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| Zodiac by Reichsminister Doktor Goebbels 03/10/2007, 5:06pm PST | ||||
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| In the pre-internet days, when I was a little boy, I found a library book about serial killers. It profiled countless bad guys, but only two stuck in my memory. The first was Richard Ramirez, whose nickname, “The Night Stalker,” sounds incredibly cool when you are eight. The other was the Zodiac.
This guy was the real deal: The mad genius comic book villain. The sick fawkin freak who just wants to hurt and kill and terrorize and taunt society with the fact that he can get away with defying it because he’s too calculating to be caught. He wasn’t a sexual predator or a religious nut or a drug fiend, just a plain old red, white, and blue killing machine. Making the Chronicle publish your cipher? "That’s like being DM for a nationwide D&D game," I would have said if I had ever played Dungeons & Dragons and if that analogy is accurate at all, because I still haven’t and I don’t know. It seems like it would be. But not really. The Zodiac also revealed his humanness in his letters. They included strange misspellings, a grandiosity that sounded more childish than genuinely loony, and a grasping, forced sense of sexuality. And of course, he got caught, more or less, and probably intentionally. The case gave people the giddy thrill of a real life bogeyman, along with some kind of insight into the damaged man behind the curtain. The movie is ultimately shaped by the arc of the real story. It’s very faithful to history. Unfortunately, the timeline of the actual Zodiac case doesn’t really lend itself to movie pacing or tidy storytelling. A whole lot happens in the early and middle parts, and then things slow way down and there’s less to show and do. Even at the very end, just as it seems like things are about to pick up again, unsatisfying reality intrudes again. It’s 3 hours long, and the last hour is the least interesting part by far. Conversely, the police procedural aspect of the first hour-and-a-half is awesome. The movie is kept engaging by its bluntness, maybe even laziness. Except for one silly haunted house sequence at the end, none of the scary stuff is given horror movie treatment. The sober depictions, particularly of the killer’s manner, make you watch closer and see more of the creepy subtleties. If you hate Mark Ruffalo as the handsome, stammering, non-threatening pretty boy he plays in every other movie, you’ll have to find a new reason to hate him here. He actually acts, kind of. For the role, Ruffalo put on 30 lbs. of ugly weight, lots of ugly 1970s cop clothing, and some irritating but dead-on affectations of real-life Det. David Toschi. Toschi is a man’s man. He’s a partial inspiration for Harry Callahan, and he really wore that quick-draw shoulder holster. Robert Downey Jr. puts on a winning performance, even if it owes a bit much to Uncle Duke. Jake Gyllenhaal is bland and weightless as the least important main character ever. You almost don’t notice him. There is one last good reason to like this movie. It uses that device where an incongruously upbeat or trippy song from the 1960s plays while something unpleasant takes place onscreen. It showed up in a lot of old slasher movies, and in stuff like Pulp Fiction and Forrest Gump. It is probably a stupid reason to like a movie, actually. Positive, anyway! |
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Zodiac by 03/10/2007, 5:06pm PST  You have convinced me to see this movie. by 03/11/2007, 12:16am PST Re: You have convinced me to see this movie. by 03/11/2007, 11:13am PDT Re: You have convinced me to see this movie. by 03/12/2007, 4:35am PDT |
