I fell in and out of sleep during Daniel Espinosa’s “Life,” a fact I feel comfortable sharing because it did not seem to have any bearing on my comprehension of the film. As it turns out, I could zone out for 10-15 minutes at a time and jump right back in feeling like I had not missed out on anything.
This is probably attributable to two factors: 1) I’ve seen “Alien,” the seminal space horror film from which “Life” cribs heavily, and 2) a line of expository dialogue recaps any major development, including big action sequences. As loud and technically complex as these set pieces are, I found myself drifting off during them with stunning ease.
“Life” (not to be confused with the James Dean quasi-biopic from 2015) takes a familiar premise – discovering life in space – and fails to take it anywhere new. “Calvin,” as their amoeba-like alien foe is named by a young schoolgirl back on earth, proves a dangerous foe for the astronauts on board the International Space Station. There’s no particular joy in watching him outsmart the crew because he adapts to surmount their weaknesses at light-speed. Not even a sardonic Ryan Reynolds or a laconic Jake Gyllenhaal can bring some – wait for it – LIFE to the screen. C /
Director Bong Joon Ho took oblique shots at social malaise through allegory in his films “The Host” and “Snowpiercer,” but he goes in for a more direct kill shot with his latest, “Okja.” The film is a blistering sendup of multinational corporations’ hunt for profit and the ridiculous measures they take to appear responsible while pursuing policies that cause harm.
The story is a bit disjointed, but that seems to be by design. After a brief prologue introduces the Mirando Corporation’s bio-engineered “superpig” program to the world, Bong cuts to ten years later where a well-adjusted creature, Okja, lives happily with her owner Mija (An Seo Hyun). The idea, perfectly engineered by company public relations, is to lease out these new creatures to farmers across the world who can raise them humanely. Then, the bells and whistles of sleekly-produced, insidious infomercials featuring Jake Gyllenhaal’s reality TV star Johnny Wilcox – essentially Steve Irwin on smack – will convince the public that the meet made from these animals is safe for consumption. And delicious, to boot!
The farm-to-slaughterhouse pipeline gets disrupted when an animal rights group intervenes to save Okja. They call themselves the Animal Liberation Front (ALF) and establish their non-militancy before their ideals, a hilarious sendup of politically correct protest culture. These young idealists involve Okja and Mija in their plan to inflict economic damage on the Mirando Corporation and its CEO Lucy Mirando, played by Tilda Swinton as a woman who talks like she’s forcing every word with the energy of someone trying not to drown.
Did I outsmart “Nocturnal Animals,” or is it just a fairly surface-level psychological thriller? Both – or neither – may be true. But the longer I sat watching Amy Adams’ Susan Morrow taking in the manuscript of her ex-husband, Jake Gyllenhaal’s Edward Sheffield, the more I wondered if this was really it.
Director and adapter Tom Ford names both Kubrick and Hitchcock as influences on the film, and it shows in his meticulous attention to the organization of the frame and the calibrated cutting between them, respectively. He deftly cross-cuts between three storylines: the events leading up to the relationship fissure between Susan and Edward, the visualization of Edward’s novel that blows up the essence of their acrimonious split into a Western revenge tale centered around the taunting and torturing of an emasculated family man, and then Susan reading the text and carrying the weight of those words through her jaded days as a Los Angeles art dealer in decline. When the biggest problem is selling the 36-year-old Gyllenhaal and 42-year-old Adams as old enough to have been split for 20 years, that’s a good sign that a lot is working correctly.
But once the connection becomes clear that the novel is a roman à clef about the effects of the divorce on Edward, the pressure mounts for “Nocturnal Animals” to do something more with its intertwined narrative. For the most part, Ford keeps it fairly straightforward. The beautiful surfaces do say so much about the characters, particularly Susan’s sterile, well-coiffed home and wardrobe that reflect the belying calm facade she presents to the world.
Director Jean-Marc Vallée might not receive an editing credit on his latest film, “Demolition,” but his fingerprints are as visible in the rhythm as they were in “Dallas Buyers Club” and “Wild.” (Vallée was credited under the pseudonym John Mac McMurphy for the two films, which he also directed.) In many ways, the effort feels like the closing of a loose thematic and visual trilogy for him. Each film replicates the emotional landscape of a character who gets shaken up by the realization of their own mortality and thus makes a drastic course correction in their own life.
