best david fincher, dudes

i'm goin zodiac, dudes

z-z-z-zodiac

thanking you for bringing Barry Sobel reference heat at 3 am!

that's why I'm here

Only ones I actively don't like are Alien³ and Panic Room, but I shouldn't say that because it sounds like I don't favor films with female leads. But they suck, truth.

fight club obv

Zodiac very obv

Alien³ is really underrated. Charles Dutton, Charles Dance, and Pete Postlethwaite... what's not to like?

don't get zodiac. <3 fight club.

As far as actual best... he's done more sophisticated work but Se7en launched Spacey, didn't kill the Black Guy or the Cop About To Retire and changed the course of Hollywood. Not for the better, true, but still.

Fight Club has moments but fails due to horrible horrible final ten minutes.

rogermexico otm about Fight Club. Voted for Zodiac, exciting movie (quite spooky) and a nice ensemble cast. Se7en is pretty good too.

xpost

Another for Zodiac.

I love ilxors because they're some of the few ppl who wouldn't walk Fight Club in a poll like this.

btw i voted for fight club because i thought it was fincheriest. i think bb is actually better, and that opinion kinda surprises me

I saw BB a couple days ago and I thought it totally sucked. Is that Mary-Alice "some people dance" bit in the story? Cos its super dodge. Also, I was taken to this on the pretense that it was an hour and a half long. The last time that shit happened to me was meet joe black, fucking brad pitt.

Alien 3 is unfairly shit upon.

tbh, I didn't really like Aliens either.

1999-2007: fave film was fight club
2009-date: fave film is zodiac

we don't talk about the 'lost years'

7

The Game is underrated. Apart from the building fall bit. Haven't seen Zodiac or Panic Room...

Hmmm. This is tricky. I adored Fight Club when I was 20, but it's very... the second half is pretty flat, and the last ten minutes is pretty awful. Watched the Norton Hulk the other day and that struck me as just a Fight Club rip...

I quite like Alien3 although I've not seen it in years. It got a hard deal. Zodiac is pretty wicked and I really like it.

But...

I think I have to go for Se7en.

im a signed-up fincher stan but i basically feel he got good with 'the game'. 'se7en' has a lot going for it, but it is unremittingly conservative and basically morgan freeman gets on my tits. (i don't think that all the 'it's easier to beat a child than to raise it' stuff is very fincher, whereas it does chime with the hardcore christian conservative message of 'bruce almighty' and its sequel, whatever that was called.)

http://pets.onas.ru/cats_fighting.jpg
http://www.illusionsdanceclub.com/files/Dance_floor_1.jpg

Haven't seen Button yet, but nothing I've heard makes me think it's going to overtake Zodiac in my heart.

One for the vastly underrated "The Game," which probably didn't wow me as much as FC when I first saw it but which has aged better in my memory.

Zodiac - the only one in which the art direction means something.

The "Express Yourself" video still his best, dudes.

this is gonna sound like some challop shit but i dont understand how a smart person like enrq could ever be impressed by fight club

shit is funny.

i thought it was pretty goddamn lame but that was probly cuz there was a lotta frontin burt_stanton type dudes who wouldnt stfu reppin it

points in favour

- was in college
- saw it before any of the publicity (film companies don't usually show films to student reviewers before release: fox had their demographic heads in a swivel with this rly)
- and thus before any of the stantons jumped on
- the first time was the best time, and totally out of the blue, had no idea what it was going to be other than basic 'men hitting each other' concept
- still think it's funny as balls, srsly
- still repping for amazingness of it as sheer technical feat: walking through the ikea catalogue, the montage that ends with the plane crashing into him...
- it's not some dumbshit 'omg corporations!' thing, i've realized, though that's what i got from it when i was 19 lol.

what is it?

lots of violence and fun stuff dude

do you rewatch it much?

