Zodiac is a film to lose yourself in. Directed by David Fincher with a perfectionist’s eye for performance and an obsessive’s attention to detail, it’s also the director’s first film that’s primarily about people, instead of its own impressive ideas. That’s not to diminish the impressive accomplishments he’s made to date, especially in the modern classics Se7en and Fight Club, but to underscore how Zodiac intensifies and deepens the connection between technical facility and sublime impact.
Tag Archives: crime
Perfume
Tom Tykwer is not a favorite — I liked Run Lola Run well enough on a single viewing, but watching it a second time was an exercise in diminishing returns, and I had little use for The Princess and the Warrior. So I had written this project off long ago, despite the fact that the novel by Patrick Süskind is among my very favorite books. What a surprise, then, in the opening reel. The Dogville-inspired flashbacks characterized by the (re)use of John Hurt as a sardonic narrator were a little disorienting, but what was up on screen was a rich and putrid vision of 18th Century France, resplendent in colorful detail and redolent with the kind of grunge you’d expect to see slathered across the set dressing in a Monty Python movie. You could almost — yes — smell it.
Point Blank
In this film’s most indelible combination of sound and image, the revenge-bent Lee Marvin (character name: Walker) is seen striding purposefully down a white hallway, each smack of his footsteps resonating like the sound of marching armies, or of a rifle being cocked. Director John Boorman cuts away to other images, across space and time, but still the cadence of that peculiar kind of madness — clop! clop! clop! — beats relentlessly on the soundtrack, giving Marvin’s rage ever-more-palpable form every time the camera alights on his steely set face. It’s scary and exciting at the same time, nicely establishing Marvin as the original Terminator. (This was remade, with some semblance of wit, as the Mel Gibson vehicle Payback, but Gibson is way too cuddly to properly inhabit the same role as Marvin.)
Ichi the Killer
Dead or Alive
The first 10 minutes of Dead or Alive constitute the most exciting time I’ve had in a movie theater so far this year. Simultaneously indulging and mocking the audience’s willingness to engage with images of explosive violence and gratuitous titillation, the film kicks off with a rapid-fire montage sequence that plays like a take-no-prisoners, big-screen reimagining of Spike Jonze’s music video for the Beastie Boys’ “Sabotage,” itself a hyped-up, self-aware riff on television cop shows of the 1970s.
Bound
Bound is a thriller with a lesbian twist, starring Jennifer Tilly (Bullets Over Broadway) and Gina Gershon (Showgirls) as illicit lovers who conspire to swindle the mob out of $2 million.
Heat
At precisely the halfway point of Heat, Michael Mann’s 171-minute epic of a crime drama, cop Vincent Hanna (Al Pacino) tucks in behind criminal mastermind Neil McCauley (Robert De Niro) on the highway, pulls him over with flashing lights, and asks him if he wants to go get a cup of coffee.
Se7en
David Fincher, whose brilliant career as a director of music videos encompassed such highs and lows as Madonna’s “Express Yourself” and Rick Springfield’s “Bop ‘Til You Drop,” has helmed an almost overly stylish thriller about the evil that men do and the myriad ways to punish them. And this thriller is so unlikely on its surface that when the machine kicks into high gear and the characters really start to matter to us, its impact seems all-encompassing and lingers for days after viewing.