For Jake Gyllenhaal’s Davis Mitchell, that abrupt discovery comes about when his wife dies tragically in a car accident – while he, in the passenger seat, escapes virtually untouched from the wreck. The cliché that normally follows such a traumatic event is the overwrought, grief-stricken husband schtick. “Demolition” goes in the opposite direction. Davis feels absolutely nothing. That’s not to say he feels hatred of his late wife or excitement over her passing (a la “About Schmidt” or, heaven forbid, “Dirty Grandpa“). He’s just numb.
Vallée does not shy away from the challenge of portraying such entropy and attempts to replicate that sensation of feeling desensitized and unresponsive to all the cues that one’s surroundings can throw. In “Demolition,” that looks a lot like destroying the “scene” as it is commonly known. Shots bleed into each other, but they also break off mid-thought and even jump wildly to a tangent. Each successive time Vallée has employed this impressionistic style, it becomes less a service to the story and more of a replacement for it. In other words, reactions likely vary based on feelings towards the character or story.
Denis Villeneuve’s “Prisoners” possesses a remarkable precision in nearly every aspect of its execution. It is palpable in the mood, the performances, the script from Aaron Guzikowski, and especially the photography by Roger Deakins. As the abduction of two children forces a father (Hugh Jackman) to extreme measures of extracting vengeance, the film patiently and methodically follows his descent into an inhumanity on par with his daughter’s abductor.
At times, Villeneuve’s realization of this unraveling feels so airtight that it comes across almost as stifling and constrictive. Somehow, the film feels like it needs to breathe. Yet on further inspection, that is not the case. Villeneuve knows exactly how much oxygen “Prisoners” needs to survive and refuses to dole out any more of it than is necessary to give each scene a pulse. This makes his film burn not only slowly but also consistently, illuminating the depravity of cruelty to children with its steadfast flame.
His exactitude directly counters the nature of the narrative, a complicated ethical story with neither an easy outlet for sympathy nor a character that lends his or herself to identification. The closest figure offered for a connection is Jake Gyllenhaal’s Detective Loki, whose adherence to rationality and order makes him the most level-headed presence in “Prisoners.” He retains a rather detached perspective on the case of the missing girls rather than allowing himself to succumb to the levels of hysteria from the grieving families. If everyone else in the film yells, Loki speaks in a whisper.
In a way, that soft-spoken approach makes for the only major flaw of “Prisoners” that I could find. The film’s audio mix is all over the board; the sound goes in and out, then up and down. I watched it twice at home on two different television sets, but the problem persisted. I often had to rewind and jack up the volume to catch a line of dialogue muttered under someone’s breath. This sotto voce technique makes the film chillingly clinical – so make sure you can hear it in all of its complexities. B+ /
Towards the end of the lengthy expository section of “Everest,” journalist Jon Krakauer (Michael Kelly) asks the question on everyone’s mind: “Why Everest?” The film recounts a harrowing climb under the tutelage of mountain guide Rob Hall (Jason Clarke), who leads a group that does not necessarily look a typical band of sport climbers. Knowing what exactly motivates them to reach the planet’s highest peak is a reasonable thing for an audience to wonder.
In this one moment perfectly set up for characters to bare their souls – the writer makes for a reasonable excuse to pose such an inquiry – “Everest” pretty much whiffs. When accomplished scripters William Nicholson and Simon Beaufoy cannot deliver on an obvious occasion to answer what deeper meaning this mountain has, it cannot help but disappoint.
So, in the absence of a satisfactory answer to Krakauer’s question, I would like to pose it myself – albeit with slightly different punctuation and inflection. Why, “Everest?”
Why, “Everest,” must you include a maudlin, manipulative score that tells us exactly how to feel when we should feel it? Granted, at least they got Dario Marianelli, so it sounds pretty. But as I watched the film, my mind often drifted to thinking about how much more intense and visceral the experience would be with the score for “Gravity.” Such impressionistic sounds and frightening dissonances could make the environment seem dauntingly alien. The music meant to represent climbing the world’s tallest mountain should not resemble the score for any old drama.
