ThomamelasOnly one man can kill this many Russians. Bring his guitar to me! Registered Userregular
So Ketar didn't post his movie review. So I'm gonna post a small filler review. We will still have our regularly scheduled movie this Tuesday from Atomika. Also, I'm gonna apologize, I'm rushing this out a bit.
A missing will. A hard boiled detective crawling into the bottle and deeper into the sewers. Blackmail. Pattycake. A mallet that shoots a boxing glove. Trolley Cars. A cartoon rabbit and his wife who isn't bad, she's just drawn that way.
Cartoons and Noir. Not a combination you expect to work, but Robert Zemeckis meticulously crafts a film in which they do. For those who have never seen it, the film combines animation and live action. But it does so with an intense eye for detail. The cartoons cast shadows. The actors are placed just so, so that they are looking right at the animation. It gives them a weight and feel that is often missing with green screen effects and CGI. And time and effort it took. It was originally planned with a budget of $30 million. It would be finished with a budget of $70 million and the effort shows.
And the casting is about as perfect as one hoped for. Bob Hoskins plays Eddie Valiant with a gruff seriousness to give the film grounding, and his interactions with the members of Toontown brings them into our world as an accepted part. The kind of thing you encounter on the street. A particular challenge since very few of his co-stars are even there. And Christopher Lloyd as Judge Doom. Evil and foreboding and yet making excellent use of his comedic talents. It's enough to make you wish he hadn't disappeared into kids direct to video films in the 90's.
In the end we get a film that riffs on Chinatown, somewhat spoofingly, somewhat lovingly in a way that could only come through cartoon logic. By all descriptions, none of this should work but it does so, and in doing so it's brilliant. It presents us with a rich world to explore. So come, enjoy it.
+7
Options
AtomikaLive fast and get fucked or whateverRegistered Userregular
edited November 2014
DON JON
So after seeing this film I read the negative AV Club review from A. A. Dowd and was flabbergasted at how badly he seems to have missed the point entirely. I admit that I don’t readily seek out Dowd’s reviews, nor am I terribly familiar with his tenure as the media editor at Time Out Chicago, but if I didn’t already know that Dowd was a professional and paid member of the 4th Estate, I would have assumed that he was just some punk kid with no experience in criticism (though sadly I admit, the intermittently uninformed and gainfully employed critics are not two mutually exclusive subsets). Regardless, his criticism seemed to solely rest on the notion that the film largely failed because Joseph Gordon-Levitt doesn’t convincingly play a witless douchebag — and Dowd is right in that, actually — but positioning the thesis of your criticism and your valuation of the film’s success on that sole criterion is just about as apt as saying Burger King’s mascot is unsuitable because he doesn’t convincingly convey a realistic portrayal of medieval European nobility. So yes, Gordon-Levitt struggles to convincingly play a sex-crazed guido dumbass simply because he can’t shut down the cogent spark in his eyes; no matter what bad thing he’s doing, he looks too smart to be doing it. It’s a legitimate criticism, but not a legitimate failure of this film, because this film in no way depends on your suspended disbelief in his craven baseness. Would the role have been better played by someone more convincingly himbo-ish, like Channing Tatum or Tom Welling? Yeah, probably. But that’s hardly the point, and completely irrelevant.
pictured: the most understated people in New Jersey
The potential utility of film is multifaceted and infinite; sometimes we make movies that are slow and languid character studies, sometimes we make viscerally-thrilling FX extravaganzas, sometimes we let Kevin Smith tell the same unfunny dick jokes over and over. Don Jon is a film about putting a strong feminist message out into the wild with actors popular enough to ensure this message gets heard by the people who need to hear it, and its players are broad archetypes to ensure that they relate to the lives and experiences of the maximum number of audience members. Don Jon is definitely not a film with a message that I didn’t already believe in — I’m the choir being preached to — and I still found many, many things tor relate to within.
Don Jon is not a romantic comedy, though it needed to be sold as one to get the audience in the door. That kind of bait and switch? I don’t mind. It’s putting the heartworm medication inside a piece of cheese, and certain kinds of people aren’t going to pay money to listen to this kind of message if they knew about it firsthand. Don Jon is also not a film about porn addiction, per se. The film’s trailer campaign wants you to know that the main character’s patronage of pornography is central to the story being told, but it is not a film about the evils of people being sexually excited by watching other people have sex. If you’re looking for that kind of film, I suggest you watch Fireproof shortly before jumping off a cliff and ridding us all of your oppressive puritanism. Sex is good and being aroused by sex is normal and healthy and not something to feel guilty about.
What Don Jon is about, however, is the culture of the patriarchy and the commodifying of sex into something rote and selfish, of which the concept of guilt (here depicted by the many references to Catholicism) is a key player. This is a movie where the patriarchy is defined not just by the oppressive acts of men, but women and institutions as well — anyone who supports the structure without actualizing it and trying to exist outside of it is fair game:
- Jon, our titular protagonist, spends his nights at clubs with his boys hunting out only the choicest pieces of ass, or as he says, “Eights or better.” From the outset of the film we see how Jon and his friends treat the sexual experience as a competitive sport and women are simply the goalposts; his less-charming friend gets chastised for bringing home “twos,” so we get the full spectrum of what sex means to these guys.
- His world is rocked when he successfully wines and dines Barbara, “the Dime,” or a ten-out-of-ten girl. Everything about this woman is stripped down to sexual valuation, and she’s just as responsible for propagating the Patriarchy’s control of her life as anyone else. She’s a woman who has accepted the commodifying of her gender and in turn plays her assets as far as they will take her within that paradigm. She’s young, single, childless, and extremely attractive, and those values in the Patriarchy allow her certain freedoms (which are actually restrictions, but part of the Patriarchy’s game is fooling people into thinking that they can’t do the things they may want to do because of who they are or what gender role they play), such as “I have too high of a sexual value to not exclusively dictate the terms of the sexual dynamic I have with any potential partner,” and “I am desirable to the extent where basic routine tasks are now beneath me,” and “My sexual value allows me to restrict the non-sexual wants and desires of anyone who I allow choose to be my sexual partner.” Which is seventeen different kinds of fucked up, I know, but if you look at it from the perspective of Scarlett Johansson’s character, she has achieved the pinnacle objectives within the Patriarchal system and is thus both entitled to those behaviors and expected to wield them. Anything less would be beneath her status as Most Desirable.