I don't rewatch much of anything that isn't a slasher movie, so no

sorry, that was to nrq. staggered he likes FC.

really hard to separate out fight club as movie from fight club as signifier of reactionary political naivety at least here in the states

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http://images.allposters.com/images/35/007_animal_house.jpg

tbh i think it's kind of a secretly conservative film, not in a social-conservative way like 'se7en' though. and it doesn't resolve anything; despite the ending, it *is* still saying fuk u corporate america to an extent. it's just that that's what seemed most salient then, whereas now i do think it has a lot in common with zodiac and ccbb, which have nothing to do with any of that stuff.

tbh i think it's about things that will sound like lame philosophical generalizations unless they're somehow forged into thrilling and innovative screen art!

this is a tautological cop-out move, but to further would take me into jaggerstan territory.

but think it's fair to say there is a lot going on in the film, and i now see why a lot of older critics preferred the first half of it -- so much is about the same kinds of intimations of mortality you get in zodiac and ccbb -- but the last hour is still some dynamite filmmaking and HBC is rocking the shit.

really hard to separate out fight club as movie from fight club as signifier of reactionary political naivety at least here in the states

― max, Sunday, February 15, 2009 4:37 PM (1 minute ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

a little bit here too.

caek -- last time i saw it all the way through was three years ago, i think, and even that was probably with commentary.

+ i wrote a whole thing last year about how it invented the 'frat pack', but possibly without rewatching. (eg 'old school' is a comedy version of 'fight club'.)

I liked FC when it came out, but the OMG office drone monologing and fake Big Beat soundtrack (Dust Brothers lol) and CGI closeups like whatever TV cop show that I don't watch does, have def not aged well. Also I am not 20 anymore. The Game rly holds up tho.

(it's kind of an absolute fact that shit from ten years ago is always the least fashionable shit. i generally disregard that, though that will change when 'ten years ago' means 'the 2000s', which sucked imho.)

Fight Club is the only funny satire made by Hollywood since Bulworth. also, Edward Norton never better (esp given his inability to pick a script since).

Se7en edges it for me.

Fincher haaaaaaates Alien3 (no creative control).

Morbius, I'm trying to fathom you finding anything to laugh about in Bulworth -- is it Warren Beatty eating KFC?

I can understand not thinking Panic Room is the best -- it isn't -- but why the hate for it? Seems like a nice taut little thriller to me, nothing more, nothing less. Good, crafty work for hire with some clever Fincherian camera work and design. Jared Leto gets half his face burned off then gets shot in the head by Dwight Yoakam. What's to hate?

best part of panic room is the opening credits imo

i like PR, not my favorite but i threw it a pity vote.

i love most of these, but fight club takes it, mostly because rewatching it and realizing how effectively fincher is actually satirizing the reaction i had to it when i was 19 (and i think hes really aware of how much "yeeeaaahhhh smash the state i want someone to hit me in the face" young alternadudes are going to respond with) is kind of an awesome and amazing feat.

Can't remember who, but I remember one critic noting that Fight Club is far less serious than its partisans would indicate, and (unlike them) knows that the entire thing is way ridiculous.

the main thing I remember about Panic Room is all that prominently placed Evian water

opening credits of panic room are some of the best opening credits ever imo

In modern parlance, this is called "trolling." Had it really been Zodiac, he would have kept something from her car to prove it was him. He was all about offering physical proof.

― i couldn't adjust the food knobs (Phil D.), Friday, January 6, 2012 10:36 PM (45 seconds ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

? He only offered physical proof once.

this was his one failed murder

Uh no he failed to kill fully a third of his victims, namely Mike Mageau and Bryan Hartnell.

xp He also wrote on Hartnell's car door.

And specifically named the ammo used in the Ferrin/Mageau attack.

yeah I should have said aborted murder. xp

I don't see why Z would take physical evidence to prove he did it considering it was an aborted crime.

That's the thing about this guy and that,s what Fincher's movie exploits so well - as serial killers go, he was shitty! He attacked three couples and only succeeded in killing both of the victims once, and he damn near got caught on the Stine killing. And yet the media, and people generally, built him into the image of this unstoppable boogeyman based on some letters he sent. It should be pretty obvious how taking credit for things you didn't do would play into this.

there were other possible Z crimes he didn't take credit for, though. Why not take (explicit) credit for Donna Lass? I think on balance, taking specific credit for the Johns case is evidence in its favor w/r/t Z's involvement.

at the very least you have to cut me some slack w/r/t MO. The Stine case proved he was adapting his routine.

there were other possible Z crimes he didn't take credit for, though.

Yes, because there weren't breathless ZODIAC THREATENED TO THROW MY BABY OUT CAR WINDOW newspaper stories about them.

I dunno the Johns case kinda makes Z look like a huge fuckup, right? Why take credit for that instead of a successful murder or a disappearance?

I don't think the Stine case proves anything except a) he got sloppy and almost got himself caught, and b) in all likelihood it scared him into never killing again. Far from being a "change in routine," it's an outlier following three very similar crimes, after which history records no definite further criminal from the perpetrator.