Why, “Everest,” must you stubbornly insist on just portraying things that happen to people? As Hall’s group summits, they face treacherous weather conditions that put their lives in peril. But the snowstorm is just a snowstorm. The film lacks any sort of overarching structure of conflict, like man vs. nature or man vs. man, to imbue the challenges with deeper meaning in the mold of “127 Hours.” The struggles remain in the realm of the personal, not tapping some greater sense of collective fear. It’s danger without any sense of dread for the audience. Read the rest of this entry »
Jake Gyllenhaal trained hard to get ripped and toned for his role as boxer Billy Hope in “Southpaw,” yet the physical transformation may not represent most impressive facet of his performance. Underneath the chiseled six-pack of abs and behind the battered face does not necessarily lie the spirit of a champion. In fact, Hope most resembles a pitbull backed into the corner of a cage.
Gyllenhaal makes the truly courageous choice not to play his character with some kind of rough-hewn heart that always finds a way to break through his hardened exterior. Hope came up through the New York City foster care system, never making peace with his parents before they passed and ending up incarcerated more than once. To boot, he lacks some basic literacy skills (he’s unable to spell the word “incarcerted” with his daughter) and needs the firm support system provided by his wife, Rachel McAdam’s Maureen, to make even the most common-sense of decisions.
In Gyllenhaal’s hands, Hope becomes borderline unsympathetic. If his character were dropped into the self-destructive drug addict role that Christian Bale played in “The Fighter,” we might not root for him. Plenty of times in “Southpaw,” I questioned whether my desire to see him triumph came simply from the fact that writer Kurt Sutter made this character the protagonist.
When tragedy hits Hope, we feel pain not because we watch a good man drawn into a maelstrom of grief and anguish. We feel pain because Gyllenhaal makes sure we know that this a person clearly ill-equipped to come to terms with the enormity of his wealth, power, and standing. A 43-0 record in the ring has not transformed Hope in any way. He’s still the same kid from the shelters who did not have the smarts to stay out of trouble.
These days, it seems like a lot to ask for a movie to seriously tackle one topic with the requisite depth to provide satisfaction. On that criterion, “Nightcrawler” more than succeeds with its blistering critique of the media. Writer/director Dan Gilroy takes our present “if it bleeds, it leads” local news culture and absolutely skewers it, exposing the obvious immorality caused by its hunger for profits and ratings.
Jake Gyllenhaal’s Lou Bloom quickly moves from amateur to aesthete in his documentation of Los Angeles’ grisly, gory violence. With each new recording, he learns how to best appeal to Nina Romina, Rene Russo’s particularly desperate station manager at KWLA. She seeks footage akin to “a screaming woman running down the street with her throat cut” in order to jolt the station’s jittery suburbanite watchers, and Lou is eager to provide that material irrespective of any sense of ethics or decency.
This savage criticism alone would satisfy, yet shockingly, Gilroy is not satisfied with setting his aim on just that target. Somehow, he manages to use “Nightcrawler” as a vessel for exploring a second major topic: extreme careerism. The media is also a business where it takes more than whetting a certain appetite to advance oneself. More than talent, it requires the marketing of oneself to a point where the line between self-promotion and shameless whoring disappears.
Though this Juvenalian satire happens to be moored to an excoriation of broadcast media, “Nightcrawler” could really be about anybody searching for lucrative employment in the business world today. Gilroy writes Lou Bloom as the desperate post-recessional job seeker followed logically (and sociopathically) into absurdity. Essentially, he gives us a Joel Osteen for the religion of capitalism, preaching the gospel according to LinkedIn.
In a discussion about the film “Enemy” a few days after seeing it, someone referred to it as “a particularly accomplished thesis film.” To a certain extent, I do have to agree. Denis Villeneuve’s film seems fixated on communicating mood and tone, doing so with such an intensity that it could easily be mistaken for his first time playing with it.