- This oppressive system of sexual gaming is encouraged and perpetuated by two external forces: Jon’s parents and Jon’s church. Jon seeks (and fails to find) the approval of his father (an amazingly brassy performance from Tony Danza), who continues to remind him that he doesn’t recognize his son “as a man,” … until Jon brings home Barbara. That’s all it took, Jon locking down a sexually-appealing mate. Jon’s dad makes extremely sleazy and awkward come-ons to Barbara, making it well apparent that he also finds her sexually attractive, and thus finally enough to express pride in his son. His mother is little better, who is equally as pleased by Barbara’s sexual attractiveness and her acceptance of the Patriarchal dynamic, and in Barbara sees a kindred spirit; Jon’s father even goes so far to say that Barbara reminds him of his own wife, which is understood to be his way of saying that he sees his own wife as a rote value signifying his own success as “a man.” The thing is, Jon’s parents have TERRIBLE relationship; they fight, they scream, they don’t have any common interests, and the wife begrudgingly lives out her life subservient to her thankless husband who is happy to spend his days at home drinking beer in his undershirt watching football. Yet these two poor people believe themselves to be successful in their relationship except for the fact that their son has failed to deliver them a grandchild, despite his being already thirty(ish) and not having a great job. Their entire dynamic is commodifyed into values that they take from each other and their children, and they pass these values on.
see: objects A) the guido beta and the final build
- Jon’s church and his time in confessional with the priest exemplifies the other side of coercion into the Patriarchy, as the Church places negative value on so many aspects of healthy human sexuality, and asks its members to be penitent in absolution for these “sins,” such as kissing, sexual intercourse, and masturbation. Here we see how the Church seeks to monopolize and monetize these activities by placing rules on when they can be done without penalty, who they can be done between, and how often. It’s here that we’re given yet another example of institutions using scores to place value on sexual activity by tacking the penalties of Hail Marys onto untoward behavior, which makes a total of three different ways the film shows sexual behavior being given tangible metric values.
There are so many little touches dotting the landscape that subtly reinforce the message that writer/director/actor Joseph Gordon-Levitt wants to send about systems of sexual oppression. Barbara and Jon attend a birthday party for her niece where five-year-old girls are dressed in pink taffeta tutus and grown-up makeup — their sexually-codified rewards for simply becoming older and thus closer to sexual viability. Jon organizes every aspect of his life through the prism of attracting sexual partners; his fastidiously-kept apartment, his muscle car, his sculpted body, his slicked-back hair, his bartending job — every decision Jon makes about his person is passed through the filter of sexual desirability, and yet its important to notice that until the end Jon through his own volition does nothing to assess his own value as a friend or partner to any potential bedfellow. Jon’s relationship with pornography reinforces his notions that women are objects and sex is a game where you try to maximize your score based on your partner’s appearance and willingness to be sexually exploited Even Jon’s frequent episodes of road rage stem from his constantly being devalued in sexual terms, whether upset with his girlfriend, or his dad’s emasculating missives, or from his own misplaced sense of entitlement and privilege simply for being an attractive alpha male; it’s interesting to see how often Jon casts himself as the wronged victim in his many conflicts, both corporeal and internal.
Spiritual salvation for our protagonist comes in the form of Julianne Moore, a classmate at Jon’s night school, who slowly brings him around to the notion that being into someone can be just as exciting as being in someone. Moore is as good here as she is anywhere, but I find some thematic trouble with her character; for one thing, her seniority over Jon (about 20 years) lends to an idea that her enlightenment in relationships may stem from experience rather than respect and intellectualism. Sure, she’s into tasteful pornography and soulful lovemaking, but the sharp age contrast could make people wonder if her ideas on sex may just be the natural state of things for a single woman in her late-middle age, and that Jon, too, could become that mindfully liberated if he just got a little bit older and wiser. I mean, I didn’t see it that way, but I could understand how some audiences would. As well, Moore’s character being newly widowed and childless connects her to a kind of melancholy and sadness that might mislead people into thinking Jon’s interest in her is due to pity or that her interest in Jon is superficial and just satisfying a need she hasn’t had met in a long time. What I’m getting at is her character’s history and attributes could cause some people to misread what is going on with her character, which is something that wouldn’t have happened if her character would have been just a little younger or not a sad widow. It muddles things, and I think needlessly, because her age and past marital/parental status are fairly irrelevant to the role she plays in Jon’s growth from selfish mook to respectful lover.
"You're laughing, but I'm not kidding. It's thiiiiiis long."
Regardless, the film is wonderful and, more than that, vital to the modern zeitgeist. Gender and sexual equality seems to finally be making a push into the mainstream, and this film stands as the first mass-market push into that dialogue. I hope people go out and see this film, even if they think they’re seeing a different kind of movie. Gordon-Levitt’s first film is stylish and pointed and confident and strong, and I can’t wait to see what he does next behind the camera.
"I don't know about you, but that movie was total horseshit."
Atomika on
+11
Options
ThomamelasOnly one man can kill this many Russians. Bring his guitar to me! Registered Userregular
Oh, to be torn 'twixt love an' duty.
S'posin' I lose my fair-haired beauty.
Look at that big hand move along,
Nearing high noon.
High Noon is the anti-western. It rejects the Fordian theme of civilization as the force that should triumph over the frontier. That the coming of civilization is the improvement of all. If The Searchers is the dark mirror to the John Wayne Cowboy, then High Noon is the dark mirror of the townsfolk. We see it in the opening moments. As Jack Colby and the rest of Frank Miller's gang ride into town. The reaction of the town folk is silent terror until we get to the saloon where the proprietor proclaims with glee that it's going to be a busy day.
I love this shot. Grace Kelly looking on with a certain sweet innocence while Gary Cooper looks at her lovingly. At the same time we can see the age and weariness around his eyes.
We move to the wedding of Will Kane, the marshal of Hadleyville, to his Quaker bride Amy. The lawman marrying the pacifist, who represents the far end of civilization. Perhaps impractical but driven by ideals. With his marriage it's time for him to give up his badge and give in to her ideal of running a store. But Will Kane is uncomfortable with this. It will leave the town without a lawman for a day. As he takes off his star, he clips it to his holster, the tool of his office. And at this point we learn about Frank Miller. That he is coming back to town that day.
After being rushed out of town Will Kane's sense of duty forces him to return, even as his new wife can not understand why they don't continue to flee. Amy brings more tarnish to the cause of civilization, telling him it's not his problem. To just ignore it. And then she rejects him, tells him she'll leave him. As Kane begins to gather his posse the town rejects him, shows itself to be full of cowards and the corrupt. The Judge gathers his things and calls him foolish then tells two stories of people welcoming tyrants who would kill the legal goverment. We find out his deputy is unfit for the job. He attempts to blackmail his way into the Marshal's position for his help.
The hotel clerk is slimy, gleeful of what's going to happen. Telling Amy that he has a comeuppance coming. The good people of the town, the ones in church debate what they should do only to turn their backs on him. Even his mentor tells him to run. Even when the one man he finds to help him learns it will just be the pair of them, the deputy runs. In the end the only person in town that will stand with him is a child. Only one other person in town even understands why he has to do what he has to do. Helen Ramírez is an outsider, the older, experienced woman who explains to Amy just the kind of man she married. But even she won't stand with Will Kane. He finishes his duty to the town that isn't worthy of it, and he throws his badge into the dirt. A final act of contempt for the townsfolk.
High Noon provoked a strong reaction when it came out and still gets angry reviews written to this day. John Wayne and Howard Hawks hated the message so much he made Rio Bravo as a counter. The review in Pravda condemned it for glorifying the individual. Usually when the film is brought up, people will talk about it as an anti-HUAC film. But it's been adopted and viewed as an anti-Korean War film as well as a film glorifying a call to arms in fighting communism. No matter how you view it, it's a fantastic film. Shot not quite in real time (The events of the film cover 100 minutes or so, the film runs 80.) Zimmerman keeps the tension going.
Zimmerman's use of Gary Cooper is inspired. He carries a weariness not seen in the Fordian Cowboy. He's tired, he's earned his rest but he carries a gravitas that makes you understand why he has to do one last duty. Events move along with him and you can just sense the weight he carries with each rejection of his call for support. But it's not just his performance, the cast around him does an amazing job of building up Frank Miller as an elemental force. A force that one runs and hides from like a tornado. Leading up to the crane shot.
