Friday, October 15, 2010

October Horror Season 2: Day 15

(Please note:  This and the next several days will be back-dated to appear on their correct day while I play catch up.  I was not able to watch for several days due to unforeseable circumstances.)

Day 15 kicks off Serious Serial Killer week with 2007's "Zodiac" which stars Robert Downey Jr and Jake Gyllenhaal among other big names.  Really an A-list cast.



Directed by David Fincher the film is just about guaranteed to be incredibly well constructed.  While I'm sure there's limitless possibility for film-nerding on this one, for a layman it just really didn't seem out of the ordinary.  It was good, no doubt, but I couldn't really interest myself in the shots unless something was actually happening in them.  With a film that clocks in at ~2.6 hours, holding attention is really important.

A good job is done here and I didn't really find myself wandering away from the movie for too long.  The only thing I could really hold against it is that in certain places they did a lot of time skipping, so you'd see "2 weeks later", and then maybe 35 seconds of film, and then a fade and "3 weeks later".  I'm told they did this to stay accurate to the actual time line of the case as laid out in the book, but it's really distracting when it happens so quickly.  If you've ever seen the Sphere adaptation, they stuck the actual chapter names from the book as transitions between sequences and it really cut up and ruined the action.

Aside from that, Downey Jr is always a pleasure to watch, even Jake isn't bad playing the doe-eyed cartoonist.  He fails a little as the serious journalist later, though.

Definitely not bad, but I wouldn't really do a recommend on this.  I guess maybe since I'm too young to remember the Zodiac news coverage, if it had been my time I might be a little more interested in it.

Tomorrow serial killers week continues with "Horsemen"

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