No Country For Old Men (dirs. Joel and Ethan Coen) [174 points / 27 votes]
Second place:
There Will Be Blood (dir. Paul Thomas Anderson) [193 points / 28 votes]
And the winner is...
Zodiac [193 points / 30 votes]
“Do you know more people die in the East Bay commute every three months than that idiot ever killed? He offed a few citizens, wrote a few letters, then faded into footnote.” – Robert Downey Jr. as Paul Avery
“Let’s take a brief moment to appreciate the resuscitation of David Fincher’s Zodiac. Dumped into theaters just before spring of 2007, after Fincher declined to trim the film into the streamlined prestige picture Paramount hoped it would be, the film opened quietly and then died at the box office (a domestic take of $33 million, making it the lowest grossing film of the director’s career). Overshadowed by the equally artful and brooding No Country For Old Men and There Will Be Blood at the end of the year, the film pulled a no-show at the Academy Awards and failed to win a single major critical prize. Like the titular killer who terrorized Northern California during the late 60’s and early 70’s, it appeared briefly on everyone’s radar and then just disappeared.
“Except it didn’t. Ten years on, the small but loud group of devotees dedicated to the film continues to feverishly evangelize for it. Pouring over the film’s fastidiously chronicled trail of breadcrumbs, re-litigating the notion of whether the film’s resolution is truly definitive or not and allowing themselves to swept up in Fincher’s sprawling, impeccably-designed, descent into the nightmare that consumed him as a child growing up in Marin County. Awash in sunshine and earthy tones, Zodiac instills in you a false sense of security, compounded by the way Fincher presents murder in an almost quotidian manner, allowing the threat of malevolence to slowly seep outward like an ink stain, eventually enveloping everything it comes into contact with. But the real violence of Zodiac is spiritual; the soul-sucking emptiness of never knowing the truth, when the dogged search for answers becomes the sum total of a life.
“The film places the viewer in the role of amateur gumshoe, cataloguing an endless stream of names, dates and details, pursuing dead-ends and conflicting information. But Fincher, a notoriously unsentimental perfectionist, demands that you understand the cost of obsession, devising a three-head monster of a narrative that allows the film to introduce, and then dispense with, its protagonists only after their respective leg of this relay race has left them a hollowed-out husk of a man (quite pointedly the film addresses the double-edged sword of being a man, unencumbered and willing to shed family, profession and even your health in pursuit of a ‘higher’ calling). At over two and a half hours the film dares to leave you exhausted, your head swimming with competing theories and suspects, giving you all the pieces to the puzzle and then asking you to accept the perfect imperfection of its conclusion.
“I am not Avery.” ~ Andrew Dignan
No comments:
Post a Comment