ThomamelasOnly one man can kill this many Russians. Bring his guitar to me! Registered Userregular
We are coming up on the end of the list of people who were interested in presenting a film. If people wish to present a second film, please PM me and I'll add you to the list. If you haven't presented a film and would like to, PM me and I'll add you to the list.
Oh wow this thread is wonderful. Had no idea. Thank you to all of the contributors.
DasUberEdward on
+3
Options
simonwolfi can feel a differencetoday, a differenceRegistered Userregular
edited December 2014
Rabbit-Proof Fence
The rabbit-proof fence was once the longest single unbroken fence line in the world, stretching from north to south across the western section of the Australian continent. Covering some 1800km, it was built to try and perform a simple job - keeping the rabbits, that invasive species we white folk brought along with us to the Lucky Country, from spreading out and covering the entire continent.
Rabbit-Proof Fence is a 2002 film based on the novel Follow The Rabbit-Proof Fence, telling the story of three girls - half-aboriginal, half-white - who are taken from their families in their native country and placed into a mission as part of government policy. They escape and find their way back home by following the rabbit-proof fence, all the way back to Jigalong.
More than the story of three girls, it's a story about the Stolen Generations. As in many countries where colonial societies made their mark, the indigenous people were displaced and made to suffer for the crime of living somewhere that had been claimed by another country. In Australia, one of the particular ways our governments acted was, under the auspices of "protection", removing children of mixed descent from their aboriginal families and re-educating them, with the ultimate goal of breeding the aboriginal out of their bloodline. Children displaced in such a manner are known as the Stolen Generations, and it is difficult to talk about Rabbit-Proof Fence without positioning it within the context of the Australian treatment of the Aboriginal people.
In 1931, Molly, Daisy, and their cousin Gracie are children from the remote town of Jigalong, in Western Australia. Their fathers were workers on the rabbit-proof fence, and have moved on, leaving the children in the care of their aboriginal family. They live and hunt on the land, speaking their people's language, but they cannot escape the gaze of the authority - the police, looking for their kind. Meanwhile, A.O. Neville, public servant and officially titled Chief Protector of Aborigines, signs an order to remove the girls from their family and place them at Moore River Native Settlement, while simultaneously casually dismissing the reports from his secretary about the requests from aboriginal people for things like seeing their children, or obtaining a new pair of shoes.
Then they are taken, as mother wails for her children and the policeman points to the paper that states that the state is their legal guardian. It is a brutal moment, of coloniser versus the colonised, and ends the only way it could, with the girls being driven away, plaintively looking out the back window at their weeping family. As their grandmother strikes herself with a rock, the scene cuts to A.O. Neville presenting a slideshow to a women's group, explaining concisely what is going on - that there is a duty, here, to help and protect the aboriginal people, from themselves if need be.
If you are looking for a subtle film, you won't find it here - director Phillip Noyce is adamant in his style of making sure there are exceedingly few grey areas within the film, and that you know what to feel, when to feel it.
The casting for the film is largely comprised of familiar faces for those who know Australian film - David Gulpilil, veteran aboriginal actor, plays the tracker Moodoo, while Kenneth Branagh plays A.O. Neville - but Molly, Daisy and Gracie are all played by aboriginal children, untrained actors, and it is a credit to Phillip Noyce that it is often easy to forget that, as he lets the girls largely remain quiet and let the film tell the story for them.
Perhaps one of the most important cast members in Rabbit-Proof Fence isn't a person at all, but the Australian landscape. The full range of the Western Australian terrain is shown in the film, from the greenery near Moore River to the dusty plains and salt lakes the girls trek across in their journey home. As with many other films, such as Walkabout, the mystery and beauty of the outback provides not just a historical context, but also raises its own questions and juxtapositions between the ways the aboriginal and white people deal with the land, providing further commentary about the divide between their lot in the Lucky Country.
Like any film that purports to be based on a true story, there are factual inaccuracies in the film. But it would be a mistake to begin listing off the ways in which the story fails to be a complete step-by-step recreation of the truth, because what matters is that this story is being told at all. Rabbit-Proof Fence was, in many ways, one of the first films to really directly confront the issue of the Stolen Generations. While many other Australian films, from Red Hill to Walkabout, have tackled the issues of racial inequality and prejudice, Rabbit-Proof Fence was among the first to both reach such a wide audience here and internationally, and made viewers understand in a real sense what people - in our modern, Western democracy - had suffered.
If nothing else, the final moments and card of the film should be the takeaway, even if you decide to dismiss the rest of it as a heavily fictionalised, bleeding heart tale. Confronted with the women themselves, and the final facts surrounding the policies explored in the movie, it is hard not to understand why this is a story that needed to be told.
The rabbit-proof fence was a failure, by the way. It didn't take long before the rabbits found a way through. So we introduced a disease, myxomatosis, to try and kill them off.
I was going to try and write a really lofty intro about who the Zodiac Killer was or what he did or how nobody knows who it really was. I was maybe going to tell you about how the glimpses of the hooded terror in the movie are chilling bookends to incredibly well-written and interesting dialogues. I was maybe even going to mention something about how the Zodiac is a haunting symbol for the end of the free-love sixties.
All of these things are true. But they aren't really what David Fincher's 2007 Zodiac is about.
James Vanderbilt effortlessly uses the story of the investigation into the Zodiac Killer to lay the framework for a tale of obsession, and the human drive to make sense of the things we don't understand. Fincher's work shows you glimpses of the Zodiac's victims, sometimes a cab driver, and at other times two lovers sharing a picnic lunch. But the film spends most of it's time following perhaps the most unexpected victim of all.
When we meet Robert Graysmith (Jake Gyllenhaal), he's presented to the audience as doe-eyed cartoonist. Graysmith's interest in the Zodiac only extends into a boyish penchant for puzzles. It is a letter famously written in code by the Zodiac that peaks his interest, and it's this same drive to solve puzzles that connects Graysmith at first with crime reporter Paul Avery (Robert Downey Jr), and later with Detective Dave Toschi (Mark Ruffalo). Together, these three men spend years pouring over the Zodiac case, nearly drowning in a haunting game of cat and mouse.
Fans of Fincher know that he's no stranger to coaxing brilliant and nuanced performances out of his actors and filling the screen with gorgeous visuals. Zodiac is no exception. Fincher lets the cast play with Vanderbilt's incredible screenplay while laying their performances over a San Francisco that is at times colorful and inviting, and at others a dreary maze of darkness and fog.
Both of these motifs play major roles over the course of the film. Fincher uses light and color to create tension where none should be. After all, many of us know the events of the film. We know who these characters are, we know their fates and you'd be hard pressed to run into somebody who doesn't know at least the end of the Zodiac legend. However, as we follow Robert's transition from nosy cartoonist in a brightly lit office, to the bowels of a boat to meet with a ruined Paul Avery, it's almost as if Zodiac is sucking the life right out of our characters before our eyes. Toschi too ultimately collapses under the weight of the case, unable to contend with the intense pressure and scrutiny. Their lives and their health are too important, hiding in darkened theaters and bars to escape from the eyes of the public, any of whom could be the Zodiac. He's ever-present. A real life boogeyman. At any moment we feel the black-hooded Zodiac could appear into a doorway, spelling certain disaster for our heroes. And yet somehow, Graysmith can't help but seek him out.
