Star Trek Into Darkness
Less a classic "Star Trek" adventure than a Star Trek-flavored action flick, shot in the frenzied, handheld, cut-cut-cut style that’s become Hollywood’s norm, director J.J.…
Inverting a Zodiac code
View image
There. That's fixed. The corrected analog version.
Dear David Fincher:
Just a note to say how much I appreciate your film "Zodiac" -- especially its use of 1960s and 1970s analog technologies and strategies. Cryptograms, city grids, travel distances, postmarks, calendars, trailer stall numbers, gun calibers, meal schedules, geographical jurisdictions, faxes, date books, phone numbers, addresses... well, I've expressed my admiration of how your film works and plays with these signs (no, I'm not a semiotician) before, and Manohla Dargis does a fine job of it in today's New York Times, too. (I particularly like her observation that: "'Zodiac' is about thinking, it’s about working things through intellectually, hazarding guesses, trying to solve puzzles (the killer largely communicates through ciphers) and about the dawning of awareness, which encapsulates the experience of watching it." That's one way I like to describe a good movie: It not only teaches you how to watch it, but becomes about the experience you have as you watch it.)
View image
The theatrical release analog version.
In a movie about obsessive detail, and the life-or-death importance placed upon even the tiniest, one little thing has stood out to me from my first viewing as being slightly... askew. Prominently displayed by the desk of San Francisco Chronicle reporter Paul Avery (Robert Downey Jr.) is a campaign button for Richard Nixon. The problem is that this button reads: NIXON. It has always struck me that Avery would have done what so many of us did at that time, which is to flip the button (or bumper-sticker or whatever) upside-down so that it read NOXIN -- a simple visual gag that's also a kind of cryptogram, and maybe a malformed counter-cultural pun (NIXON = TOXIN). We found it amusing that the monolithic GOP (or the RNC or CREEP or the FBI or some other Republican Establishment entity) had unwittingly, through the use of simple block letters, made it so easy to turn their message on its head. Mild subversive gestures were rarely so delightfully effortless. Best of all: 100% analog!
View image
Whip Inflation Now. The WIN button, from the Gerald R. Ford administration.
Anyway, I hope you have already made this little adjustment in your Director's Cut of "Zodiac," which I am about to watch. Just in case, I've taken the liberty of making a slight freehand PhotoShop tweak to the still, above.
Many thanks again,
jim
Next Article: The Rest is Noise Previous Article: Consensus and the Big Film Poll Blowout of 2007
Popular Blog Posts
Only Connect: Cannes Report, May 17
Asghar Farhadi ("A Separation") returns with another look at unsolvable dilemmas, an erotic thriller goes all the way...
Cannes review: Marcel Ophüls puts his memoirs on film in "Ain't Misbehavin (Un Voyageur)"
Two very different documentarians, Marcel Ophüls and Clio Barnard, premiere new work at Directors' Fortnight.
Cruisin' Together: Cannes Day Three
Michał Oleszczyk falls for offbeat gay thriller "Stranger by the Lake" and gloriously eccentric essay-film "A Story o...
Artifice and Real Life: Cannes Report, May 16, 2013
Barbara Scharres has a few choice words for François Ozon's "Young & Beautiful" and Sofia Coppola's "The Bling Ri...
