Men in Flight

The Game: written by John Brancato and Michael Ferris; directed by David Fincher; starring Michael Douglas (Nicholas Van Orton), Sean Penn (Conrad Van Orton), Deborah Kara Unger (Christine), James Rebhorn (Jim Feingold), Peter Donat (Samuel Sutherland), and Carroll Baker (Ilsa) (1997): A twisty and enjoyable 'What's reality?' plot derails towards the end for reasons I'll leave to you to discover. Still, it's fun getting there in what was director David Fincher's third feature film (after Alien 3 and Se7en). Michael Douglas is suitably flustered, though the character's anti-social tendencies and rigidity needed more development at the beginning to make the the ending work the way it seems to have been intended to work. This initial softening of the character helps make an improbable ending almost intolerable. Lightly recommended.

Hector and the Search for Happiness: adapted from the Francois Lelord novel by Maria von Heland, Peter Chelsom, and Tinker Lindsay; directed by Peter Chelsom; starring Simon Pegg (Hector), Rosamund Pike (Clara), Jean Reno (Diego Baresco), Ming Zhao (Ying Li), Christopher Plummer (Professor Coreman), Stellan Skarsgard (Edward), and Toni Collette (Agnes) (2014): Well, the whole thing is a bit gooey. Or perhaps mushy. But Simon Pegg is Simon Pegg, and much of the writing in this picaresque film is light enough to keep things from bogging down in First-World Problems. 

The cast is first-rate throughout, though Pegg's character is somewhat unbelievable as a psychiatrist: just imagine he's the comic-book-shop employee/comic-book illustrator he played on Spaced and the whole movie makes way more sense. Funded by what seems to be about nineteen different countries, supplied with an international cast, and seemingly only released to about three theatres, the film almost seems to have been some sort of tax shelter scam. Oh, well. Recommended.

Unstoppable: written by Mark Bomback; directed by Tony Scott; starring Denzel Washington (Frank), Chris Pine (Will), Rosario Dawson (Connie), Ethan Suplee (Dewey), Kevin Dunn (Galvin), Kevin Corrigan (Werner), Kevin Chapman (Bunny), and T.J. Miller (Gilleece) (2010): Denzel Washington and the new Captain Kirk strive to stop a runaway train from blowing up half of Pennsylvania. This film was indeed inspired by real-life events which are crazy enough -- both reality and film involve a train on the same tracks chasing down the crewless runaway. The movie pumps things up with helicopters, explosions, and domestic drama for Captain Nu-Kirk.

Still, the late Tony Scott was in his wheelhouse for this action/chase movie. He keeps things tight and tense, brings the movie in under 100 minutes, and supplies the viewer with enough train technobabble and real-world stunts to make the whole thing an engaging, old-school diversion. One could imagine this movie being made almost verbatim in the 1950's, albeit with Humphrey Bogart in the Denzel Washington role and John Derek in Chris Pine's position. The supporting cast is surprisingly deep and well-served by the movie, with Rosario Dawson as a female lead who isn't required to fall in love with either of the male leads. I guess that's progress. Recommended.

Zodiac (2007)

Zodiac (The Director's Cut): adapted by James Vanderbilt from the non-fiction book by Robert Graysmith; directed by David Fincher; starring Jake Gyllenhaal (Robert Graysmith), Mark Ruffalo (Inspector David Toschi), Anthony Edwards (Inspector William Armstrong), Robert Downey Jr. (Paul Avery), Chloe Sevigny (Melanie), Brian Cox (Melvin Belli), Elias Koteas (Sgt. Jack Mulanax), Dermot Mulroney (Captain Marty Lee), John Carroll Lynch ( Arthur Leigh Allen) and Donal Logue (Captain Ken Narlow) (2007): What I consider to be director David Fincher's finest film, and one of the ten best American movies of the last ten years, is a crime procedural about the hunt for the Zodiac, a San Francisco-area serial killer of the late 1960's and early 1970's. In its calculated retro-look, Zodiac is both an homage and an addition to the ranks of great 1970's docudramas that include The French Connection, Serpico, and All the President's Men.

