Come anticipate David Fincher's "Zodiac"

the other thing that i love about zodiac (which yeah i've seen multiple times and i think it does reward repeat viewing) is how effortlessly it lays out a massively complicated case and sticks to the facts about the murders and the investigation. it does take a few liberties with characters here and there iirc, but otherwise it's a masterclass in how to make a movie based on real events.

i'm a sucker for procedural movies tho, i wanted arrival to be like 185 minutes of amy adams writing on a whiteboard

This movie and Thin Red Line are two (relatively) recent masterpieces that yeah I will start watching from any point.

then it's punctuated occasionally with a new zodiac letter or the totally magnetic interview with arthur lee allen, where the cops know they're within inches of getting their guy... and they don't. investigations are tough and boring and sometimes massively exciting and there are very few movies which communicate that as clearly as zodiac does

OTM, this scene is so great. Five and a half minutes of people sitting at a table talking, and it's riveting.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5D13q-2I62w

I especially like how he shoots the entire thing in standard masters and alternating shot/reverse shot takes of Allen and each detective, until Allen starts talking about bloody knives, at which point we get three Jonathan Demme-style closeups of each detective staring right into the camera.

There's also a couple of weird moments where he violates the 180-degree line and places Elias Koteas on the "wrong" side of the screen in relation to both Allen and to Edwards/Ruffalo.

The Thin Red Line is a really good comparison i think because both movies have this loose and open structure with a number of discrete episodes which makes them they feel longer than they really are. Zodiac in particular has a kind of entropy to its narrative that i find fascinating.

no country for old men kinda has the same hypnotic one-sock feeling as zodiac for me

tarkovsky's stalker, too

how many twix can you fit in one sock

two twix one sock

Zodiac in particular has a kind of entropy to its narrative that i find fascinating.

entropy's a great description, yeah - after the spin-up of the early scenes the sense of everyone just losing their personal and collective momentum over the course of the intervening years is pretty unique

how many twix can you fit in one sock

trainer sock: eight
regular ankle sock: 17
knee-ish length athletic sock: 37

these are single-twix packets, obv

There are a couple other prominent movies like this, like ... Vertigo, maybe? Where the initial plot driver ends and turns into something else entirely.

the scenes toward the end of Zodiac that seem to have dramatic tension, like the conversation in the film guy's basement, lean heavily on the viewer's anticipation that something is going to -- no that something has to happen. but nothing does, because the case never had definitive closure

Vertigo is maybe the ur-text, but L'avventura is the paradigm case. i am really drawn to these kinds of movies. actually a lot of Antonioni fits the bill, The Passenger and L'eclisse especially.

"I'm not leaving you holding the bag on anything, am I?"

like 185 minutes of amy adams writing on a whiteboard

would be amazing

good Cinephilia stuff here

http://www.cinephiliabeyond.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/09/cap057.jpg

https://cinephiliabeyond.org/finchers-zodiac-as-easily-one-of-the-best-thrillers-of-the-millennium-so-far/

i'd like to know more about the pre-production history of this movie, because it feels like such an anomaly. i mean, i can see why a serial killer movie got greenlit, particularly based on a source text that purports to "solve" the case--but how on earth did this wonderful script--which more or less turns into a nearly metaphysical meditation on "closure," narrative and otherwise--get accepted and made into a movie with what appears to have a healthy budget, A-list cast, long running time, etc.? how did this slip through the cracks?

Jake is beautiful.

i assume the studio was at least partially banking on fincher making another serial-killer blockbuster on the scale of seven and they accidentally got an entirely different kind of movie

yeah my thoughts exactly.

that's definitely it. Seven is the reason this god made.

got

That little Vimeo compilation of insert shots is a great short film on its own!

probably worth remembering too that the a-list cast was a little less a-list back when it was in production in 2005/2006, especially downey jr, who was only just climbing his way back to respectability

It's a one sock movie alright. For wankers.

completely wrong obviously but A+ work regardless

I have clarified that it was offered in somewhat that spirit!

