26 September 2007
Zodiac (2006)
It’s hard to make a movie that doesn’t have an ending. It reminded me a bit of JFK without the monologue at the end. At least you knew when that one was over: failure was its denoument. Here you have the same overwhelming load of facts buried through a shifting ensemble of characters (the cartoonist disappears for at least 45 minutes when we focus on the police stuff, and then he just retraces it all).
Did I miss something, or is the last 45 minutes a recap of the first 90 minutes? And I must admit I cocked an eyebrow when reading Roger Ebert’s recent review that said David Fincher manages to create a great deal of suspense without cheap thrills like chases and things that go bump in the night, only then to cite the cheapest scene in the whole thing (the basement) as an example of the “best sort of” that kind of scene. Maybe I was missing something, but in what turned out to be a complete dead end, the film first misleads us into thinking the cartoonist is in the basement with the killer, and then proceeds to have the floorboards creak menacingly when it seems that no one is even upstairs. Not even his mother in drag. And then the door is locked, and yet the cartoonist thrashes at it mercilessly. Of course the movie poster writer guy is just having some fun with the paranoid guy, right? And that’s just having a bit of fun, in turn, at our expense? It seemed cheap and sensationalistic to me, because what value does the movie poster guy have in insinuating that he’s the killer from a story point-of-view? Nothing, especially since this whole movie poster lead evaporates within seconds of the cartoonist sputtering terrified on his heels from the clutches of the evil basement.