“Enemy” is far more successful at making you feel an overarching sense of gloom than it is at making you connect with its characters. But that unrelenting dread in and of itself is a pretty remarkable achievement. It’s more than just an atmospheric score recalling “Taxi Driver,” or the grays and faded yellows that dominate the color palette. The film is the cinematic equivalent of a yoga pose held for 90 minutes straight, something to be admired for sheer poise alone.
Villenueve also manages to compliment his visual style with an equally controlled and subdued performance from Jake Gyllenhaal. “Enemy” follows a meek history professor Adam Bell as he discovers an actor who looks exactly like him, Anthony Claire. Both characters are played by Gyllenhaal, and they each feel distinct in demeanor as well as in the way that the events affect them.
The film is the definition of a slow burn, and Javier Gullón’s script keeps revelations rolling out at a similar pace. Even when “Enemy” doesn’t have you completely emotionally engaged, it keeps you tense with its smoggy disposition and cryptic imagery. Not that Villeneuve ever really loosens up in the film, but he does channel David Lynch on a few occasions. So now that he’s accomplished this film, maybe it’s time to dabble in the surreal. B+ /
There’s a very specific kind of movie you’d immediately think of when I say a “cop movie,” and it is exactly that kind of film that “End of Watch” so ably resists becoming. It avoids clichéd conventions of the buddy cops but doesn’t set up its two protagonists as polar opposites and rivals either. They aren’t fighting some overly symbolic battle against evil, nor are they navigating a disturbingly grey world.
As Brian Taylor and Mike Zavala, Jake Gyllenhaal and Michael Peña give assured, confident, and assertive performances as two ordinary cops who find themselves drawn into a web of crime beyond their wildest imagination. We follow them through their days on the job in the same way a slice-of-life British drama would … although the characters in those movies usually don’t uncover grotesquely disfigured bodies or virtually enslaved humans.
These shocking sights are made all the more unsettling by writer/director David Ayer’s sparing use of them. Sensationalism in a sensational movie by nature loses its sensation. When those same sights punctuate the quotidian, they jolt us out of our slouched position in our seats.
Ayer’s execution isn’t exactly flawless; his opportunistic seizing of the “found footage” filmmaking style feels a little bit forced, and then it is abandoned all together. “End of Watch” also suffers some minimal damage from ridiculous ethnic actors – I mean, come on, do the Hispanics really not know another word in English other than the f-bomb? But overall, he crafts one hell of an emotionally involving, sensorily engaging, and wholeheartedly engrossing police drama that never strays far from a firm base in reality and humanity. A- /
Part “Inception” and part “Groundhog Day,” Duncan Jones’ sophomore directing effort “Source Code” is a fully engrossing thriller that blends the best aspects of both and reminds us how a good action movie should make us feel. It’s cleverly written, masterfully directed, and potently acted. It maintains an uncannily even keel while juggling action, mystery, and even some wit and heart. Come December, I wouldn’t be surprised if this is still one of my favorites of the year.
The movie’s captivating sci-fi premise is executed admirably and with precision, largely thanks to how screenwriter Ben Ripley insists on making it so simple. “Source Code” reminds us that original and complex aren’t necessarily synonyms on screen. In about the time that it took “Inception” to lay out its exposition, Ripley gets us in and out of the source code, never making us feel lost or confused for a second. Even at its short running time of under an hour and a half, we never feel like shorted in terms of story or entertainment.
The titular program allows Captain Colter Stevens, played with cunning and intensity by Jake Gyllenhaal, to relive the 8 minutes before a bomb explodes on a train outside of Chicago in the body of teacher Sean Fentress. As he switches back and forth between finding the terrorist inside the source code and figuring out his own status outside, Stevens is putting together more than just an elaborate puzzle – he’s piecing together his life. The stakes are high, and Gyllenhaal along with Vera Farmiga’s stone-faced – but not unemotionally robotic – webcam operator play them as such. The result is that we don’t just want to sit back and watch the characters put the pieces together; we want to join in from the other side of the screen.
If these two without clothes on can’t sell, do you need any more proof that the Internet has oversaturated the market?
