic movie posters and includes a self-indicting, pre-opening credit visual clue (elucidated during the third act) that speaks to cinema's potent cultural impact,

wait what is this "clue" he's referring to here

-- Shakey Mo Collier, Wednesday, July 25, 2007 8:22 PM (2 months ago) Bookmark Link"

i'm not sure but there is an unusual close-up shot of some geese just after the discovery of the first bodies.

anyway, i didn't understand this film.

yea i watched the movie with subtitles. it was a big help. i sometimes do that with movies with tons of tiny little details that i need to keep track of, e.g. syriana. something about reading it, visually understanding it makes it stick a little better.

clue = "based on actual case files" text that precedes the opening credit sequence (joke being that later in the film the "actual case files" are referred to as lost/destroyed)

anyway, i didn't understand this film.

-- jed_, Monday, October 1, 2007 1:34 AM (2 hours ago) Bookmark Link

ok i'll take the bait. what did you not understand

I got this from Netflix and it has been sitting in my living room for two weeks. I watched the first hour of it but was not able to concentrate (it wasn't the movie, though, I had a very hard time concentrating enough to even read a newspaper right after that).

watched this last week, struck me as very much a made-for-tv movie with some big stars. quite poor. ridiculous conclusions.

just as said s1ocki, i couldn't understand what was happening because i couldn't understand what anyone was saying.

http://youtube.com/watch?v=ePYxO-KgXT4

oops wrong thread hahahahahaha

Director's Cut on the way too. That's a bit sudden i find.

not these days

i'm holding out for the supa-dupa multi-disc edition with the director's cut etc, though i hope it has both versions on it.

which is WAY more defensible for a film like this than for, say, 'blade runner' or 'apocalypse now redux'. i think "fincher's dvd cut" has been a possibility since before the film even came out in cinemas. 'blade runner' dircut was an afterthought.

best use of a pop song i've ever seen in a film. not that i ever listened to HURDY GURDY MAN much but i certainly won't ever again in my life be able to hear it without wanting a stiff drink.

we did a thread once about best uses of pop songs in films. can't find it mind.

this is driving me crazy, but wasn't butthole surfers' version of Hurdy Gurdy Man notably used in recent years in some indie movie about a creepy teenager or something?

Zodiac was the best movie I have seen in ages.

will we get to see the 3 minute black-screen music montage sequence on this ere director's cut dvd? hope so. only 6 minutes of extra footage on it in total by all accounts.

'L.I.E.' it's used in Yerac. So Sight and Sound says.

will we get to see the 3 minute black-screen music montage sequence on this ere director's cut dvd? hope so. only 6 minutes of extra footage on it in total by all accounts.

-- pisces, Monday, October 29, 2007 3:06 PM (49 minutes ago) Bookmark Link

ere's 'oping. where have you seen its only 6 minutes?

my bad. it's *four* minutes:

http://www.criterionforum.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=6662&postdays=0&postorder=asc&highlight=zodiac&start=0
____________________________________________

The 2-disc set will feature a version of the film that's 162 minutes long (for the record, that's 4 minutes longer than the theatrical version). Extras will include audio commentary by director David Fincher, a second commentary by Jake Gyllenhall, Robert Downey Jr., producer Brad Fischer, James Vanderbilt and James Ellroy, 3 The Film featurettes (Zødiac Deciphered, The Visual Effects of Zødiac and Digital Workflow), 3 Sequence Breakdowns (Blue Rock Springs, Lake Berryessa and San Francisco), 5 The Facts featurettes (This is the Zødiac Speaking, Lake Herman Road, Blue Rock Springs, Lake Berryessa and San Francisco), 4 Prime Suspect featurettes (His Name Was Arthur Leigh Allen, Linguistic Analysis, Jeopardy Surface: Geographic Profiling and The Psychology of Aggression: Behavioral Profiling), 2 text-based features (Special Agent Sharon Pagaling-Hagan's Behavioral Profile of the Zødiac and Dr. Kim Rossmo's Geographic Profile of the Zødiac) and the film's theatrical trailer. Audio will be Dolby Digital 5.1 on the DVD version, and Dolby Digital Plus 5.1 on the HD-DVD. All of the video-based special features will be in HD on the HD-DVD version

cheers. shit i am such a sap i might buy the theatrical as well as this. it's not necessarily about footage but about choices, right?

