Come anticipate David Fincher's "Zodiac"

Yeah, there's somewhere between a -1% and 0% chance this is true.

Nothing less than someone producing the remaining scraps of Paul Stine's shirt would convince me at this point.

the sequence with the murder by the lake is utterly terrifying, zodiac killer is v. wraithlike here. it's like The Innocents - a period costume movie with a ghost appearing at a body of water in broad daylight.

also v. definitely a film abt collecting, the collecting mentality, abt ppl who get obsessed by sicko detail, so it's just as finger-pointing (at the audience) as a good haneke

finger-pointing is there I think but that phrase feels a bit too strong. The "easy dirty harry" stuff comes alongside a real sense of justice. It's more melancholy than finger-pointing would allow, perhaps.

One other thing is that this film, probably due to accidental historical reasons, totally avoids glamorizing the killer, even as a phantom.

there's that amazing moment when Avery suggests that the letter writer was claiming victims who weren't really his and the zodiac seems to disperse into something else and then in the final act you see graysmith painstakingly forging meaning, as much as he can, out of the chaos--and the stance of the movie towards all of this is beautifully ambiguous.

That sense of melancholy is key to why I love the film so much--especially all that comes after the case has essentially been abandoned, but even right from the start ("How can people be so heartless?"--if a movie has me quoting Hair and Three Dog Night like they're fonts of wisdom, that's an achievement).

the sequence with the murder by the lake is utterly terrifying, zodiac killer is v. wraithlike here.

yeah this gave me nightmares for days

one thing I love abt the film is employing multiple actors to play the killer so we can't even pin him down when we see him.

yeah the melancholy is really key.

i should say that i dont think graysmith is the *hero* of course, but i do think there's something very poignant about how the movie focuses not on the killer or the victims, but those in the middle tasked with making it right, seeking truth and justice and making those two irreconcilable (and unimaginably horrific) extremes equal to each other. which of course cannot succeed. graysmith is the one that can't let it lie--and we follow him to the end because he's the one that pursues it the farthest as the others drop away. he takes us to a point at which it feels like, to me anyway, *so much* is really at stake that it always sorta, i guess it doesn't emotionally *move* me in typical ways, but it does strike some sort of existential note for me, something about what/how meaning is.

also, i saw john carroll lynch once at columbus circle eating lunch with what seemed to be a wife and daughter. i was star struck! he's so--what the opposite of charismatic yet still magnetic?--in this.

wow didn't really catch the multiple actors trick, that's a really smart move

john carroll lynch

love how this guy is uber-creepy in Zodiac and then totally lovable in Fargo

the lake scene is really disturbing but the trailer full of squirrels is the part that haunts me

i think the killer operating all over the place in the really complicated metropolis (and outlying rural spaces) of the bay area really adds to the haunted nature of the whole story.

the lake scene is terrifying, but you know almost immediately that you're in for something awful when the scene starts with its out-of-place-in-this-film brilliant blue sky, etc.

fucking indoor squirrels have the opposite effect

well not opposite, i guess you still know you're in for something awful

"the zodiac"/the "hunt" for "the zodiac" is so blurry and chaotic that by the end it feels metaphysical, even though all the movie's detail is rly specific and mundane (signatures, phone numbers, voices, distances). when you start getting that vibe--when the mystery starts to feel like an unknowable and the zodiac as just an expression through a random dude or two of a shapeshifting (wraithlike, haunted otm) deathforce that exists mostly in fear--then suddenly everyone's speeches, about anything, become, like, dreadful. amidst all the a+++ performances in this movie RDJ is a lil diminished, there he is doin RDJ, has a scarf, has patter, whatever, but still i think of his alcoholic exit speech (AM I BEING UNKIND???) all the time: "oh, that's right, i forgot. you went to the library." lucid despair. rly need to watch this again like today cuz there's lots and lots of it i'm forgetting or oversimplyfing in memory but it would make a good double feature w a serious man. assorted ways of dealing w a knot that reties itself. but unlike a serious man which is about religious people who talk in explicitly metaphysical terms this movie plays the whole time at having its eyes fixed down, at being about paperwork and blood spatter analysis. kind of the ideal movie honestly.

yes! "metaphysical" the word I was looking for.

haha how could that be you use that word in 21% of all your posts

haha honestly I almost never use that word! i usually grope for something like "religious" (like I do upthread I am willing to bet) which seems wrong here somehow.

2nd occurence of metaphysical in my post was changed from religious

but yknow it's not that the whale is god

the genius of the movie is how much of the Zodiac case Fincher understood. Not even from Graysmith's angle, but how nebulous it has turned out to be, how terrifying it is that so little is known even when he left victims ALIVE, how it continually kept poisoning the well for any new law enforcement agent that dared to even look sideways at the cold case

It's like the Mummy's Curse somehow

How can something SO terrifying and SO fascinating and SO public be such a dead end?

