David Fincher -- c/d?

TIL Robert Towne is still with us

‘Chinatown’ Prequel Series in Development at Netflix From David Fincher, Robert Towne https://t.co/gQZ7xQXYCG

— Variety (@Variety) November 19, 2019

incidentally I'm finally watching the assembly cut of Alien 3 and it absolutely rules

He had nothing to do with that, right? (After the fact, that is). I saw it once back when, and I also remember enjoying it.

who the hell do you get to play Jake Gittes

Christian Slater

(j/k I have no interest in watching Christian Slater in anything)

thought about making that joke but he's too old now, obviously

avon barksdale

Jonah Hill

omg just noticed the real kicker at the bottom of that article cuz lol why would anyone want to watch this

The streamer is currently prepping the drama series “Ratched” starring Sarah Paulson from executive producer Ryan Murphy. The series will explore the backstory of the infamous Nurse Ratched from “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.”

xpost Duh, they'll just spend millions to de-age Nicholson. And also Faye. And also her sister/daughter will be de-aged into a baby.

gay ppl w/ bad taste xp

Gittes doesn't know Evelyn before the events of the original film (which I remind you had a sequel)

Doesn't mean they won't put them both in the movie! Sillier things (like a sequel to Chinatown) have happened.

Funniest would be if they spent millions on de-aging but for slater

Towne wouldn't do that to his best known creation, can't see Fincher doing it either. Presumably it will be about the original trauma Jake suffered in Chinatown, alluded to but never made explicit in Polanski's film.

xp

Maybe it will take place 200 years before the first movie.

Sillier things (like a sequel to Chinatown)

Towne conceived of it as a trilogy, but The Two Jakes' lack of success (it's not a bad film) torpedoed the third one.

yeah the trilogy thing at least made some thematic sense (water, oil and I forget the third thing...)

fire I think

(they could do that one set in 2019...)

yeah The Two Jakes is actually good, Nicholson is excellent and Keitel is his equal as the other Jake.

Good enough, iirc. But not necessary, and as far as I remember it no one would miss much if they saw Chinatown but not the sequel.

we have Mank teaser. looks good imo

https://youtu.be/J_NqUYwngr0

Looks like "Sin City," was this all green screen?

Really worried this film will fall into Pauline Kael’s “Raising Kane” garbage about Mank being the primary author of the script

we'll see. Fincher not really the sort to skimp on research but who knows what his dad's script is like

xp. it does apparently

supposedly that was the case with versions of the script that circulated in the 90s, although who knows if its changed over the years

A screen card informs viewers that “Herman Mankiewicz died in 1953. Today Citizen Kane is widely regarded as the best movie ever made. Virtually everyone thinks that Orson Welles wrote it.”

They both got an Oscar for writing it. I don’t know why this is such a bone of contention for some people. Ridiculous. Welles revised the hell out of it, and completely deserves co-authorship credit of the script

and now Fincher's dad will get an Oscar for writing this. symmetry!

This is an amazing time to be a Welles fan, given how we now have The Other Side of the Wind, Too Much Johnson, Welles/Hopper,
a fresh Quixote restoration attempt, beautiful Blu-Rays of his films. But in spite of all of this newfound reevaluation and wealth of fresh insights into his creative gifts, we're being getting "Pauline Kael's Raising Kane: The Motion Picture".

I just want it to be good tbh, it's not like Welles ever let the facts get in the way of a good yarn

supposedly that was the case with versions of the script that circulated in the 90s, although who knows if its changed over the years

― turn the jawhatthefuckever on (One Eye Open), Thursday, October 8, 2020 10:25 AM (twenty-nine minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

well finche's dad has been dead since the early 00s so unless finches has substantially revised the plot of his dead dad's script...

my autocorrect does not like the name fincher

he's a notorious control freak so anything's possible

full disclosure i've never thought highly of fincher and would not be totally surprised if he'd fallen for the 'raising kane' line. its one of those bogus things like the shakespeare authorship debate where it makes some people feel smart to feel like they're challenging the conventional wisdom, 'everything you know is wrong', etc.

my current Finchy rankings

god tier:

Zodiac
Gone Girl
Social Network
(Mindhunter)

solid-to-OK tier:

