fun zodiac

Fun; Zodiac

A pair of movies about killers, neither of them great, but Fun (1994)

was downright awful. Neither Joe nor I remember (or would admit to)

putting this film on the list, and so we're both baffled at why either

of us would have done such a thing. I started with extremely low

expectations, and so, I was actually pleasantly surprised, at first.

It's nicely shot, in what looks like 16 mm black and white for the

scenes set in the present, colour for the past. The first third of the

film roped me in with what started as some fairly interesting

characters, two teenaged girls who murder an old woman. The dialogue

was stagey, as often are films adapted from stageplays (of which this

is one), but sometimes it didn't matter. A couple of monologues felt

like it was trying to ape David Mamet's Sexual Perversity in Chicago

(which became About Last Night, a 1980s film starring Demi Moore). But

Fun never breaks out of its theatricality, which becomes a burden that

eventually sinks the whole film. The acting became stale and

overdramatic without any insight, so I stopped believing, and after

that, it was just a chore to sit through, especially when the horrible

techno music came on and wouldn't stop. It became a fast-forward.

Zodiac, on the other hand, was a film that Joe had been looking

forward eagerly, Fight Club and Seven being among his favourites. But

Fincher, he said, you let me down! We weren't as enthralled by his

newest work as we wanted to be, though that is a tall order. A

detective film about the Zodiac killer who was never caught, it wasn't

great, but it was, on the whole, quite watchable - except for the few

scenes of murder and killing during which I simply left the room, not

willing to endure explicit violence these days. Being a mother has

made me super-sensitive, which I personally think is a good thing. I

don't know why I don't mind Seven so much, maybe because the actual

killings don't take place before your eyes, and the bodies are treated