Fincher captures all that desperation and futility so well

well no one ever solved the Ripper murders either
xp

How can something SO terrifying and SO fascinating and SO public be such a dead end?

haha yup

i feel like the supposedly radical ambiguity of the film is undercut more than somewhat by the last scene(s?).

i feel like fincher/screenwriters lead us to believe that this guy really was the killer and there wasn't enough evidence to pin it on him in time.

my sense is that there is also evidence that would seem to rule that guy out that fincher doesn't introduce. so he does streamline the narrative a bit in order to have some kind of conclusive ending, even if it's far less conclusive than the vast majority of film procedurals.

still think it's a brilliant movie FWIW.

"my sense is that there is also evidence"

i mean to say that i recall reading of evidence...

beyond what's referred to in the closing text shots?

I think in some sense you're right that they want us to definitely suspect him without having proof. it's a conceit of the film, I think, that he can't be totally ruled out. hence why that bit about the DNA not matching at the very very end almost makes you want to say "so much the worse for the facts" in a graysmithian mode.

but the witness answering "8" is just so amazingly perverse I have to think it's based on actual testimony? In any case it's brilliant. it's not like "5"--it's almost there!

they should make a musical about this from the POV of Arthur Leigh Allen about how he's just a regular joe being stalked by policemen, journalists and this crazy Highsmith dude. all he wants to do is skin some squirrels and go skin diving but nooooo

ok maybe not

beyond what's referred to in the closing text shots?

― Οὖτις, Tuesday, May 13, 2014 4:32 PM (22 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

yes, from news articles and etc.

skin some squirrels and go skin diving

that, and masturbate to the sounds of children's screams IIRC

Graysmith: "Does the name Dick Van Dyke mean anything to you?"
Narlow: "Hypothetically, you just named my favorite suspect in the whole case."

(Last year, but I'd never seen it till now.)

well no one ever solved the Ripper murders either
xp

― Οὖτις, Tuesday, May 13, 2014 9:22 PM (2 days ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

That's what they want you to think!

Abraham Lincoln and Jack the Ripper: One and the Same?

dang, was looking forward to reading the gary l stewart book ( as recommended on s&d: True Crime! books ) but is it just outright bullshit?

i feel like fincher/screenwriters lead us to believe that this guy really was the killer and there wasn't enough evidence to pin it on him in time.

my sense is that there is also evidence that would seem to rule that guy out that fincher doesn't introduce. so he does streamline the narrative a bit in order to have some kind of conclusive ending, even if it's far less conclusive than the vast majority of film procedurals.

still think it's a brilliant movie FWIW.

― espring (amateurist), Tuesday, May 13, 2014 9:29 PM (6 days ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

The movie sticks to Graysmith's version of events which has many factual errors and distortions, including a ridiculous scene in the film where Graysmith supposedly solves the second cipher.

ALA was excluded by everything: handwriting, fingerprints, eyewitnesses, DNA. It wasn't him.

dang, was looking forward to reading the gary l stewart book ( as recommended on s&d: True Crime! books ) but is it just outright bullshit?

― NI, Monday, May 19, 2014 12:53 AM (3 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

The fingerprint evidence in the book is ludicrous from what I've read.

dang, was looking forward to reading the gary l stewart book ( as recommended on s&d: True Crime! books ) but is it just outright bullshit?

― NI, Monday, May 19, 2014 12:53 AM (3 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

The fingerprint evidence in the book is ludicrous from what I've read.

― Matt Armstrong, Sunday, May 18, 2014

The amateur sleuths on the Zodiac Killer message board aren't too convinced, it seems

that message board is kinda O_o

wait is it a message board FOR zodiac killers or

no one is sure whether they are a zodiac killer or not

very tense place

I haven't seen a picture of it but apparently this guy somehow needed to reverse the image of his dad's fingerprint in order to find a match, which sounds ridiculous

that message board is kinda O_o

― set the controls for the heart of the sun (VegemiteGrrl), Monday, May 19, 2014 1:38 AM (10 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

which one? :D

Really odd watching The Zodiac--the other one, from a couple of years before Fincher's. It turns up in sale bins all over here.

It's not good, didn't expect it to be, was just interested in comparing them. Maybe it shouldn't have surprised me how closely the budget version anticipated the later film--it obviously draws from the same source material (Graysmith's book, I assume)--but seeing the same murders played out in the same sequence, and in exactly the same settings, and hearing the Zodiac speak lines that match up verbatim, was disorienting. The Zodiac actually starts with the Vallejo murder that Fincher's film only alludes to.

It's more plodding than outright bad, although sometimes it's that too--there's a montage of news of the day intercut with the unfolding story (as "Time Has Come Today" plays overtop) that's really clunky. The actors playing the detective and the reporter aren't within light years of Ruffalo and Downey (no Graysmith character). The worst performance, though, comes from the one person who links the two films, Philip Baker Hall. He plays the chief of police in this one, and he's surprisingly terrible.

interesting! I didn't even know about that other film.

This is playing tonight in NYC in 35mm. As a skeptic, I'm willing to give it a second shot if I can stay energized til 9pm.

http://www.filmlinc.com/films/on-sale/zodiac

if you can stay awake until then, you can always nap during the movie. it's a long one.

no i don't do that

Do it! It's a movie that really rewards (more than most) the big screen. All about the details and subtle touches, plus the construction. It's nice to be as focused on the procedure as its characters.