Jake Gyllenhaal and Anne Hathaway, two young and attractive starlets, couldn’t power “Love & Other Drugs” to box office success. The movie will cap off its run in a week or so here with a little over $31 million in the bank. It cost $30 million to make. Phew. Fox can breathe. (They had “Avatar” to save them last year.)
But the real number to talk about is 49%, its approval rating on Rotten Tomatoes. The number was even lower from the top critics, who only deemed it fresh 34% of the time. Obviously, for a movie to get nominated for Best Picture even in this era, that’s really not going to cut it. Heck, it didn’t even cut it for the HFPA, who gave Golden Globe nominations to “The Tourist” (10% approval from top critics) and “Burlesque” (27% approval from top critics). But clearly quality wasn’t very important to them this year.
Gyllenhaal and Hathaway were both nominated for Globes for their performances, and I’d say it wouldn’t be too far-fetched for Gyllenhaal to win. As for Hathaway, there’s some nobody named Annette Bening who she’s up against that I heard might win.
Back in my Oscar Moment when it was still an outside chance for Best Picture, I asked if “Love & Other Drugs” would go beyond the Golden Globes. The only voter said no, and kudos to them for having obvious foresight. But hey, it’s always worth a shot for me with the Oscar Moment column. God forbid I were to miss a Best Picture nominee in my first full year of forecasting…
There’s an interesting commentary on the pharmaceutical industry at the heart of “Love & Other Drugs,” a prevalent enough part of the story to make it into the title. But it’s the love part of the name that takes control of the movie and ultimately devalues the larger and more relevant message. Like a pimple, the romance grows and grows until it virtually envelops the face.
Granted, this is an incredibly attractive pimple. The film’s historical background in dealing with Viagra gives it free reign to go crazy on the sexuality, and director Edward Zwick runs with the opportunity. It’s practically soft-core porn starring two young, attractive stars in Anne Hathaway and Jake Gyllenhaal. But the movie is more than just two constantly and completely naked stars on a bed; it develops the emotional out of the physical.
The nudity isn’t meant to titillate so much as it is to be honest. It removes the sheets of pretense from the bedfellows, Jamie the womanizing Viagra salesman (Gyllenhaal) and his latest squeeze Maggie, a passionate but insecure lover affected by stage 1 Parkinson’s (Hathaway), and leaves their character naked. The two nudities complement each other beautifully, and these are two fascinating portraits of people trying to figure out where their lives are heading.
“Love & Other Drugs” was chosen to open the AFI Fest this week, and I couldn’t think of a better time to discuss this interesting player in the 2010 awards race.
Comedies are always a wild card with the Oscars; sometimes they hit, others they flop. Over the past decade, there have been eight Best Picture nominees that would fall into the comedic category at the Golden Globes (NOTE: I excluded musicals). The last comedy to win Best Picture was 1998’s “Shakespeare in Love,” which is a romantic comedy not unlike “Love & Other Drugs.”
On the other hand, that movie was a period piece, an aspect that tickles Academy fancies more than the romantic comedy side. Since 1998, no romantic comedy has been nominated for Best Picture, so “Love & Other Drugs” does face an uphill battle. However, because of the expanded field, our only frame of reference with complete relevance to the movie is the 2009 Best Picture race. Last year, popular romantic comedies “(500) Days of Summer” and “It’s Complicated” received Golden Globe nominations for Best Picture but failed to receive similar acclaim from the Academy. Replacing them were darkly comedic “A Serious Man” and animated “Up,” ineligible for the award at the Globes.
So are we looking at a movie that has no power to extend its reach beyond the Golden Globes? Based on initial critical reaction, that may be the scenario. The Hollywood Reporter‘s Kirk Honeycutt calls it a melodrama and shockingly conventional romance with “ADD like you wouldn’t believe.” Todd McCarthy of IndieWIRE writes that it’s “an enormously contrived and cloying romantic drama without a moment of believable reality to it.” Kris Tapley at In Contention wrote the line that I found most discouraging: “it could have been this year’s ‘Up in the Air.’”