The man, as previously stated, has a penchant for puzzles. And what more of a rush could you ask for that solving the greatest puzzle of all. The one nobody else could. Increasingly obsessed with the identity of the killer, he hounds Toschi and Avery for information. Beaten and embarrassed, the men oblige even when they can go no further. They need to know.
It's 1978 by the time Graysmith reaches his final conclusion. Even in his absence, the oppressive homes and dreary streets that he explores only serve as a reminder that the Zodiac is gone, but not forgotten. After appearing on television to promote an upcoming book (on which the movie based), Graysmith begins to receive anonymous phone calls of heavy breathing. The toll this has taken on Graysmith is obvious. He loses his job, and along with it his wife Melanie (Chloe Sevigny) and children.
But we know how this ends. Graysmith may have found fame through his books, and he may have even come up with an answer that suited all of his information. But he could find no cipher. Unlike the letters he so playfully examines, his evidence is circumstantial and his guesses go unchecked. He may have a pulse by the film's end, but not unlike the cab driver or those picnicking teens, Zodiac stole the life from Robert Graysmith only moments after the two are introduced. The police have attributed five deaths to the Zodiac (though he himself claims some 32 more). Perhaps Robert Graysmith should be considered the sixth.
Zodiac is dense, exciting and chilling.
If you haven't seen it, enjoy. Be ready to look over your shoulder and under your bed before you sleep tonight.
If you have, I invite you to do a little advanced work by following Fincher's use of color throughout the film. There's a boldness and sense of purpose that permeates the wardrobes of those involved, signaling the desire to find out the true identity of the killer. It's a semiotics fan's dream, and I promise it rewards a more analytical viewing.
I fell in love with Labyrinth a long time ago. Take a bookish young boy at an impressionable age and show him a movie starring a pretty, bookish young girl, a cast of delightfully realized grotesques and a strangely captivating man in tights and Kajagoogoo hair and that boy will likely be entranced. Here's the trailer.
Jennifer Connelly is Sarah, a girl in that murky area between worlds of girlishness and womanhood, and is hiding from the transition in a world of fairy tales. Her mother is dead, and her place taken by a step mother she sees as wicked (this is a fairy tale, so of course she does). Worse still, her place in her father's affections seems to have been usurped by her new baby half-brother, Toby, for whom she must babysit. Being a girl prone to wild flights of fancy she pretends to ask the imaginary Goblin King to take the baby away one night 'when baby had been particularly cruel to her'. But of course the Goblin King is real, and hears her. Oops.
Instantly regretful, Sarah begs to get her brother back, but a strangely familiar Goblin King tells her that isn't the way things work. The baby is in his castle at the heart of a labyrinth she must solve in 13 hours. At the end of those thirteen hours, Toby will become a goblin forever, and she will have failed. So off she skips through the labyrinth, picking up companions on the way, and generally nailing a place in the hearts of eleven year olds watching the movie back in 1986 that means they still get nostalgic for lost youth and innocence when watching the movie today. In between her adventures, we see the Goblin King as he plots and schemes and sings songs and dances, sometimes singing songs about dances, and oh wait my God is that David Bowie under that hair?
He looks oddly ageless in heavy makeup and massive hair, prancing around the screen surrounded by muppets. It's a performance that should be horribly naff and embarrassing. He is one of the most admired musicians in the world, got great notices for his brief forays into acting (Merry Christmas, Mr Lawrence and The Man Who Fell To Earth) and yet here he is dressed like a pantomime villain, singing Magic Dance with gusto (choreography by Gates McFadden, aka Dr Beverley Crusher) and surely sacrificing the vast majority of his credibility in the process. Strangely, no. He's brilliant, throwing himself into things but retaining enough of his aloof, alien oddness to make the Goblin King a weird creation that simultaneously works for the kids movie he's appearing in and for Bowie's own eclectic personal back catalogue. The video for Dancing In The Street is infinitely more cringeworthy.
Jennifer Connelly was fifteen when she made Labyrinth. She's the lead in a movie that calls for her to act almost exclusively with puppets or a vaguely sinister world-famous musician. It's a big ask, but she gives a beautifully unmannered performance. Never winsome, sometimes petulant but defiant and vulnerable and why yes I guess I did have a crush on her when I was growing up how did you guess? It's a thankless task in some ways, as the eye is usually drawn to the visual trickery and lush design that she walks through, but the film wouldn't work if she didn't work, and she does. Also, she scrubs up a treat.
The rest of the cast are puppets, or people entirely consumed by elaborate costumes. Hoggle, Sarah's guide through the labyrinth, is a wrinkly, bad tempered little weasel who exterminates fairies and whoops with joy when one bites the dust. Ludo is a big, dopey hairball who don't talk good. Sir Diddimuss is a chivalrous prat on a dog. The goblins and the denizens of the labyrinth are a manifold variety of spikes, wrinkles, tusks, warts, fur and the consummate characterization the Henson team of puppeteers have always managed to create with just a hand in a sock.
The script, by Terry Jones and many others, went through a vast number of rewrites, and ends up a travelogue through the layers of the labyrinth, culminating in an Escher room where Bowie literally dances on the ceiling (oh what a feeling). There's a subtext the young me missed about the labyrinth being a metaphor for Sarah making the leap from girl to woman, but I think I grokked that she had some growing up to do and the labyrinth taught her a lesson or two. I also probably missed the hints that Jerath has fallen for the girl and wants a Queen rather than her baby brother. It was apparently a fraught writing process of compromises, leaving no one completely happy.
Brian Froud's design makes the labyrinth a delightful mix of the ugly and the beautiful, the silly and the genuinely disturbing, trompe-l'œils and fairytale archetypes delivered with a twist. Scene after scene casually tosses out glorious slices of invention for us to gobble up. A troupe of goblin knight cavalry whose spears are tipped with snapping, ugly imps; a shrivelled old woman who carries a lifetimes worth of junk on her back; a giant robot that is the gates of the Goblin City; the Bog of Eternal Stench; the Helping Hands; the stone faces that utter dolorous portents and get snippy if you cut them off; a working class worm that gives directions; the glorious Escher room in the above clip. And it's all like this. Barely a scene passes without a new delight.
Labyrinth was a box office dud, making back barely half its budget, and apparently Henson despaired for years afterwards. It found life as a cult movie much later, and generally enjoys a warmer reputation these days. If you made it now the movie would probably be entirely animated or mostly animated, which would avoid the naff blue screen effects the movie has in the Firey dance scene, but would avoid the little thrill of joy when you realise they actually built that massive goblin robot and Ludo was a thing you could shake hands with. The pleasures of practical effects, for the actor as well as for the audience, are much in evidence here. Acting with Ludo in a set designed to look like an enchanted forest is plainly a better option than acting with thin air or a rod with a football on it surrounded by a soulless green screen. Such things are not cheap, of course, or easy to create. The production notes indicate that one set, the forest, required "required 120 truckloads of tree branches, 1,200 turfs of grass, 850 pounds of dried leaves, 133 bags of lichen, and 35 bundles of mossy old man's beard." But take a look at what that gets you when you rock up to a Royal Premiere.
