I'm seeing it this Friday night - get this - with the hubby, even! :o ;D
It's kind of part of my birthday gift extravaganza, since he screwed up *again* and scheduled himself to be flying on my actual birthday. ::)
Hmmmm... Maybe I can get a pre-season baseball game followed by a visit to Blue Martini out of him, too...
Let us know what you think.
Run time is 2 hours 45 minutes! :o :DJesus H! This distinctly limits the probability of my seeing this in the theater. An intermission might make it more feasible and pleasant (whatever happened to those?).
Jesus H! This distinctly limits the probability of my seeing this in the theater.
Really?I'm afraid so. Long running times are hard on me, and more and more movies these days are clocking in well over two hours. Now seeing these in home-entertainment formats is much less daunting, but in the theater, 2-hours + tends to scare me off.
(With the majority of the new 45 minutes being them up on the mountain, and in the Siesta Motel, and the third night in the tent! :D :D :D )Now that's a running time I could live with!
Now that's a running time I could live with!
Actually, some of my favorite films are long ones, including Jacques Rivette's Celine et Julie vont en bateau (well over three hours) and Andrei Tarkovsky's Solyaris. Long running times are hard on me, for a variety of reasons, but that doesn't mean I can't appreciate a long film.
Hey Del,
The blue drink with the umbrella is an Aqua Velva, reminiscent of the nasty aftershave of the same name.
I totally laughed when Jake's character received this drink. After trying it, Robert Downey, Jr's character wanted one. Then the table was littered with tulip glasses and paper parasols.
I found the recipe: vodka and blue curacao. Some include an infusion of mint. Probably goes down easy.
I agree with you about Jake's character Robert: why the obsession? Why was he divorced the first time? Another obsession ruin his marriage? We are left to figure it out.
Paul
I really found myself the most involved with Paul Avery, and the more I think about it, the more I have to admit it's mostly because of Robert Downey, Jr.'s portrayal of him. In another actor's hands, I wouldn't have cared about him half as much.
Viewers who appreciate this movie will also like the classic Call Northside 777 starring Jimmy Stewart, also based on a real-life case of a reporter's investigation of a murder. And they will enjoy other movies about murders who communicate with journalists or policemen, including Dirty Harry (inspired by the Zodiac case and briefly glimpsed in this film), The Mean Season, and No Way to Treat a Lady. Viewers who would like to find out more about the Zodiac case (and perhaps try to solve some of the still-unsolved coded messages) should read Zodiac and "This Is the Zodiac Speaking": Into the Mind of a Serial Killer. And they might like to take a look at the classic movie that allegedly influenced or inspired the Zodiac killer, The Most Dangerous Game.
I also read in the review at Pajiba (one of my favorite review sites: http://www.pajiba.com/zodiac.htm) that at the time the investigation was getting going, David Toschi (Mark Ruffalo) was a local celebrity as he had inspired Steve McQueen's Bullitt. So that might be another movie to add to the DVD list. We rented Dirty Harry to watch tonight.
I agree with this review. I like pajiba a lot, too, Leslie. Again usually because they get the themes without giving too much away and because they usually agree with me. He was also dead on, by the way (and no pun intended), about how that lake scene would make a fine short subject.
Paul Avery also snorted cocaine at the bar where he was drinking the aqua velvets with Graysmith. Its hard to catch him doing it as he used a spoon, popular back in the day. You see him snorting the coke from the spoon in the sequence after he and Graysmith move to the booth, the table littered with empty and half emptied glasses of aqua velva. Just my little side note
Paul Avery (Robert Downey, Jr.) is the chain-smoking hard-drinking newspaper reporter who covered the story. Downey vibrates like a tuning fork, his offbeat rhythms responding to tones only he can hear. It is is heartbreaking to see the sensitivity that makes him a meticulous observer of the world he writes about begin to implode. The movie doesn't ask or answer whether the stress of being a possible target of Zodiac is what finally causes him to unravel or whether working on the story kept his fragile spirit together with a sense of purpose. It just shows us the toll that the story took on the man who happened to have the crime beat when the first letter came in.
Paul Avery also snorted cocaine at the bar where he was drinking the aqua velvets with Graysmith. Its hard to catch him doing it as he used a spoon, popular back in the day. You see him snorting the coke from the spoon in the sequence after he and Graysmith move to the booth, the table littered with empty and half emptied glasses of aqua velva. Just my little side note
the waiter came around and asked me if I'd like to try their special "Blue Whale Martini" while he was in the restroom, I said "Why not?" They brought me out this very blue drink in, I kid you not, a fish bowl. Umbrellas and fruit galore. Ed comes out just after he'd deposited it in front of me. We still talk about it.
(And it was goooooood, by the way.)
While there were some excellent performances, and some brave attempts at excellent performances, the actors portraying the two main characters were the weak links in the film. Both Mark Ruffalo as Inspector David Toschi, and Jake Gyllenhaal as San Francisco Chronicle political cartoonist, turned true-crime author Robert Graysmith, seemed miserably miscast. Neither actor were of sufficient age to carry off their respective roles, and in the case of Gyllenhaal, he appeared to de-age as his charectars obsession with Zodiac began destroying everything in his life.
There was very little in the way of flesh to his portrayal of Graysmith, which made it difficult to care about why he became so enthralled with the serial killer. Ruffalo faired better as Toschi, in part, because much of his performance was paired with the ever entertaining Anthony Edwards as his investigating partner, who eventually requests a transfer off the case and out of the homicide department. Stand out performances from Robert Downey Jr as the self-destrucitve Chronicle crime reporter Paul Avery, and John Carroll Lynch as the only real suspect in the killings kept me watching whenever they were on screen.