The movie is apparently charged with nudity that Variety‘s Justin Chang called “abundant” and sexuality that Honeycutt proclaimed “unusually bold.” This could be off-putting to some of the older voters; however, it could pique curiosity among younger viewers and make it a box office hit. If it does become a serious contender, expect much talk on the nudity/sexuality to surround any discussion of the film.
Not all see “Love & Other Drugs” as a lost cause. Guru Dave Karger of Entertainment Weekly is on the movie’s side, writing back in October that “the Jake Gyllenhaal/Anne Hathaway comedic drama reminds me a lot of Up in the Air and Jerry Maguire (both past Best Picture nominees). And it’s perhaps the sexiest movie I’ve seen in years. It won’t be for everyone, but if most critics go for its blend of titillation and tragedy, then it’s a contender for one of the five ‘B-list slots.’” Karger also listed it among his 10 best picture predictions (albeit last).
I could see it filling out one of those last slots, although until the film’s release, I won’t be able to say how much a nomination would surprise me. Something tells me though that we won’t be looking at many other nominations for the movie, though. Even though Anne Thompson of IndieWIRE wrote “writer-director Zwick has done what I have long wanted him to do—get into the James L. Brooks/Nancy Meyers smart comedy mode,” I have a hard time seeing him finding room in the Best Director field.
As Univarn wrote on my latest predictions, “you have a lot of directors who have been very good for a long time all coming into their own right now.” Zwick has been directing many seemingly Academy friendly movies like “Glory” and “Blood Diamond” but has never been recognized for his directorial prowess. (Interestingly enough, he won an Oscar for producing “Shakespeare in Love” and was nominated for producing “Traffic” in 2000.)
Zwick co-wrote the movie as well, but a tight Adapted Screenplay race with such heavyweights as “The Social Network” and “Toy Story 3” may keep his work out there as well. In my mind, the movie’s best bet is in the acting categories. It seems to be the one exemplary aspect of the movie that all critics agree on. Said Honeycutt, “Gyllenhaal and Hathaway are terrific as two sarcastic, sexually hungry young people eager to hop into bed, or go up against the nearest wall for a knee-trembler.”
Both sub-30 actors have been nominated for Oscars before: Gyllenhaal for Supporting Actor in 2005 for “Brokeback Mountain” and Hathaway for Leading Actress in 2008 for “Rachel Getting Married.” They are reaching the age of anointment quickly, and it’s only a matter of time before the Academy just caves and gives them the trophy. Whether it will be for “Love & Other Drugs” is the question.
Let’s start with Gyllenhaal, the film’s leading man. Since his nomination, he has only starred in four movies, three of which were Oscar also-rans and the other a Hollywood swords-and-sandals epic flop. Gyllenhaal has gotten many raves for his latest role, ranging from Tapley and Thompson calling him the best performance in the film to Hollywood Elsewhere‘s Jeffrey Wells dubbing this “his most winning performance ever – not the deepest or darkest or saddest, perhaps, but 100% likable.” He’s facing a tough Best Actor field with the likes of Colin Firth, Jeff Bridges, and Robert Duvall as well as fellow Gen-Y actors James Franco, Ryan Gosling, and Jesse Eisenberg. If his performance is light as Wells alludes to, it may not be anything more than a Golden Globes play.
The more intriguing prospect for the movie is no doubt Anne Hathaway playing Maggie, the Parkinson’s-affected love interest of Gyllenhaal’s slick pharmaceutical salesman. She has the more dramatically appealing and Academy friendly role, and the difficulty of tackling such a role will surely keep her in discussion all season long. In the past decade, Academy Award nominees for Best Actress have included drug addicts, Alzheimer’s patients, a depressed writer, a psychotic killer, a paralyzed fighter, and an alcoholic. Whatever physical condition causes leading women to ail, the Oscars have been there to reward them.
Zwick calls her “in bloom” in “Love & Other Drugs,” and early reviews seem to be in accord. Chang calls her performance sensitive and understated, also adding that “the actress makes Maggie a vivacious presence, the sheer force of her spirit serving as a rebuke to her physical setbacks.” Wells calls it her most appealing performance yet, praising Hathaway in writing “you can read every emotional tick and tremor on her face.” However, the movie’s critical struggle could harm her; Tapley points out that Hathaway plays a “one-trick, woe is me character who never finds a genuine end to her arc.”