While writing this aimless blather I realised that most of the audience here are well into adulthood, well versed in film tricks and structure, adept at knocking holes in thinly mortared plot walls and worn down to a cynical nub by decades of movie watching. So if you haven't seen the movie, I could be on a hiding to nothing recommending it to you. One of my favourite books, by Gene Wolfe, imagines a book called The Book Of Gold. It is a wondrous volume of stories that one only comes across when one is of an impressionable age, and, once read, remains treasured by the reader in a way no other book will be. If one passes the age at which one may encounter the book, well, that is that. Labyrinth might well be like that, only able to really burrow into your heart if you catch it at the right age, and perhaps even only if you were at the right age thirty years ago.
I was maybe even going to mention something about how the Zodiac is a haunting symbol for the end of the free-love sixties.
This is a really neat insight. You're right, it's a minor theme of the film, but it's definitely there and something I haven't really thought through before. What's interesting about it is how subtle and in-the-margins it is. Zodiac focuses on professional adults (Graysmith gets married, has kids) rather than the stereotypical hippies, and the closest to "free love" that the movie gets is with the first victim, whom the film acknowledges as having a lot of parties and a lot of men circling around her. But in tone, if not in subject matter, Zodiac fits squarely into the tradition of loss of innocence stories--and I think you're right in pinpointing Robert's as the innocence which is lost. That tonal journey from youthful idealism to personal tragedy is both the overall emotional arc of the film and the story of many of its minor characters and individual sequences--like the opening, which goes from a hopeful date to a nightmare, or Paul Avery's descent into mocking despair. I've heard it said that the subject of Zodiac is the distance between the two faces (of the same person) that bookend the movie, and that distance is really about the lost promise of that generation. Zodiac looks clearly at that time and sees how the people who lived through it tried to do the right thing and mostly failed--failed marriages and alcoholism and abandoned hopes. "You're wrong," says Robert, "it was important." "Then what did you ever do about it?" Avery says. "If it was so fucking important, what did you ever do?" Not enough to change things, but still too much for his own peace of mind.
Posts
A missing will. A hard boiled detective crawling into the bottle and deeper into the sewers. Blackmail. Pattycake. A mallet that shoots a boxing glove. Trolley Cars. A cartoon rabbit and his wife who isn't bad, she's just drawn that way.
Cartoons and Noir. Not a combination you expect to work, but Robert Zemeckis meticulously crafts a film in which they do. For those who have never seen it, the film combines animation and live action. But it does so with an intense eye for detail. The cartoons cast shadows. The actors are placed just so, so that they are looking right at the animation. It gives them a weight and feel that is often missing with green screen effects and CGI. And time and effort it took. It was originally planned with a budget of $30 million. It would be finished with a budget of $70 million and the effort shows.
And the casting is about as perfect as one hoped for. Bob Hoskins plays Eddie Valiant with a gruff seriousness to give the film grounding, and his interactions with the members of Toontown brings them into our world as an accepted part. The kind of thing you encounter on the street. A particular challenge since very few of his co-stars are even there. And Christopher Lloyd as Judge Doom. Evil and foreboding and yet making excellent use of his comedic talents. It's enough to make you wish he hadn't disappeared into kids direct to video films in the 90's.
In the end we get a film that riffs on Chinatown, somewhat spoofingly, somewhat lovingly in a way that could only come through cartoon logic. By all descriptions, none of this should work but it does so, and in doing so it's brilliant. It presents us with a rich world to explore. So come, enjoy it.
So after seeing this film I read the negative AV Club review from A. A. Dowd and was flabbergasted at how badly he seems to have missed the point entirely. I admit that I don’t readily seek out Dowd’s reviews, nor am I terribly familiar with his tenure as the media editor at Time Out Chicago, but if I didn’t already know that Dowd was a professional and paid member of the 4th Estate, I would have assumed that he was just some punk kid with no experience in criticism (though sadly I admit, the intermittently uninformed and gainfully employed critics are not two mutually exclusive subsets). Regardless, his criticism seemed to solely rest on the notion that the film largely failed because Joseph Gordon-Levitt doesn’t convincingly play a witless douchebag — and Dowd is right in that, actually — but positioning the thesis of your criticism and your valuation of the film’s success on that sole criterion is just about as apt as saying Burger King’s mascot is unsuitable because he doesn’t convincingly convey a realistic portrayal of medieval European nobility. So yes, Gordon-Levitt struggles to convincingly play a sex-crazed guido dumbass simply because he can’t shut down the cogent spark in his eyes; no matter what bad thing he’s doing, he looks too smart to be doing it. It’s a legitimate criticism, but not a legitimate failure of this film, because this film in no way depends on your suspended disbelief in his craven baseness. Would the role have been better played by someone more convincingly himbo-ish, like Channing Tatum or Tom Welling? Yeah, probably. But that’s hardly the point, and completely irrelevant.
pictured: the most understated people in New Jersey
The potential utility of film is multifaceted and infinite; sometimes we make movies that are slow and languid character studies, sometimes we make viscerally-thrilling FX extravaganzas, sometimes we let Kevin Smith tell the same unfunny dick jokes over and over. Don Jon is a film about putting a strong feminist message out into the wild with actors popular enough to ensure this message gets heard by the people who need to hear it, and its players are broad archetypes to ensure that they relate to the lives and experiences of the maximum number of audience members. Don Jon is definitely not a film with a message that I didn’t already believe in — I’m the choir being preached to — and I still found many, many things tor relate to within.
Don Jon is not a romantic comedy, though it needed to be sold as one to get the audience in the door. That kind of bait and switch? I don’t mind. It’s putting the heartworm medication inside a piece of cheese, and certain kinds of people aren’t going to pay money to listen to this kind of message if they knew about it firsthand. Don Jon is also not a film about porn addiction, per se. The film’s trailer campaign wants you to know that the main character’s patronage of pornography is central to the story being told, but it is not a film about the evils of people being sexually excited by watching other people have sex. If you’re looking for that kind of film, I suggest you watch Fireproof shortly before jumping off a cliff and ridding us all of your oppressive puritanism. Sex is good and being aroused by sex is normal and healthy and not something to feel guilty about.
What Don Jon is about, however, is the culture of the patriarchy and the commodifying of sex into something rote and selfish, of which the concept of guilt (here depicted by the many references to Catholicism) is a key player. This is a movie where the patriarchy is defined not just by the oppressive acts of men, but women and institutions as well — anyone who supports the structure without actualizing it and trying to exist outside of it is fair game:
- Jon, our titular protagonist, spends his nights at clubs with his boys hunting out only the choicest pieces of ass, or as he says, “Eights or better.” From the outset of the film we see how Jon and his friends treat the sexual experience as a competitive sport and women are simply the goalposts; his less-charming friend gets chastised for bringing home “twos,” so we get the full spectrum of what sex means to these guys.