I like to think that one day, someone will find something when cleaning out their parents' or gramdparents' belongings that shows definitively who Zodiac was, but I also find it highly unlikely.

"further criminal activity"

Au contraire, it makes him look like the devil. "This one got away, but I still made her pay, and I can be anyone, anywhere!"

I don't think the Stine case proves anything except a) he got sloppy and almost got himself caught, and b) in all likelihood it scared him into never killing again. Far from being a "change in routine," it's an outlier following three very similar crimes, after which history records no definite further criminal from the perpetrator.
― i couldn't adjust the food knobs (Phil D.), Friday, January 6, 2012 10:49 PM (1 minute ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

1 out of 4 isn't an outlier, it's 25%.

Major takeaway from Zodiac: The Movie (and this is pretty much true to real life) was that the Zodiac sure did like to fuck with the cops and the press and inflate his own importance, which makes Zodiac writing letters taking credit for things he didn't do not noteworthy.

I mean this dude scared an entire city into utter shitlessness just by saying "Hey, maybe I'll shoot some kids on a school bus" despite never having targeted children in any of his crimes. Taking credit for Johns, after everyone already thought it was him based on her rantings, was an easy way of maintaining his (unearned) terrifying reputation.

And between the Johns incident and the letter in which he took credit, he wrote three other letters in which he never mentioned it. Only after he complains repeatedly in those three letters about people not wearing Zodiac buttons does he then claim, "Oh yeah I did this thing too that was already reported in your papers ARE YOU SCARED YET TROLOLOLOL?"

ok you're actually convincing me lol

I'll bump it down to 10%

it's interesting that the two most disputed Z cases, both of which he claimed credit for in more oblique ways, are so similar.

Sometimes I think the reason he was never caught and why some of the crimes were executed so poorly is because there were two people working together, splitting them up. But that seems kinda silly, the Hillside Stranglers notwithstanding.

have you guys solved the case yet

he seemed to keep getting worse at his "job" xp

http://www.toplessrobot.com/00-20-31.jpg

have you guys solved the case yet

― The Silent Extreme (Shakey Mo Collier), Friday, January 6, 2012 11:13 PM (1 minute ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

yeah, Graysmith did it.

either him or Gyllenhall's dad.

Oh man now I want a screenplay where Graysmith is the Zodiac killer and uses his SF Chron job to throw everyone off.

what if Graysmith was the real author of the letter that got Toschi demoted?

http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-tuAzsKGELpo/TrLSMikT6nI/AAAAAAAADZ8/H3DTLuBOyRE/s1600/JFK5.jpg

have you seen the unabomber as Z theory it'll blow your minds bros

That theory is kind of fun, even if it's not true. The handwriting similarities, location coincidences etc make it tempting.

I love the turn this thread has taken.

i need to see the remix of Zodiac where they whip the mask off him at the end and it turns out it was the janitor

rooby rooby rooooOOOoO

still not gonna see that dragon tattoo, benjamin button neither

― lag∞n, Thursday, January 5, 2012 1:12 AM (Yesterday) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

otm

― johnny crunch, Friday, January 6, 2012 5:18 PM (3 weeks ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

lol i watched that dragon tattoo last nite, p ok if u dont think abt it too much, just let it wash over you

btw why are you all zodiac killer experts

y'all expert zodiac killahs

btw good review, still not watching

haha

a major plot point is at some point its revealed that the girls is super hot

sry is that a spoiler

I worked on The Game. Because of the English first AD we regularly referred to him as 'Fincha'.

this movie really is a lot like JFK

Zodiac that is

whichever one we think is best?

gdamn xp

http://s3.amazonaws.com/criterion-production/release_images/3968/627_box_348x490_BD.jpg?1339786418

for Fincher (and Alien3) fans, some amazing stuff right here

http://www.cinephiliabeyond.org/take-all-of-the-responsibility-because-youre-going-to-get-all-of-the-blame/

Zodiac - the only one in which the art direction means something.

^Alfred nuts

Saw a rep screening of Seven tonight--I don't think the second time, but (like An Unmarried Woman the other day) the first time since a year or two of its release.

All that time hasn't really changed my view: efficient, but fundamentally nasty (in a way that Zodiac isn't for me), and also, with Kevin Spacey's big monologue in the car, kind of obvious. The best moment is when Spacey turns up at the station and turns himself in. Can't imagine ever seeing it again.

would’ve voted for The Game