sorry i've been away for a while - much has been going on.
i saw zodiac - a bleak and uncompromising mammoth film about murder and its investigation. david fincher almost seems to be making the anti-Se7en, a fine film which probably spent too much time exploring the seedy underbelly of gruesome violence. zodiac, on the other hand faces up to what murder really is - wiping the slate clean of another human being's personhood, and then breaking the slate. the fact that the film recreates the mood of the 70s in meticulous detail while paying gentle homage to 'all the president's men' and 'the conversation' makes it both a deeply pleasurable for cinephiles as well as a disturbing but profoundly moral film.
2 comments:
Gareth,
I couldn't agree more that Zodiac is the best film of this year. Spiritually, I found that the film allows for an enormous dialogue on serial killing, obsession, work vs. leisure, etc.
Spiritually, the focus on Graysmith places the viewer in a quandry. While he is initially engaged in the killings (partially) for protecting his son, his motivations for pursuing the case later in the movie are reduced to the illusive and his love of puzzles. He neglects his family and sanity over his obsession with the case. We get the feeling that he might be dissappointed or without purpose if the case were solved. It strangely sustains him. I found him to be squarely in your anti-hero category for many reasons including his abandonment of family, purely selfish and work-related interest in Robert Avery after his alcoholic brekdown, and his willingness to succumb to obsession to understand an obsessive sociopath.
I was surprised that the film didn't receive more attention at Cannes.
I wish more people had this sort of obsession over justice issues!
I'm going to have break the Zodiac love-in and say that I found it to be an awful film. Maybe that makes be a Philistine?!
"... it’s about an hour too long, and about ten stunts short of being watchable ... Why I didn’t fall asleep is a mystery!"
Sorry!
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