- His world is rocked when he successfully wines and dines Barbara, “the Dime,” or a ten-out-of-ten girl. Everything about this woman is stripped down to sexual valuation, and she’s just as responsible for propagating the Patriarchy’s control of her life as anyone else. She’s a woman who has accepted the commodifying of her gender and in turn plays her assets as far as they will take her within that paradigm. She’s young, single, childless, and extremely attractive, and those values in the Patriarchy allow her certain freedoms (which are actually restrictions, but part of the Patriarchy’s game is fooling people into thinking that they can’t do the things they may want to do because of who they are or what gender role they play), such as “I have too high of a sexual value to not exclusively dictate the terms of the sexual dynamic I have with any potential partner,” and “I am desirable to the extent where basic routine tasks are now beneath me,” and “My sexual value allows me to restrict the non-sexual wants and desires of anyone who I allow choose to be my sexual partner.” Which is seventeen different kinds of fucked up, I know, but if you look at it from the perspective of Scarlett Johansson’s character, she has achieved the pinnacle objectives within the Patriarchal system and is thus both entitled to those behaviors and expected to wield them. Anything less would be beneath her status as Most Desirable.
- This oppressive system of sexual gaming is encouraged and perpetuated by two external forces: Jon’s parents and Jon’s church. Jon seeks (and fails to find) the approval of his father (an amazingly brassy performance from Tony Danza), who continues to remind him that he doesn’t recognize his son “as a man,” … until Jon brings home Barbara. That’s all it took, Jon locking down a sexually-appealing mate. Jon’s dad makes extremely sleazy and awkward come-ons to Barbara, making it well apparent that he also finds her sexually attractive, and thus finally enough to express pride in his son. His mother is little better, who is equally as pleased by Barbara’s sexual attractiveness and her acceptance of the Patriarchal dynamic, and in Barbara sees a kindred spirit; Jon’s father even goes so far to say that Barbara reminds him of his own wife, which is understood to be his way of saying that he sees his own wife as a rote value signifying his own success as “a man.” The thing is, Jon’s parents have TERRIBLE relationship; they fight, they scream, they don’t have any common interests, and the wife begrudgingly lives out her life subservient to her thankless husband who is happy to spend his days at home drinking beer in his undershirt watching football. Yet these two poor people believe themselves to be successful in their relationship except for the fact that their son has failed to deliver them a grandchild, despite his being already thirty(ish) and not having a great job. Their entire dynamic is commodifyed into values that they take from each other and their children, and they pass these values on.
see: objects A) the guido beta and
- Jon’s church and his time in confessional with the priest exemplifies the other side of coercion into the Patriarchy, as the Church places negative value on so many aspects of healthy human sexuality, and asks its members to be penitent in absolution for these “sins,” such as kissing, sexual intercourse, and masturbation. Here we see how the Church seeks to monopolize and monetize these activities by placing rules on when they can be done without penalty, who they can be done between, and how often. It’s here that we’re given yet another example of institutions using scores to place value on sexual activity by tacking the penalties of Hail Marys onto untoward behavior, which makes a total of three different ways the film shows sexual behavior being given tangible metric values.
There are so many little touches dotting the landscape that subtly reinforce the message that writer/director/actor Joseph Gordon-Levitt wants to send about systems of sexual oppression. Barbara and Jon attend a birthday party for her niece where five-year-old girls are dressed in pink taffeta tutus and grown-up makeup — their sexually-codified rewards for simply becoming older and thus closer to sexual viability. Jon organizes every aspect of his life through the prism of attracting sexual partners; his fastidiously-kept apartment, his muscle car, his sculpted body, his slicked-back hair, his bartending job — every decision Jon makes about his person is passed through the filter of sexual desirability, and yet its important to notice that until the end Jon through his own volition does nothing to assess his own value as a friend or partner to any potential bedfellow. Jon’s relationship with pornography reinforces his notions that women are objects and sex is a game where you try to maximize your score based on your partner’s appearance and willingness to be sexually exploited Even Jon’s frequent episodes of road rage stem from his constantly being devalued in sexual terms, whether upset with his girlfriend, or his dad’s emasculating missives, or from his own misplaced sense of entitlement and privilege simply for being an attractive alpha male; it’s interesting to see how often Jon casts himself as the wronged victim in his many conflicts, both corporeal and internal.
Spiritual salvation for our protagonist comes in the form of Julianne Moore, a classmate at Jon’s night school, who slowly brings him around to the notion that being into someone can be just as exciting as being in someone. Moore is as good here as she is anywhere, but I find some thematic trouble with her character; for one thing, her seniority over Jon (about 20 years) lends to an idea that her enlightenment in relationships may stem from experience rather than respect and intellectualism. Sure, she’s into tasteful pornography and soulful lovemaking, but the sharp age contrast could make people wonder if her ideas on sex may just be the natural state of things for a single woman in her late-middle age, and that Jon, too, could become that mindfully liberated if he just got a little bit older and wiser. I mean, I didn’t see it that way, but I could understand how some audiences would. As well, Moore’s character being newly widowed and childless connects her to a kind of melancholy and sadness that might mislead people into thinking Jon’s interest in her is due to pity or that her interest in Jon is superficial and just satisfying a need she hasn’t had met in a long time. What I’m getting at is her character’s history and attributes could cause some people to misread what is going on with her character, which is something that wouldn’t have happened if her character would have been just a little younger or not a sad widow. It muddles things, and I think needlessly, because her age and past marital/parental status are fairly irrelevant to the role she plays in Jon’s growth from selfish mook to respectful lover.
"You're laughing, but I'm not kidding. It's thiiiiiis long."
Regardless, the film is wonderful and, more than that, vital to the modern zeitgeist. Gender and sexual equality seems to finally be making a push into the mainstream, and this film stands as the first mass-market push into that dialogue. I hope people go out and see this film, even if they think they’re seeing a different kind of movie. Gordon-Levitt’s first film is stylish and pointed and confident and strong, and I can’t wait to see what he does next behind the camera.
"I don't know about you, but that movie was total horseshit."
Oh, to be torn 'twixt love an' duty.
S'posin' I lose my fair-haired beauty.
Look at that big hand move along,
Nearing high noon.
High Noon is the anti-western. It rejects the Fordian theme of civilization as the force that should triumph over the frontier. That the coming of civilization is the improvement of all. If The Searchers is the dark mirror to the John Wayne Cowboy, then High Noon is the dark mirror of the townsfolk. We see it in the opening moments. As Jack Colby and the rest of Frank Miller's gang ride into town. The reaction of the town folk is silent terror until we get to the saloon where the proprietor proclaims with glee that it's going to be a busy day.
I love this shot. Grace Kelly looking on with a certain sweet innocence while Gary Cooper looks at her lovingly. At the same time we can see the age and weariness around his eyes.
We move to the wedding of Will Kane, the marshal of Hadleyville, to his Quaker bride Amy. The lawman marrying the pacifist, who represents the far end of civilization. Perhaps impractical but driven by ideals. With his marriage it's time for him to give up his badge and give in to her ideal of running a store. But Will Kane is uncomfortable with this. It will leave the town without a lawman for a day. As he takes off his star, he clips it to his holster, the tool of his office. And at this point we learn about Frank Miller. That he is coming back to town that day.
After being rushed out of town Will Kane's sense of duty forces him to return, even as his new wife can not understand why they don't continue to flee. Amy brings more tarnish to the cause of civilization, telling him it's not his problem. To just ignore it. And then she rejects him, tells him she'll leave him. As Kane begins to gather his posse the town rejects him, shows itself to be full of cowards and the corrupt. The Judge gathers his things and calls him foolish then tells two stories of people welcoming tyrants who would kill the legal goverment. We find out his deputy is unfit for the job. He attempts to blackmail his way into the Marshal's position for his help.
