Thursday, March 1, 2007

THE EXISTENTIAL WILLIES: It's been a while since I've seen a movie get as universally good reviews as David Fincher's Zodiac, opening Friday and starting Jake Gyllenhaal, Robert Downey Jr., Mark Ruffalo and Anthony Edwards. Concludes EW's Owen Gleiberman:
Zodiac never veers from its stoically gripping, police-blotter tone, yet it begins to take on the quality of a dream. It's an analogue of the post-9/11 world, where the enemy is specific yet, by virtue of his self-projection, omnipresent, and therefore impossible to pin down. As the '70s roll forward, the investigators move on to other cases, but Graysmith, the amateur, can't, and Gyllenhaal, who marinates his boyishness in quivery tension, makes that obsession ours. Slithering into police libraries, interviewing suspects, tearing his family life apart, he's eaten up by the need to know, and he makes connections no one else does, but does he solve the case? By the time he fastens on to a monster, maybe the monster (and maybe not), Zodiac leaves us haunted by the knowledge that he's looking for something that can't be found: a way to make the monsters go away. A
Or if you're going to see Black Snake Moan this weekend, you can tell us.

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