A List Of Things Thrown Five Minutes Ago

HURDY GURDY, GURDY HE SANG: I've said a bit already about my love of David Fincher's Zodiac; today, Scott Tobias inducts it into The New Cult Canon:

There may be arguments over which David Fincher film is the strongest—the existential noir of his endlessly imitated serial killer movie Seven, the plugged-in portrait of modern masculinity in Fight Club, the Rashomon-like complexity of Facebook’s origins in The Social Network—but there’s no question which is the most Fincherian. That would be Zodiac, his 2007 recounting/reinvestigation of the unsolved Zodiac killer case that gripped the San Francisco Bay area in the late ’60s and early ’70s, then tapered off as the trail went cold. All the qualities associated with Fincher—his dictatorial command over every aspect of the production, his Kubrickian habit of forcing his actors to do dozens of takes, his rigorous attention to detail—are epitomized by Zodiac, an obsessive movie about the nature of obsession.


... Zodiac is a movie awash in information: dates, crimes, locations, suspects, evidence, meaningful connections and red herrings, breakthroughs and setbacks. And though it burrows deeply into that information—and generously respects the audience’s ability to process it all—it’s not so myopic that it misses the cultural significance of the Zodiac killer, either. On a macro scale, Fincher captures the tenor of a city transfixed by a boogeyman who embodied the anxieties of the time. On a micro scale, he cleanly explicates an absurdly complicated procedural while dealing insightfully with the type of person that would follow this case down the rabbit hole—a person very much like himself, it’s safe to say.