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[DVDVRMC] ZODIAC (Fincher, 2007)


Niners Fan in CT

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Absurdly late on this but lets get it going. I'm going to go back and watch this again before I comment but this was the first film that started me on my current Jake Gyllenhaal kick. He was decent in Jarhead and awesome in Brokeback Mountain but since Zodiac we've had Source Code, End of Watch, Prisoners and Enemy. All of a sudden Jake is one of my favorite actors...

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On most years, this may have been my pick for best picture. Zodiac had the poor misfortune of being in 2007 and releasing alongside No Country for Old Men and There Will Be Blood. I have not seen the film since it released to DVD seven years ago. It's one I have been meaning to revisit. This also was early into the Robert Downey Jr. comeback train, as this was a year before IronMan released.

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Zodiac is about the best movie you could make from a book with an extremely flawed premise.  Talk about conviction in the court of public opinion.

 

You will never ever listen to Hurdy Gurdy Man by Donovan the same way again.

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I still love this movie, despite finding out later that Robert Graysmith is dazzlingly full of shit, and the friendship between he and Avery depicted in the movie never really existed.

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  • 2 weeks later...

I don't really look at ZODIAC in the same way as traditional "serial killer" or mystery films. I don't think it's about actually solving the crimes (though obviously it does point to one guy quite hard), and it's not even much of a thriller; rather, I think it's about our obsession with serial killers, and with "unsolved" mysteries. Gyllenhaal's and Downey's characters have a lot of other problems going on, but it seems like both of them fuck up their lives over their obsessions. There are all these attempts to make sense of it, to fill in the blanks, and they're all ultimately fruitless.

 

I wouldn't be the first to point to the Korean film MEMORIES OF MURDER as a good comparison. Not sure which film I like more, though for my money Song Kang-Ho might be the best actor working right now.

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Finally got back around to this one.  Still love it, quite a bit.  I actually wish it was LONGER; I never agreed with the people who said it was too long.  That's the entire point!  The movie's events cover almost two decades worth of time, and the entire theme is about how an unsolved mystery can slowly eat away at people's souls.  It's about the weight of the years, each piling on top of the others, until they can crush anything beneath them and grind them into powder.  It's about how we simply NEED TO KNOW the truth, the facts, the explanation of how and who and WHY this all happened... and how it drives us absolutely fucking insane when we're denied that knowledge.  

 

The movie is a clinic of fine acting, although despite the accolades for him I actually think Gyllenhal comes off weakest compared to everyone else.  Which really isn't a horrible insult towards Jake, when you look at the cast that surrounds him.  I mean, Ruffalo and Downey and Brian Cox and Phillip Baker Hall, and HOLY SHIT Anthony "GOOSE" Edwards, where has THAT guy been hiding for the past twenty years?!  Not to mention poor Chloe Sevigny, whose talent really should have had a world-class list of credits by now; I blame The Brown Bunny for humiliatingly reducing her reputation down to "that actress who actually sucked a cock onscreen", when she should be widely hailed as one of the finest thespians of her generation.  In Zodiac, with maybe like ten minutes of screentime, she perfectly gets across the entire character of Mrs. Graysmith.  You understand that she's a bit of an oddball herself, you understand WHY she would possibly be attracted to a wallflowery basketcase like Robert; and you totally get why she'd tolerate his Zodiac obsession for a long time, but eventually be so creeped out that she'd abandon him in the middle of the night.  

 

 

Speaking of Graysmith: exactly what Big Lies did he tell, anyway?  The movie doesn't really portray his relationship with Paul Avery (whom Zodiac totally throws under the bus in a BIG way) as a "friendship", it felt like those scenes with them together portrayed maybe every single time those two dudes ever hung out together.  And the film certainly doesn't go out of its way to lionize Robert himself, portraying him as kind of a loser with a thoroughly empty personality who fucked up the lives of everyone who was close to him with his endless, never-consummated obsession with this case.  Detective Toschi was the only one who felt like the movie had sanded off his rough edges, since Ruffalo's character is never really made to look bad.  

 

 

 

I don't really look at ZODIAC in the same way as traditional "serial killer" or mystery films. I don't think it's about actually solving the crimes (though obviously it does point to one guy quite hard), and it's not even much of a thriller; rather, I think it's about our obsession with serial killers, and with "unsolved" mysteries. 

 

Yeah.  Zodiac isn't a "mystery" as we think of it; there's no real resolution, the clues are random and contradictory, and there's absolutely no catharsis to be had.  

 

And jesus, how 'bout the sheer cinematic brutality of those first two murders?  The shooting in the car is a bit stylized and over-directed at first... but when he comes BACK and shoots them MORE, that was pretty powerful.  But it's got nothing on the assault in the park, which still remains one of the most unnervingly realistic-feeling murder/kidnappings I've ever seen.  The uncertainty, the awkwardness, the total bullshit lies that the killer compulsively spouts... that all just felt plain damn real.  Even the director (or the editor, or the MPAA, or whomever made the call here) seems squeamishly uncomfortable with showing us the woman being stabbed for more than a couple of seconds, because they QUICKLY cut away to the next scene.  That simple stabbing had more haunting impact than every gory death in the entire Saw series combined, because it simply did not feel like the safe old Movie Violence that we're all used to.  It felt like we were actually watching a chick get stabbed to death right in front of us.  I'm actually sitting here trying to think of any movie kills which were more disturbingly plausible; well, the ending of S&Man maybe, but that's how far down the rabbit hole I've gotta go to come up with any competition.  
 

And I dunno if David Fincher meant it like this, but in some ways Zodiac feels like the Anti-Se7en.  That incredibly overrated movie was straight-up Movie Violence in a big way, complete with one of those bullshit genius-mastermind villains who didn't remotely resemble any serial killer in real life ever.  Let's face it, serial killers are all about expressing their dominance over other people because they're fucked-up losers who usually can't relate to other people and feel powerless and impotent in their lives.  Hannibal Lecter is a total fiction, as are all 24601 other movie killers which blatantly ripped Hannibal off.  And sadly, our culture has become inexplicably fascinated with the lie of Movie Serial Killers, to the point where I seriously think that some of the real-world sociopaths have been directly inspired by just how damned much media coverage the average serial killing receives.  Stuff like Dexter is utterly mythological horseshit; these things work much more like Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer in real life.  

 

Zodiac puts that old murder-worshipping false stereotype right out of its misery, depicting the scattered deranged nature of a real killer in all its messy banality.  These guys are NOT the Joker with brilliant plans and epic messages to impart to the world at large; they're basement-dwelling barely-literate rapists who are too afraid to even commit rape, so they just kill people instead and then jerk off later while remembering their crimes.  Their jousting with the police is usually comprised of 90% pure bullshit, desperate lies pulled directly out of their asses to make them sound cooler and more mysterious and scarier and more badass than they ever possibly could be in real life.  Their murders take absolutely no bravery or planning or toughness or even effort; they just wait around like a trap-door spider until they happen to stumble over a perfectly-vulnerable victim at just the right time and precisely the right place.  

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The biggest lies Graysmith told were all in the service of making Allen look better as a suspect. Most likely Leigh was not at the painting party that Graysmith centers his whole theory around. Also, Leigh ' s family were in no way convinced he was Zodiac and IRL were surprised he was a suspect.

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Guest The Magnificent 7

Zodiac is a really good movie, and the scene where Graysmith visits the movie poster guy is a masterpiece of a scene.  Everything about that scene is just incredible and scarier than most good horror movies. 

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