Fuckit I might well watch this again tonight just as penance

just looking on imdb and holy moly this movie cost $65m

the weird thing is that i guess most of that went towards stuff which the audience probably mostly won't actively notice, like obsessively-detailed set and costume design and super-subtle digital effects. there's a great behind-the-scenes feature on the dvd (buy a copy and earn me a twix guys) which shows how the scene of the taxi murder was shot on location at the real murder scene with a massive greenscreen in the background so that fincher could ensure the skyline was period-correct

Inexplicable (or not): zero Academy Award nominations. Even coming out in March, you would think it'd get editing and cinematography at a minimum.

US gross ($33 M) was about half the est'd budget. Oscar does not like flops, early-year flops in particular.

Howbout those screenwriter credits after this:

http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0888743/?ref_=ttawd_awd_66

btw I've not seen this since the original run (once). What besides San Francisco and obsession does it have in common w/ Vertigo? Seem wildly different otherwise.

I want to say it either wasn't released on blu-ray in north america or was done so very poorly

there's some UK not region-locked version I have that's nice, beautiful film

Haha, I saw "Meg" at the top of that list and thought "Given his other credits this is going to be that giant prehistoric shark monster book, isn't it?" DING DING DING

mh itryna muscle in on my twix action and i'm not thrilled about it tbh

i rewatched zodiac a few months ago and actually quite liked it

i really briefly wrote about it in the no country for old men thread because i do think there is a link, except no country goes too far off into a fantasy world, which i didn't like

zodiac reminds me more of something like sicario, which isn't nearly the film that either NCFOM or zodiac is, but has the same sort of lethargic sinister tug and propulsion without any real payoff or closure in a way. i'm not sure that it's entirely by design in sicario, and it's certainly unable to maintain it the way zodiac does. but i think my appreciation for it comes from the same place, due to what it's able to achieve in that style.

it came out the same year as no country for old men!

2007 was an interesting year for american film

GDT calls out No Country for Old Men in the original tweet thread

Tonally, the film is "of a piece" It is a unity of cinematic space and reality. It transcends all its individual elements and thus they become unbreakable. In this rarefied strata, only a few films exist. Of recent memory No Country For Old Men is one of them.

so did dmac rescreen this or what

Not yet. I'm a busy man doing nothing

same

But consider me sold on giving it another shot tbf

Prompted by the thread I watched this again the other night and have come to the opinion that Fincher subtly undercuts Graysmith's opinion of himself quite a lot, and may actually think he's kind of a goon. (Kind of like what Kubrick did to Tom Cruise in "Eyes Wide Shut.") There's a scene where Graysmith first decides to start researching the case himself and goes to the Vallejo PD to look at their files. The scoring in that scene is so cliche suspense thriller/"there's an exciting mystery going on" that it can't be anything but parody.

Later on there's a scene where he's working the case at the kitchen table with his kids as his research assistants, and you can hear the television in the background playing the theme song from "Scooby Doo."

yeah, otm. each of the main characters end up sad and broken in their own way, and graysmith's decline is obviously the least dramatic but it's still pretty affecting - all those years of dogged, obessive effort for no real outcome save he got to write a pretty pulpy-looking true crime book

graysmith clearly did play an important role in the case but he's portrayed consistently as kind of an annoying weirdo. gyllenhaal's puppyish enthusiasm in the early part of the movie definitely curdles over the course of the rest of the story and becomes something much sadder.

what do people itt make of the longer cut and the black-screen sequence? it's the flimsiest excuse for a Director's Cut ever and i can see why the studio balked at it, but i like it all the same.

You mean the bit showing the passage of time strictly through audio?

Graysmith *is* an annoying weirdo - Fincher is otm to undercut him bc he's a nutbar

his first book is great but it becomes clear that he's an island. the sequel is bananas