Really, really good, but I thought the Coke product placements were incredibly jarring. Did anyone else notice that?

not that i ever listened to HURDY GURDY MAN much but i certainly won't ever again in my life be able to hear it without wanting a stiff drink.

Having seen Donovan perform it last week, I feel the same way.

Yes- never thought I'd hear Donovan soundtracking brutal executions!

nobody else thought this was very made-for-TV stuff, with just better actors than normal?

i was very disappointed with how standard it was.

you're a dick.

oh the debating-school rhetoric.

The acting and tech quality is way above average, but yeah, the raw material is "pretentious cop show."

Mark Ruffalo's character was slightly Columbo-like, I thought. That's not a bad thing.

yeah he's meant to be. the actual guy was a media cop -- consultant on 'bullit', i think. that's part of the whole thing. i don't think morbius understands the film.

Yes- never thought I'd hear Donovan soundtracking brutal executions!

Lest We Forget

Starts @ 3:30 (On the the other hand, altough it is brutal, the actual execution is later on and Donovan-free)

nobody thinks that one guy was a bit disappointing? i'm constantly bemused at how standard his posts are.

Toschi was the role model for Bullitt and Dirty Harry - both films are directly referenced in Zodiac

which is key, as the central thrust of this movie is that movies distort and obscure reality

huh?

go back over all the film references in the movie, they're liberally littered throughout it and always used to point up how a desire for fame, or conventional film narrative, or desire to be a hero hopelessly obscure the facts and making solving the murders essentially impossible.

making = make

some ex. - Toschi's relation to the movie business, Melvin Belli on TV references his Star Trek appearance, the basement scene with the projectionist, the movie posters that decorate Graysmith's walls, Graysmith's referring to "The Most Dangerous Game" film, etc etc

The acting and tech quality is way above average, but yeah, the raw material is "pretentious cop show."

-- Dr Morbius, Friday, November 2, 2007 2:53 PM (1 hour ago) Bookmark Link

naturally, being 'about' a murder investigation, the material has a lot in common with cop shows about murder investigations.

but by pretentious i think you just mean it hits notes that cop shows often don't, and that's partly because of... the high quality of its acting and because of fincher's eye (and ear).

the raw material is something that actually happened! reality is pretentious.

cop shows are about reinforcing revenge/punishment fantasies (criminal always caught, etc.) Zodiac is all about deliberately violating this convention.

Critically respected cop shows (Bochco, The Shield) haven't been like this in awhile, have they?

I mean, like the reinforcement Shakey describes

the first three eps of 'homicide' were about a moidah that never gets solved, iirc.

xp

by raw material I basically meant the script.

thing is, i remember the movie making an emphasis of graysmith's disintegration but i remember much more concretely the climactic scene w/ him & arthur lee allen at the hardware store, & the pre-credits sum-up thing where it heavily implied that he'd 'caught' the killer, even if he wasnt brought to justice - i dont really think satisfaction for the audience was being subverted

that may very well be true Morbs - I've only seen one episode of the Shield, I can't stand that Chiklis guy. Homicide I've never seen. Bochco is... a strange case. Cop Rock was hilarious tho. Stuff I have seen (the wife likes to watch CSI, for ex.) still hew pretty closely to the humanized cop+revenge fantasy structure (also if you are not a cop on one of these shows, you are either a victim, deserving only pity, or a criminal, deserving only punishment. Cops tend to be strictly of the morally-conflicted-but-ultimately-upright-struggling-hero variety, which I find nauseating.)

honestly I try to avoid cop shows like the plague, police procedurals and cops in general tend to really irritate me.

x-post

i dont really think satisfaction for the audience was being subverted

see my comments upthread re: Graysmith's closure moment at the hardware store being ultimately empty and self-serving.