There are plenty of great comedies made every year, many better than some of the dramas that typically make their way into the Best Picture field. Here’s to hoping that “Love & Other Drugs” has the goods to bring glory to the genre at the Academy Awards.
BEST BETS FOR NOMINATIONS: Best Actress
OTHER POSSIBLE NOMINATIONS: Best Picture, Best Director, Best Actor, Best Adapted Screenplay
After “Panic Room,” Fincher took a five year break from directing. He returned to the big screen in 2007 with “Zodiac,” a narrative of the events surrounding the Zodiac Killer who haunted San Francisco in the 1960s and 1970s.
There’s no such thing as a simple movie with David Fincher. On the surface, “Zodiac” looks like a movie about the hunt for a serial killer. But much like “Seven” is not a movie about a serial killer, neither is “Zodiac.” It’s a multitude of things, and while it’s not left open for you to interpret like “Fight Club,” you can still make of it what you want.
The movie can really be thought of as two mini-movies (which may brutalize less patient moviegoers since the running time is 157 minutes). The first half follows the police investigation of the murders of the Zodiac Killer and the games the murderer plays with his victims and the authorities chasing him down. There’s plenty of cop drama for all of those who faun over movies like “The Town” and “The Departed,” but once the official police inquiry into the events stops, all those drooling will face the harsh reality that “Zodiac” is no longer a police movie.
The second half concerns itself with the peculiar obsession of Robert Graysmith (Jake Gyllenhaal) with tracking down the Zodiac Killer through his own means. Acting compulsively to catch him, Graysmith consults the two men most knowledgable on the subject, reporter Paul Avery (Robert Downey, Jr.) and police investigator Dave Toschi (Mark Ruffalo). Armed with their insights, he gets to the bottom of the case – even if we don’t have the satisfaction of certainty, as the case is still unsolved as of today.
But the overarching storyline that ties both of these aspects together is a journalistic view of the events. Here’s how Fincher saw “Zodiac” as he made it:
“I looked at this as a newspaper movie. My model was ‘All the President’s Men.’ You piece the thing together with a bit of info here, a hunch there, and you make mistakes long the way, and maybe you end up with an supportable conclusion as to the when and where and how. … And maybe, with someone like Zodiac, even he couldn’t provide an answer, I don’t know.”
But it’s also not just about the people intimately involved with the investigation; it’s about how the fear of being killed gripped the San Francisco area. Fincher himself was among those as a seven-year-old boy scared to go outside. There are no strange storylines that show directly how the events impact the average San Franciscan, but it’s a very subtle undertone that could fly totally under the radar for those not paying attention. It took me some reading to discover this angle, and the more I think about it, the more I see it.
As a movie that’s psychologically affecting, I don’t think “Zodiac” is entirely effective. It’s not like I haven’t been scared by the prospect of a serial murderer in real life; the D.C. sniper took his toll when I was about 10 years old, and that frightened me. However, Fincher crafts a movie quite different from his others here: a fact-based narrative that relies on true events to provide the terror. The fact that it manages to sustain interest for two and a half hours is another testament to the director’s incredible versatility.
Director Bong Joon Ho took oblique shots at social malaise through allegory in his films “
Director Jean-Marc Vallée might not receive an editing credit on his latest film, “
Towards the end of the lengthy expository section of “
These days, it seems like a lot to ask for a movie to seriously tackle one topic with the requisite depth to provide satisfaction. On that criterion, “
In a discussion about the film “
There’s a very specific kind of movie you’d immediately think of when I say a “cop movie,” and it is exactly that kind of film that “
If these two without clothes on can’t sell, do you need any more proof that the Internet has oversaturated the market?
So are we looking at a movie that has no power to extend its reach beyond the Golden Globes? Based on initial critical reaction, that may be the scenario. 
I could see it filling out one of those last slots, although until the film’s release, I won’t be able to say how much a nomination would surprise me. Something tells me though that we won’t be looking at many other nominations for the movie, though. Even though 
Marshall and the Movies 
Recent Comments