Come anticipate David Fincher's "Zodiac"

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

Yeah, I didn't mean to imply that Graysmith didn't deserve to be undercut or anything, just that there were a lot of complaints (esp. from amateur Zodiac sleuths who don't have a lot of good to say about Graysmith) around the time of the movie about making his character the "hero" of the movie. And maybe he comes out that way on first/casual viewing, but the movie doesn't support it at all.

yeah I think the movie could ~somewhat~ mislead viewers into thinking Arthur wotsisname is a viable suspect but yeah, Graysmith def doesnt come off as any kind of hero unless yr just willfully misreading the movie

tbf I think there was a lot of willful misreading of this movie at the time and people *did* come away thinking Allen was the Zodiac, despite the explicit exoneration at the end

smdh

I know right

ppl are so dumb

ikr ted cruz is of course the zodiac killer

during my initial obsession with this movie (around the time the directors cut blu ray came out) i kinda bought into the arthur lee allen theory. but i also got interested in the actual case and looked into it more and realized ALA was surely a creep but probably not the Zodiac. however, this just made it easier for me to see the nuances and subtleties of the movie.

it's important to me thought that, for my
money, the movie doesn't totally exonerate ALA. i think it stays indeterminate (rightly).

easy dirty harry

the card at the end was vv different from the one at the end of JFK, for example, which says something about how Clay Shaw was lying and was involved with the CIA, using it to suggest "hey he was involved" (and is willfully misleading about his role with the CIA, which was not really a role at all. the card at the end, coming right after the scene where the survivor IDs Allen is basically all about the futility of the hunt, or at least the futility of this particular lead and the emptiness of the obsession these guys had chasing these ghosts.

the film is spookier and more spot-on for choosing to remain an open mystery at the end and not fictionally "solve" the case, there's none of that scooby doo effect of deflating the scares by unmasking the specter. (maybe that's one of the points of the scooby doo music as well?)

one of the things that i think is usually lost in true crime movies or in serial killer pics is the pervasive sense of dread accompanying the real life situations, the feeling felt by those who are experiencing it as a local phenomenon, as opposed to the usual cinematic maneuver of depicting the horror of the crimes and the blood and all that. obviously the murders are depicted here and done well, but they're pretty quick hits and not sadistic or methodical. and the gauziness of the killer, using different actors to play the role, is such a key here.

otm

rewatching with Finchers commentary today

it's cool how many scenes are his recreations of childhood memories. i think that might be what puts it over, the personal aspect of it where you just feel like he cares about so many small details

also downey suggested the bar trick with the straws... and then had to do 26 takes of it so that the coverage matched up lol doh

the amount of times that fincher says...well we did 50 takes on this shot... 20 takes on this shot

imagine how pissed off the actors & crew would have been if the movie ended up sucking lol

I remember really liking all the commentaries on the blu ray. I can't remember which one james ellroy sits in on, the actors maybe?, but it's great.

yeah hes on the actors commentary

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j0rtR2EQliE

we're finally gonna solve this fucker

Somebody gotta get rid of this fucka!

Boo yah!

Yeah (Fincher)'s clearly contemptuous towards the film system these days. I hope he doesn't start doing shitty middlebrow cable series..

― regular speed of candy on chrome (brimstead), Saturday, July 13, 2013 4:36 PM (four years ago)

Whomp whomp.

Anyway, not really much of a Fincher guy myself, but precisely because Kate and I noted his other new series, which I see VG has started a thread on, as well as just living here now and all, I decided a couple of weeks ago I should finally get around to this and snagged a Blu-ray of the director's cut version on the cheap. We watched it last night -- as two of Kate's favorite things are old-school San Francisco and the 70s (as actually lived) in general she was all about this. Having done a massive thread reread I'm pretty much in the 'pro' camp -- absolute technical marvel, loved the ensemble pretty much front to back, stellar scenes in particular throughout. Certainly glad I saw this for the first time on, if not an actual movie screen, a 4K TV. That said the things that didn't entirely work may just be a matter of initial perceptions playing out, and those things are more based on initial assumptions than anything else (I had somehow assumed a generally slower pace, for instance, but the editing alone kept that from happening). Kate was enraptured with the cinematography right out of the gate and remarked on the crispness etc. pretty much from the first scenes in; I'm only now thinking this morning for the first time how this plays against the perception of film and memory now, how there's a '70s' film/TV stock feel which shapes thoughts back on the time -- TV procedurals in particular of course and how they react to 70s films in the field. It's an interesting forcing of immediacy -- there's not meant to be any haze, there can't be. Even the dead-ending and unravelling must by default be clear in the moment.

Something in the opening credits made me think "I know that name" and then it leapt out at me in the end credits -- David Shire on piano. I'm mildly surprised that through this whole thread while both The Conversation and Shire are each mentioned once separately, there's no mention of his piano score for said film specifically, since surely that's as much of a tip of the hat as all the other cinematic reference points throughout the film, meta or otherwise.

Anyway, circling back to Mindhunter a bit, in his Charlie Rose interview the other day Fincher said this re Zodiac:

As for what he learned from “Zodiac” to help him on “Mindhunter,” the director had this to say: “I learned my lesson with ‘Zodiac’…You can ask a lot of an audience, but two hours and 45 minutes and no closure is probably — ‘Yes, get a babysitter; yes, find parking; yes, wait in line; yes, sit and have people with their phones on in your peripheral vision and concentrate for two hours and forty-five minutes,’ is asking a lot.”

yeah even though the zodiac is relatively well-known among true crime folks, i think a lot of people who remembered the name or kinda know the story didnt know that it was unsolved. and there’s a good portion of people who dont want to go on a fact-finding journey just for the sake of it

i think mindhunter def brings a lot of the style developed for zodiac and if anything makes me wonder what zodiac: the series might have been like
though i adore the film

i reread Graysmith’s first Zodiac book for a true crime bookclub & i really have no patience for it now at all. first time reading that book was exciting as someone who didnt know anything at all about that case but now it’s like
“... nope dude that’s not a thing”
“um youre making that up”
“ok WHAT now?”
“would a linear narrative kill you jfc”
and in general he’s just really a terrible writer.

Fincher’s movie is infinitely more enjoyable than the book has any right to be; that might be small comfort to Fincher now but i think it’s a pretty big achievement.

(xpost) I mentioned David Shire on the Conversation thread, when I saw him speak after a screening of the film a few years ago.

Coppola's _The Conversation_

Oh it makes sense to mention him there -- I'm talking about this thread here, you see. :-D

If they want to verify the accuracy of this Roy Moore inscription, they need the same Sherwood Morrill who drinks like Paul Avery now.