Sunday, 17 February 2008

zodiac suffers from multiple



"Zodiac" Suffers From Multiple-Personality Disorder

I only recently got around to seeing "Zodiac", last year's film about

the "Zodiac Killer" who terrorized San Francisco in the late `60s and

early `70s. The most memorable aspect of this film prior to my viewing

it had to be the controversy surrounding a certain blogger

plagiarizing an entire review directly from the San Francisco

Chronicle.

After seeing this flick, it struck me as being two or three different

movies in one. It starts out as a buddy-cop film, evolves into a

horror movie and then turns into a one-man quest to solve a crime. A

film with multiple personalities can be at turns pretty cool and

pretty confusing. I felt like "Zodiac" got lost in dismissing and not

following up on certain suspects, namely Robert Vaughn, played by

Charles Fleischer in possibly the creepiest role I've seen in recent

years. Jake Gyllenhaal's line, "Not many people have basements in

California," is the precursor to the eeriest scene of the movie.

A star-studded cast, a still-unsolved mystery, an air-tight pursuit of

historical accuracy, a dramatic story, an eye-pleasing setting ... it

would seem that everything was there for a wonderful film, but it

falls short. Part of that may be due to the fact that the "Zodiac

Killer" has yet to be definitely identified, so there can be no

conclusion per se. But it's also partly due to the idea that this one


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