Zodiac

[sal]

Anyone see this one yet? Its the first must-see American film of 2007, no doubt, and may be director David Fincher's finest hour. Its a fascinating film that was obviously very well researched and made with alot of passion. The film definitely has an eerie, creepy feeling about it that stays with you, but its not a "scary movie" per se. It works well on alot of levels, but works best as showcasing the mental and emotional breakdown of its characters. A minor epic in a way, I enjoyed it very much.

It also has, for my money, one of the scariest scenes in recent film history. For those who have seen it, I'm refering to the basement scene.

[jlhoots]

Anyone see this one yet? Its the first must-see American film of 2007, no doubt, and may be director David Fincher's finest hour. Its a fascinating film that was obviously very well researched and made with alot of passion. The film definitely has an eerie, creepy feeling about it that stays with you, but its not a "scary movie" per se. It works well on alot of levels, but works best as showcasing the mental and emotional breakdown of its characters. A minor epic in a way, I enjoyed it very much.

It also has, for my money, one of the scariest scenes in recent film history. For those who have seen it, I'm refering to the basement scene.

Thanks Sal.

Going to see it this week.

[BruceH]

I saw it last night and thought it was well done. A "different" serial-killer movie in that it's close to being a documentary. It sticks to the facts of the case and the performances were good. It actually took me a while to recognize Anthony Edwards! And I'm a fool for location shooting and it's got plenty of that. Corner of Washington and Cherry? I've BEEN there! Many times. (Yikes.)

[Teasing the Korean]

Any thoughts on David Shire's score?

[sal]

Any thoughts on David Shire's score?

As usual, his music was excellent. Although in this film, due to the mix of original score and popular songs from the era, the score didn't stand out as much as Shire's scores have stood out in other films. Strangely enough, "Zodiac" at times gave me a similar feeling that "The Conversation" did, which is one of my favorite movie scores of all time, and which also happens to be composed by David Shire.

[Alexander]

The film (which I saw over the weekend) did an excellent job of evoking the period(s) in which it was set without giving in to the "greatest hits of the decade" phenom ("Let's see, this is set in the late sixties, so we need to have one hippy, two militant black guys, a VW Beetle..."). It looked more like a film that was MADE in the late 60s/early 70s than a film ABOUT the late 60s/early 70s. In that, it reminded me of the similarly excellent "24 Hour Party People" and "Munich."

SPOILER ALERT!

The thing I really dug was the way all of the seriously suspenseful stuff turns out to be red herrings (like Jake G in the spooky house bit). I also like the fact that (and I confirmed this after seeing the film) the Zodiac is played by different actors in his different apperences in the film, and that NONE of them were played by the guy who was the prime suspect. This really captured the contradictory nature of the various eye-witness discriptions. I also wondered WHY the SF police never considered the possibility (with all the hand-writing stuff) that there was an accomplice. You know...one person doing the killing, and the other writing the letters. Maybe they did consider it, but dismissed it. The film never mentioned it, though.

In reality, of course, the film isn't really about the Zodiac Killer. It's about obsession and about the way the media can make us all feel like victims. The hysteria that enveloped San Francisco during the 10 months the Zodiac was active was prefigured by the hysteria over the Whitechapel killings in 1888 London, and would itself prefigure the hysteria following 9/11 (remember: Watching something on TV is NOT the same thing as experiencing it first hand).

[BruceH]

I AM NOT AVERY!

[Larry Kart]

Excellent movie, best American movie I've seen in years. Alexander's "It looked more like a film that was MADE in the late 60s/early 70s than a film ABOUT the late 60s/early 70s" was my impression too. I was especially knocked out by the newsroom scenes; that was exactly the atmosphere, human and physical, of the Chicago Tribune when I went to work there in the mid-1970s. For instance, the Robert Downey Jr. character versus the more orthodox old-style newspaper types around him. In that era, it was fairly common to have at least one peacock-like overt eccentric on the staff, who usually was really good at what he did but also was self-destructive. And the anxious, lifted-pinky patrician publisher! Also, especially toward the end -- e.g. the final scene between Ruffalo and Gyllenhall -- it really choked me up, in large part because this was a movie that was really ABOUT something that runs deep and wide though all of our lives, or at least the lives of all of us of a certain age range: the need to/desire to/failure to (in most cases) get a grip on the swirl of seemingly significant (and seemingly external) events. One little touch I especially loved -- when Chloe Sevigny leaves and takes the kids, her note to Gyllenhall ends "Don't call." When she next shows up at the house one night, after a gap of time and in a scene where the sound of her entrance is meant to frighten Gyllenhall and us, she says to him something like "You never call."

