333. Zodiac
Posted on October 28th, 2018
Archived in Podcasts
Alan J. Pakula,
Alfred Hitchcock,
All The President's Men,
Andrew Kevin Walker,
Chinatown,
Clint Eastwood,
David Fincher,
Dirty Harry,
genre,
journalism,
Mindhunter,
Noir,
Roman Polanski,
San Francisco,
Se7en,
Serial-Killer,
Vertigo,
Zodiac
Zodiac
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4 Responses to “333. Zodiac”
“Psychological carnage Hollywood hadn’t seen since Chinatown.” In that case you should see Arthur Penn’s Night Moves. Filmed in 1973, but released in 1975, a year after Chinatown. A true gem.
Hi James,
Thanks for listening in. Yes, I’ve seen Night Moves. And yes, Harry Moseby’s despair is palpable and the boat going in circles is a vision of purgatory but perhaps it’s because I saw both Chinatown and Vertigo before Night Moves that they had, and still have a greater impact on me.
All The President’s Men gets mentioned as an influence and it should, it deals with reporters, finding out the truth and more importantly paranoia but in the end Nixon resigns and a bunch of the other faceless government bad guys go to jail. For me the movie that gives the best blueprint of Zodiac would be Oliver Stone’s JFK. What was good about JFK was Stone made a movie about the unending complex paranoia of conspiracy theory’s. Stone may have intended to make a movie that tries to solve the JFK murder, or at least point the finger in a whole bunch of different directions, but what he really made was movie about a murder and then the paranoia of trying to solve the case while never actually solving the murder….sound familiar? I have a hard time taking the conclusions of JFK seriously but I found the paranoia while trying to solve the case to be exhilarating. James Vanderbilt and David Fincher did an excellent job capturing the paranoia one feels when they dive into the Zodiac story and that’s not an easy thing to pull off.
Hi Mike,
Thank you for your post. Brilliant comparison to JFK and one I wholeheartedly agree; the avalanche of conspiracy theories is at times overwhelming and many of them surely designed to throw people like Garrison off the scent. Like you, I have reservations about the film’s conclusions (let’s say Stone intended it as a counter-myth) but at the same time, I think it is one of American cinema’s greatest achievements.