Panic Room
Fight Club
Seven
Benjamin Button
Alien 3
The Game

fuck off:

Dragon Tattoo
(House of Cards)

full disclosure i've never thought highly of fincher and would not be totally surprised if he'd fallen for the 'raising kane' line. its one of those bogus things like the shakespeare authorship debate where it makes some people feel smart to feel like they're challenging the conventional wisdom, 'everything you know is wrong', etc.

also to a frustrated screenwriter like Fincher's dad...

guys no one has seen the movie yet

I was afraid Ben Mankiewicz would get into this crap with Peter Bogdanovich on the TCM podcast, but he largely avoided it (and instead took us to other stupid segues and avoiding half of Bogdanovich’s oeuvre)

But so much of the fun in filmgoing nowadays is speculation!

honestly even if he was a shit director, Fincher would be in my good books forever for his persistent trolling of Ben Affleck

proper trailer, more of the same but still looking pretty tite to me

https://youtu.be/aSfX-nrg-lI

On paper, David Fincher’s MANK is a movie I *should* love, but instead just admire. Incredibly well crafted, shot, acted. But the story left me cold. I now know more about Mank’s feelings toward the 1934 California gubernatorial race than I do his feelings toward Orson Welles.

— Mike Ryan (@mikeryan) October 30, 2020

give me those horse genealogies and dental records

tons of reviews kicking around now. seems like ppl who are hung up on the authorship angle are indeed going to be pissed, but also that it's far from the single focus

As in the The Social Network, Fincher is conscious of the explanatory clichés of the biopic and avoids them. Penned by Fincher’s late father, Jack Fincher, Mank is a stubbornly glorious work of inside baseball, with appearances by the likes of Josef von Sternberg (Paul Fox), Ben Hecht (Jeff Harms), Charles MacArthur (John Churchill), David O. Selznick (Toby Leonard Moore), Charles Lederer (Joseph Cross), and Mank’s younger brother, Joseph Mankiewicz (Tom Pelphrey). Though they portray Joseph pitilessly as a politico, the filmmakers tell the audience little about the interrelationships between these and other influential people. One won’t learn of the Algonquin Round Table from Mank, though it’s alluded to, and an amusing pitch meeting involving von Sternberg and Hecht is even funnier if one knows that Hecht previously co-wrote a picture for the director—1927’s Underworld—that’s the sort of genre fare that von Sternberg appears to want to transcend in Mank.

These sorts of barely articulated cross-associations suggest a bygone society driven by an infrastructure of unknowable vastness. And the opportunity to conjure such a labyrinthine and increasingly sinister impression of community is what excites Fincher throughout Mank. Like many of his other films, especially Fight Club, Zodiac, and The Social Network, Mank is a parable on the limits of control, fashioned with rueful self-awareness by one of Hollywood’s most famous contemporary control freaks. As a cartoonist had to live with his inability to crack the riddle of the Zodiac killer, Mank must live with an existence, fashioned in part by his own self-loathing and lack of discipline, in which he’s to ineffectually bear witness to the flexing of American corruption as represented by an intersection between the press, Hollywood, and the government. Such a theme also very consciously aligns Mank with the “fallen, not-quite-great man” themes of Citizen Kane.

https://www.slantmagazine.com/film/review-david-finchers-mank-is-a-self-aware-parable-on-the-limits-of-control/

The rep theatre in London (Ontario--still open, but probably one color-zone from closing up again) is playing Mank and Citizen Kane back-to-back for a few days next week. Definitely anxious to see this, and the trailer looks good. I do think Mank is a poor title, though I understand its relevancy. It just doesn't sound very good.

This piece is dated yesterday, but it says the list has been circulating for a while, so maybe it's already somewhere on this thread.

https://www.indiewire.com/gallery/david-fincher-favorite-movies-streaming/

Like looking in a mirror for me. (So I'll mention again that, along with the two films of his I love, I dislike both Seven and Fight Club.)

No specific complaints about Mank--well made, performances fine (the guy who plays Welles--knew this from the trailer already--is uncanny)--but the truth is I was a little bored at times. Definitely going to read one of Upton Sinclair's famous novels, though.