About the music, I noticed one particularly nice moment: Once Ruffalo's character has been thrown off Homicide and is being investigated by Internal Affairs, Gyllenhall calls Ruffalo's house to ask him a key question/pass on some key information. Ruffalo's wife answers, and we see Ruffalo pacing in the next room while the sound of an uptempo, Pepper Adams-ish baritone saxophone solo is heard -- the impression being, it seemed to me, that this is not at all a soundtrack-mood thing but is meant to be taken as the record that Ruffalo's character is actually playing/listening to in the scene, as his way of at once acknowledging his agitated state of mind and relieving some of the anger he feels by listening to a recording that expresses the mood that he himself is feeling. Also, that he'd be a jazz fan. This struck me as perfect all the way around.

My wife liked the movie too but felt that Gyllenhall played his role in a too broadly innocent, boyish manner. I kind of see what she means but would say that the whole thing probably couldn't have worked otherwise. In that vein, in an interview Fincher has said that he grew up in Marin County, was age seven when the Zodiac killings began, and that he and his friends were really freaked out by what was going on, that Zodiac "was the ultimate boogeyman" for them. Most tellingly perhaps --and perhaps touching on something about the Gyllenhall character -- Fincher explains that his own drily matter-of-fact father told little David just what was going on, noting especially Zodiac's current threat to kill a bunch of kids as they fled a school bus after Zodiac had shot out the tires, and that Fincher's unspoken thought at the time was, "Like, couldn't you drive us to school?" So I'm thinking that Gyllenhall's character is in effect an adult and a child in one body, with the adult trying to protect the endangered child in one sense (as Gyllenhall literally does several times by driving his kid to school, though I believe that he does this for the first time before Zodiac issues his threat; and yet later Chloe Sevigny rightly accuses Gyllenhall of endangering his kids by pursuing the case), while it is the still-endangered child's vision, needs, and desires that drive the adult's behavior. Or, to put it in a slightly different way, the adult exists by and large to preserve the still-endangered child within, that the drive to so is virtually absolute, and that the adult world must give way at key points to the rage, purity, and strength of the preserved endangered child's vision, until what? See "Hitchcock's "Vertigo" here, I guess, which of course is set in San Francisco.

[Larry Kart]

About "Vertigo," it just might be that the demeanor and "look" (in particular the prematurely grey hair, the height and thinness) of Anthony Edwards' character is meant to subtly evoke Jimmy Stewart's character in "Vertigo." That is, you have a string of obsessives or semi-obsessives -- played by Edwards, Ruffalo, Downey Jr., Gyllenhall, and the guy who plays Lee -- and when Edwards jumps ship on the case, ostensibly for rational real-world reasons, it feels to me more (or also) like he's saying to Ruffalo that he (i.e. Edward's character) lacks the defenses or whatever that Ruffalo's character has displayed up to that point, that Edward's character is pulling back not so much because it would make sense to most anyone to do so but because he's too vulnerable to continue, that if he did he might undergo the sort of madness/disintegration that Stewart's "Scotty" does in "Vertigo."

Edited March 17, 2007 by Larry Kart

[Larry Kart]

From Fincher's Esquire interview:

Fincher was a kid then, in the Bay Area. He and the other first graders talked about the Zodiac on the playground. The stories grew and grew. "It was really scary," he says. "He was the ultimate bogeyman." Fincher saw sheriff's cars tailing his school bus. Some parents started driving their kids to school. You know, police cars are following our buses, Fincher told his father. Well, his father said, you should know that a man who has murdered a handful of people has sent a letter to the Chronicle saying he plans next to take a high-power rifle and shoot out the tires of a school bus and kill the children. Uh-huh. Fincher stared at his father. "And I kept thinking, You know, you have a car, you could give us a ride to school. You're a freelance magazine writer. There's really nothing to stop you," he says. "I remember being kind of appalled. My parents didn't seem that concerned about my well-being."