The hotel clerk is slimy, gleeful of what's going to happen. Telling Amy that he has a comeuppance coming. The good people of the town, the ones in church debate what they should do only to turn their backs on him. Even his mentor tells him to run. Even when the one man he finds to help him learns it will just be the pair of them, the deputy runs. In the end the only person in town that will stand with him is a child. Only one other person in town even understands why he has to do what he has to do. Helen Ramírez is an outsider, the older, experienced woman who explains to Amy just the kind of man she married. But even she won't stand with Will Kane. He finishes his duty to the town that isn't worthy of it, and he throws his badge into the dirt. A final act of contempt for the townsfolk.
High Noon provoked a strong reaction when it came out and still gets angry reviews written to this day. John Wayne and Howard Hawks hated the message so much he made Rio Bravo as a counter. The review in Pravda condemned it for glorifying the individual. Usually when the film is brought up, people will talk about it as an anti-HUAC film. But it's been adopted and viewed as an anti-Korean War film as well as a film glorifying a call to arms in fighting communism. No matter how you view it, it's a fantastic film. Shot not quite in real time (The events of the film cover 100 minutes or so, the film runs 80.) Zimmerman keeps the tension going.
Zimmerman's use of Gary Cooper is inspired. He carries a weariness not seen in the Fordian Cowboy. He's tired, he's earned his rest but he carries a gravitas that makes you understand why he has to do one last duty. Events move along with him and you can just sense the weight he carries with each rejection of his call for support. But it's not just his performance, the cast around him does an amazing job of building up Frank Miller as an elemental force. A force that one runs and hides from like a tornado. Leading up to the crane shot.
Will Kane is alone, tiny compared to the town around him. And yet he has his duty.
High Noon
The rabbit-proof fence was once the longest single unbroken fence line in the world, stretching from north to south across the western section of the Australian continent. Covering some 1800km, it was built to try and perform a simple job - keeping the rabbits, that invasive species we white folk brought along with us to the Lucky Country, from spreading out and covering the entire continent.
Rabbit-Proof Fence is a 2002 film based on the novel Follow The Rabbit-Proof Fence, telling the story of three girls - half-aboriginal, half-white - who are taken from their families in their native country and placed into a mission as part of government policy. They escape and find their way back home by following the rabbit-proof fence, all the way back to Jigalong.
More than the story of three girls, it's a story about the Stolen Generations. As in many countries where colonial societies made their mark, the indigenous people were displaced and made to suffer for the crime of living somewhere that had been claimed by another country. In Australia, one of the particular ways our governments acted was, under the auspices of "protection", removing children of mixed descent from their aboriginal families and re-educating them, with the ultimate goal of breeding the aboriginal out of their bloodline. Children displaced in such a manner are known as the Stolen Generations, and it is difficult to talk about Rabbit-Proof Fence without positioning it within the context of the Australian treatment of the Aboriginal people.
In 1931, Molly, Daisy, and their cousin Gracie are children from the remote town of Jigalong, in Western Australia. Their fathers were workers on the rabbit-proof fence, and have moved on, leaving the children in the care of their aboriginal family. They live and hunt on the land, speaking their people's language, but they cannot escape the gaze of the authority - the police, looking for their kind. Meanwhile, A.O. Neville, public servant and officially titled Chief Protector of Aborigines, signs an order to remove the girls from their family and place them at Moore River Native Settlement, while simultaneously casually dismissing the reports from his secretary about the requests from aboriginal people for things like seeing their children, or obtaining a new pair of shoes.
Then they are taken, as mother wails for her children and the policeman points to the paper that states that the state is their legal guardian. It is a brutal moment, of coloniser versus the colonised, and ends the only way it could, with the girls being driven away, plaintively looking out the back window at their weeping family. As their grandmother strikes herself with a rock, the scene cuts to A.O. Neville presenting a slideshow to a women's group, explaining concisely what is going on - that there is a duty, here, to help and protect the aboriginal people, from themselves if need be.
If you are looking for a subtle film, you won't find it here - director Phillip Noyce is adamant in his style of making sure there are exceedingly few grey areas within the film, and that you know what to feel, when to feel it.
The casting for the film is largely comprised of familiar faces for those who know Australian film - David Gulpilil, veteran aboriginal actor, plays the tracker Moodoo, while Kenneth Branagh plays A.O. Neville - but Molly, Daisy and Gracie are all played by aboriginal children, untrained actors, and it is a credit to Phillip Noyce that it is often easy to forget that, as he lets the girls largely remain quiet and let the film tell the story for them.
Perhaps one of the most important cast members in Rabbit-Proof Fence isn't a person at all, but the Australian landscape. The full range of the Western Australian terrain is shown in the film, from the greenery near Moore River to the dusty plains and salt lakes the girls trek across in their journey home. As with many other films, such as Walkabout, the mystery and beauty of the outback provides not just a historical context, but also raises its own questions and juxtapositions between the ways the aboriginal and white people deal with the land, providing further commentary about the divide between their lot in the Lucky Country.
Like any film that purports to be based on a true story, there are factual inaccuracies in the film. But it would be a mistake to begin listing off the ways in which the story fails to be a complete step-by-step recreation of the truth, because what matters is that this story is being told at all. Rabbit-Proof Fence was, in many ways, one of the first films to really directly confront the issue of the Stolen Generations. While many other Australian films, from Red Hill to Walkabout, have tackled the issues of racial inequality and prejudice, Rabbit-Proof Fence was among the first to both reach such a wide audience here and internationally, and made viewers understand in a real sense what people - in our modern, Western democracy - had suffered.
If nothing else, the final moments and card of the film should be the takeaway, even if you decide to dismiss the rest of it as a heavily fictionalised, bleeding heart tale. Confronted with the women themselves, and the final facts surrounding the policies explored in the movie, it is hard not to understand why this is a story that needed to be told.
The rabbit-proof fence was a failure, by the way. It didn't take long before the rabbits found a way through. So we introduced a disease, myxomatosis, to try and kill them off.
That didn't work either.
Choose Your Own Chat 1 Choose Your Own Chat 2 Choose Your Own Chat 3
All of these things are true. But they aren't really what David Fincher's 2007 Zodiac is about.
James Vanderbilt effortlessly uses the story of the investigation into the Zodiac Killer to lay the framework for a tale of obsession, and the human drive to make sense of the things we don't understand. Fincher's work shows you glimpses of the Zodiac's victims, sometimes a cab driver, and at other times two lovers sharing a picnic lunch. But the film spends most of it's time following perhaps the most unexpected victim of all.
When we meet Robert Graysmith (Jake Gyllenhaal), he's presented to the audience as doe-eyed cartoonist. Graysmith's interest in the Zodiac only extends into a boyish penchant for puzzles. It is a letter famously written in code by the Zodiac that peaks his interest, and it's this same drive to solve puzzles that connects Graysmith at first with crime reporter Paul Avery (Robert Downey Jr), and later with Detective Dave Toschi (Mark Ruffalo). Together, these three men spend years pouring over the Zodiac case, nearly drowning in a haunting game of cat and mouse.
