Will This Meeting Come to Order?

The ever-enjoyable and thought-provoking Dana Stevens at Slate has called the annual Movie Club to order. First topic of convo: David Fincher's Zodiac and fellow debaters Nathan Lee, Wesley Morris and Scott Foundas's obvious Fincher love. Funny, Cinecultist and our fellow Fincher admirer Ilana were just discussing our love for Zodiac last night over beers at The Smith.

Stevens writes that "David Fincher has always seemed like a niche director to me, an expert spelunker into remote corners of the male psyche who never brings back quite enough from his travels to justify the descent," (ha) but CC disagrees. Or rather, the thing we found most intriguing (and ultimately resonant) about Zodiac is the way Fincher seems to be interrogating the very project of investigation and the thriller genre. By refusing to make one character the ultimate mystery solver and by scattering the movie's action across decades, he seems to be laughing in the face of our ability to catch evil-doers. Law and Order's Jack McCoy may be able to get the killer to confess in 50-odd minutes, but in Fincher's world, it's not so easy. And this from a director who was made famous by his tidy crime solving movie Se7en. Now he wants to spend 2 and a half hours exploring a story without a tidy conclusion, and that seems worthy of admiration and predictions of cinema history placement in our book.

Please keep clicking through at the above link for the other critics' responses, they're all quite well written. (BTW, Morris agrees with CC's opinion on Zodiac but we heartily disagree with his worship of Southland Tales. That Kelly mess put CC to sleep, literally.)