[BruceH]

About the music, I noticed one particularly nice moment: Once Ruffalo's character has been thrown off Homicide and is being investigated by Internal Affairs, Gyllenhall calls Ruffalo's house to ask him a key question/pass on some key information. Ruffalo's wife answers, and we see Ruffalo pacing in the next room while the sound of an uptempo, Pepper Adams-ish baritone saxophone solo is heard -- the impression being, it seemed to me, that this is not at all a soundtrack-mood thing but is meant to be taken as the record that Ruffalo's character is actually playing/listening to in the scene, as his way of at once acknowledging his agitated state of mind and relieving some of the anger he feels by listening to a recording that expresses the mood that he himself is feeling. Also, that he'd be a jazz fan. This struck me as perfect all the way around.

That's the way it struck me too. I was absolutely certain that the record was something Ruffalo's character was playing both to blow off some steam and to express his anger and frustration.

[Teasing the Korean]

It was obviously intended as source music and not part of the soundtrack, based on the sound quality alone.

[Chuck Nessa]

It was obviously intended as source music and not part of the soundtrack, based on the sound quality alone.

Don't you think it was "manipulated"?

[catesta]

I'm going to see this film tonight.

158 minutes! I hope I can keep my eyes open.

[Teasing the Korean]

It was obviously intended as source music and not part of the soundtrack, based on the sound quality alone.

Don't you think it was "manipulated"?

I don't understand your question.

[Larry Kart]

I think Chuck means -- though I have a long history of not quite getting what Chuck means -- that the music was recorded in the present for the film, then altered or manipulated a bit sonically so that it sounds like something that was recorded at the time of the film. Which, if so, is cool IMO; they got it just right. Maybe Gary Smulyan.

[Chuck Nessa]

I think Chuck means -- though I have a long history of not quite getting what Chuck means -- that the music was recorded in the present for the film, then altered or manipulated a bit sonically so that it sounds like something that was recorded at the time of the film. Which, if so, is cool IMO; they got it just right. Maybe Gary Smulyan.

Larry got my meaning right on this one.

[Teasing the Korean]

I think Chuck means -- though I have a long history of not quite getting what Chuck means -- that the music was recorded in the present for the film, then altered or manipulated a bit sonically so that it sounds like something that was recorded at the time of the film. Which, if so, is cool IMO; they got it just right. Maybe Gary Smulyan.

I understand that. I was responding to an earlier post that it was indeed intended as source music, i.e. something the character hears coming from a radio, etc., rather than part of the film score.

[mikelz777]

About the music, I noticed one particularly nice moment: Once Ruffalo's character has been thrown off Homicide and is being investigated by Internal Affairs, Gyllenhall calls Ruffalo's house to ask him a key question/pass on some key information. Ruffalo's wife answers, and we see Ruffalo pacing in the next room while the sound of an uptempo, Pepper Adams-ish baritone saxophone solo is heard -- the impression being, it seemed to me, that this is not at all a soundtrack-mood thing but is meant to be taken as the record that Ruffalo's character is actually playing/listening to in the scene, as his way of at once acknowledging his agitated state of mind and relieving some of the anger he feels by listening to a recording that expresses the mood that he himself is feeling. Also, that he'd be a jazz fan. This struck me as perfect all the way around.

That's the way it struck me too. I was absolutely certain that the record was something Ruffalo's character was playing both to blow off some steam and to express his anger and frustration.

I'm reading the book and just got to the part which mentions this incident. The author (Gyllenhall in the movie) is visiting the cop (Ruffalo in the movie) after he is taken off homicide. He finds the cop sitting in his living room looking trancelike and exhausted with dark circles under his eyes when the cop's wife says, "Look Dave, he's brought you some books. Here's one on the Big Bands." I guess he really must have been a jazz fan.