Come anticipate David Fincher's "Zodiac"

remind me why I don't have this on bluray. clearly I'm an asshole.

This movie's like "The Thin Red Line," it can just be left playing in a loop in the background.

haha not coincidentally my other fav from the last 15 years

(xposts) Of the many really small roles, I love the cop who, after Koteas wryly says that Graysmith thinks he's going to solve the Zodiac case, cheerfully adds, "Good for him!"

there's not a false note in any of the performances really. Love the gentle and melancholy affection between Edwards and Ruffalo. It's a moving and even slightly tragic depiction of male platonic friendship. Not a lot of other movies even approach something like that with the kind of subtlety and intimacy that feels so true to life here. Their relationship feels so worn in in a beautiful way.

You just reminded me of something that's so good in Zodiac, and so forced in another film I otherwise really like, Clockers. I'm thinking of the Paul Stine crime scene, and how that compares to the big crime scene in Clockers. In the latter, Keitel and Turturro engage in all this knowing, movie-cop banter that's supposed to show us how desensitized they've become. Every time I've watched Clockers, that scene bothers me--do actual cops behave this cavalierly? In Zodiac, though, there's no banter and no jokes once they arrive at the crime scene (well, excepting Ruffalo's aside about Edwards' birthday). They're completely focused on trying to make sense of what's there.

yeah one thing i really like is that, despite everything, the detectives are clearly distinguished from Graysmith by their professionalism--you get this particularly with Toschi walking out of Dirty Harry early.

Mcpoyle from It's Always Sunny as the victim.

(xposts) Of the many really small roles, I love the cop who, after Koteas wryly says that Graysmith thinks he's going to solve the Zodiac case, cheerfully adds, "Good for him!"

― clemenza, Friday, August 9, 2013 6:24 PM (39 minutes ago) Bookmark

james legros!

john getz from 'blood simple' as an editor at the chronicle

i love brian cox in this.

siskel film center is doing a fincher retrospective this month. missed this on the big screen when it came out, so i'm gonna get tix.

i'm too tired to check if anyone mentioned the superb docs about the crimes on the bonus disc, but wow....amazing stuff

jaymc let me know when you're going and I might join you

"Sorry."
"'Sorry'" counts as speaking."

"They like to help, you know, sometimes."
"Yes, Robert, I know."

So many lines in this I never get tired of. The second exchange is such a perfect encapsulation of the relationship between Graysmith and Toschi.

this can no longer be ignored.

mine does.

"You don't smoke, do you?"
"Once. In high school."

rewatching

lake berryessa stabbing is so hellishly realistic...the dull thuds of each stab, his faint grunting each time...every tiny detail is so horrifying

made worse bc it's such a tranquil, beautiful setting, the dappled sunlight in their faces as they are first approached
guh

lets watch this movie forever

i love ruffalo and edwards

that first lamp scene so minimal but tells you so mucj

much

have i jizzed abt this movie enough ffs

jesus harold christ on rubber crutches

"Learn a lot"

hovered

"We're actively pursuing all leads."

(What do you mean by lamp scene, VG?)

First Ruffalo scene where he's in bed, reaches to answer phone & knocks over lamp

Blanked out..."Let me just describe the lamp you're gonna buy me."

(I don't have all these memorized word for word--there's a transcript online.)

yes let's watch something horrifying forevvvvvvvvver

i must be a horror movie philistine because i didn't like this or find it scary at all. mark ruffalo and rdj were good in it though

It's not a horror movie.

i mean i got the sense when it turned out to be the most obvious suspect that it was trying to break the hollywood paradigm for the benefit of real headz or something, and at the same time that its appeal isn't supposed to lie in the plot, but all these details y'all are mentioning went completely unnoticed (or unappreciated maybe) by me :(

xp ok, a mystery then? is the reason people like this because of the way it's interacting with whatever genre it's a part of or?

I like it for the ways it both exploits and undermines its genres conventions

Yeah, it's a procedural, but takes place at a point in time where "procedure" couldn't get the protaganists what they needed, so the whole thing is constantly getting in its own way. Plus, nobody comes away at the end of the movie any smarter or closer to the solution than they were at the beginning! The text before the credits makes clear that "the most obvious suspect" wasn't the guy at all! But Gyllenhaal needs it to be him so he can move on.

Gyllenhaal is a stand-in for the audience - he NEEDS to believe, he's been trained to require structure

gyllenhaal is a stand-in for the audience for about 1/3 of the movie and then you realize oh he's nuttier than the rest of them put together and you're on your own

:)

i love this movie!!

http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2014/05/zodiac-killer-is-my-father-claims-new-book.html has this been discussed yet?

sounds like bullshit

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