Fans of Fincher know that he's no stranger to coaxing brilliant and nuanced performances out of his actors and filling the screen with gorgeous visuals. Zodiac is no exception. Fincher lets the cast play with Vanderbilt's incredible screenplay while laying their performances over a San Francisco that is at times colorful and inviting, and at others a dreary maze of darkness and fog.
Both of these motifs play major roles over the course of the film. Fincher uses light and color to create tension where none should be. After all, many of us know the events of the film. We know who these characters are, we know their fates and you'd be hard pressed to run into somebody who doesn't know at least the end of the Zodiac legend. However, as we follow Robert's transition from nosy cartoonist in a brightly lit office, to the bowels of a boat to meet with a ruined Paul Avery, it's almost as if Zodiac is sucking the life right out of our characters before our eyes. Toschi too ultimately collapses under the weight of the case, unable to contend with the intense pressure and scrutiny. Their lives and their health are too important, hiding in darkened theaters and bars to escape from the eyes of the public, any of whom could be the Zodiac. He's ever-present. A real life boogeyman. At any moment we feel the black-hooded Zodiac could appear into a doorway, spelling certain disaster for our heroes. And yet somehow, Graysmith can't help but seek him out.
The man, as previously stated, has a penchant for puzzles. And what more of a rush could you ask for that solving the greatest puzzle of all. The one nobody else could. Increasingly obsessed with the identity of the killer, he hounds Toschi and Avery for information. Beaten and embarrassed, the men oblige even when they can go no further. They need to know.
It's 1978 by the time Graysmith reaches his final conclusion. Even in his absence, the oppressive homes and dreary streets that he explores only serve as a reminder that the Zodiac is gone, but not forgotten. After appearing on television to promote an upcoming book (on which the movie based), Graysmith begins to receive anonymous phone calls of heavy breathing. The toll this has taken on Graysmith is obvious. He loses his job, and along with it his wife Melanie (Chloe Sevigny) and children.
But we know how this ends. Graysmith may have found fame through his books, and he may have even come up with an answer that suited all of his information. But he could find no cipher. Unlike the letters he so playfully examines, his evidence is circumstantial and his guesses go unchecked. He may have a pulse by the film's end, but not unlike the cab driver or those picnicking teens, Zodiac stole the life from Robert Graysmith only moments after the two are introduced. The police have attributed five deaths to the Zodiac (though he himself claims some 32 more). Perhaps Robert Graysmith should be considered the sixth.
Zodiac is dense, exciting and chilling.
If you haven't seen it, enjoy. Be ready to look over your shoulder and under your bed before you sleep tonight.
If you have, I invite you to do a little advanced work by following Fincher's use of color throughout the film. There's a boldness and sense of purpose that permeates the wardrobes of those involved, signaling the desire to find out the true identity of the killer. It's a semiotics fan's dream, and I promise it rewards a more analytical viewing.
I promise my next one will be better, it's just been a crazy couple of weeks. But for now, Zodiac!
I fell in love with Labyrinth a long time ago. Take a bookish young boy at an impressionable age and show him a movie starring a pretty, bookish young girl, a cast of delightfully realized grotesques and a strangely captivating man in tights and Kajagoogoo hair and that boy will likely be entranced. Here's the trailer.
Instantly regretful, Sarah begs to get her brother back, but a strangely familiar Goblin King tells her that isn't the way things work. The baby is in his castle at the heart of a labyrinth she must solve in 13 hours. At the end of those thirteen hours, Toby will become a goblin forever, and she will have failed. So off she skips through the labyrinth, picking up companions on the way, and generally nailing a place in the hearts of eleven year olds watching the movie back in 1986 that means they still get nostalgic for lost youth and innocence when watching the movie today. In between her adventures, we see the Goblin King as he plots and schemes and sings songs and dances, sometimes singing songs about dances, and oh wait my God is that David Bowie under that hair?
Jennifer Connelly was fifteen when she made Labyrinth. She's the lead in a movie that calls for her to act almost exclusively with puppets or a vaguely sinister world-famous musician. It's a big ask, but she gives a beautifully unmannered performance. Never winsome, sometimes petulant but defiant and vulnerable and why yes I guess I did have a crush on her when I was growing up how did you guess? It's a thankless task in some ways, as the eye is usually drawn to the visual trickery and lush design that she walks through, but the film wouldn't work if she didn't work, and she does. Also, she scrubs up a treat.
The script, by Terry Jones and many others, went through a vast number of rewrites, and ends up a travelogue through the layers of the labyrinth, culminating in an Escher room where Bowie literally dances on the ceiling (oh what a feeling). There's a subtext the young me missed about the labyrinth being a metaphor for Sarah making the leap from girl to woman, but I think I grokked that she had some growing up to do and the labyrinth taught her a lesson or two. I also probably missed the hints that Jerath has fallen for the girl and wants a Queen rather than her baby brother. It was apparently a fraught writing process of compromises, leaving no one completely happy.
Labyrinth was a box office dud, making back barely half its budget, and apparently Henson despaired for years afterwards. It found life as a cult movie much later, and generally enjoys a warmer reputation these days. If you made it now the movie would probably be entirely animated or mostly animated, which would avoid the naff blue screen effects the movie has in the Firey dance scene, but would avoid the little thrill of joy when you realise they actually built that massive goblin robot and Ludo was a thing you could shake hands with. The pleasures of practical effects, for the actor as well as for the audience, are much in evidence here. Acting with Ludo in a set designed to look like an enchanted forest is plainly a better option than acting with thin air or a rod with a football on it surrounded by a soulless green screen. Such things are not cheap, of course, or easy to create. The production notes indicate that one set, the forest, required "required 120 truckloads of tree branches, 1,200 turfs of grass, 850 pounds of dried leaves, 133 bags of lichen, and 35 bundles of mossy old man's beard." But take a look at what that gets you when you rock up to a Royal Premiere.
Choose Your Own Chat 1 Choose Your Own Chat 2 Choose Your Own Chat 3
Choose Your Own Chat 1 Choose Your Own Chat 2 Choose Your Own Chat 3
Early is generally better then late. I'll allow it.
This is a really neat insight. You're right, it's a minor theme of the film, but it's definitely there and something I haven't really thought through before. What's interesting about it is how subtle and in-the-margins it is. Zodiac focuses on professional adults (Graysmith gets married, has kids) rather than the stereotypical hippies, and the closest to "free love" that the movie gets is with the first victim, whom the film acknowledges as having a lot of parties and a lot of men circling around her. But in tone, if not in subject matter, Zodiac fits squarely into the tradition of loss of innocence stories--and I think you're right in pinpointing Robert's as the innocence which is lost. That tonal journey from youthful idealism to personal tragedy is both the overall emotional arc of the film and the story of many of its minor characters and individual sequences--like the opening, which goes from a hopeful date to a nightmare, or Paul Avery's descent into mocking despair. I've heard it said that the subject of Zodiac is the distance between the two faces (of the same person) that bookend the movie, and that distance is really about the lost promise of that generation. Zodiac looks clearly at that time and sees how the people who lived through it tried to do the right thing and mostly failed--failed marriages and alcoholism and abandoned hopes. "You're wrong," says Robert, "it was important." "Then what did you ever do about it?" Avery says. "If it was so fucking important, what did you ever do?" Not enough to change things, but still too much for his own peace of mind.