Mirroring the investigation, the film's pace is slow and deliberate. As the movie only shows Zodiac crimes for which there were witnesses, the first known Zodiac killing is discussed but never shown. And what we are shown of the killings is horrifying but not gratuitous. There's far more gore in an average episode of CSI. Or Dirty Harry, for that matter, itself based partially on the Zodiac killings.

This is a film to be savoured and mulled over. Fincher gets fine performances from his entire cast, though I think Mark Ruffalo -- as (real) Inspector Dave Toschi, gives both the best and the most period-accurate performance. Ruffalo looks like a 70's actor in this film, a slightly more conventionally handsome Gene Hackman. Everyone else is good as well, with Jake Gyllenhaal, as the editorial cartoonist-turned-amateur-sleuth Robert Graysmith, playing the straight-arrow heart of the movie (it's his book that the film is based on).

The opening scene, set to Donovan's "Hurdy Gurdy Man", is one of the most striking set-pieces I've seen in any film. And Donovan's daughter, Ione Skye, has an uncredited cameo later in the film. Weird stuff. The Zodiac too is weird: a mixture of the malign and the banal and the lucky, the killer is accurately portrayed as a windbag who craves media attention. His interactions with celebrity lawyer Melvin Belli (played with smarmy, self-satisfied gusto by Brian Cox, the first movie Hannibal Lecter) look like rehearsals for every ridiculous Nancy Grace and Geraldo Rivera moment of the past 20 years. Belli even appeared in an episode of the original Star Trek, "And the Children Shall Lead", as evil alien angel Gorgon!

Whatever and whoever he was, there's nothing Luciferian about Zodiac, nothing of Hannibal Lecter. John Carroll Lynch (Marge's husband in Fargo) nails his few scenes as the prime suspect in the case, an angry white guy with a really awful trailer full of awful stuff.

The Director's Cut DVD also gives the viewer about three hours of new documentary material on the Zodiac investigation, much of it shot and edited in the style of Errol Morris. This, too, is riveting stuff, and the filmmakers play fair: the documentary material raises doubts about the film's conclusion as to who the Zodiac really was. Highly recommended.

Citizen Zuckerberg

The Social Network, written by Aaron Sorkin, based on the book The Accidental Billionaires by Ben Mezrich, directed by David Fincher, starring Jesse Eisenberg, Justin Timberlake, Andrew Garfield, Rooney Mara and Rashida Jones (2010): If it's difficult to depict the act of writing onscreen in a way that can show the agony of some people who write to live, it's almost impossible to depict computer programming. The Social Network gives it a shot, especially in the early going, but it's still difficult to realize by the end of the film what a terrific programmer Mark Zuckerberg (and secondary character Sean Parker) was when he designed Facebook.

Sorkin's screenplay, sharp and flat at the same time, imposes a structure and a motivation on Zuckerberg's story that seems to have been lifted from Citizen Kane, with some modifications. Zuckerberg's Rosebud is Erica Albright (Rooney Mara, soon to be Lisbeth Salender in the American remake of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo), the girl who got away and whose dumping of him, in the movie's logic, rocket-fuels Zuckerberg's programming engine. The facts of the founding and expansion of Facebook apparently bear almost no resemblance to this movie, but The Social Network does act as an interesting, albeit often one-note, character study and social examination. "It's all high school," the parents say in Heathers (1989): welcome to the operating logic behind Facebook!

Jesse Eisenberg gives a nuanced performance in what could have been a pretty dull role. He is stuck with the fact that the movie imagines Zuckerberg as being borderline autistic or, possibly, part-Vulcan. All of the performances are solid. I found myself empathizing with Zuckerberg more than perhaps the filmmakers intended because the people he may or may not have screwed over on his way to social networking history are written as such lazy, whiny idiots. Justin Timberlake captures the partyboy aspect in Napster-creator Sean Parker's personality, but we never get much of a sense of a keen programming brain at work inside Timberlake's noggin.

Zuckerberg's best friend, Eduardo Saverin (Andrew Garfield, playing a wronged nebbish) , who puts up the first $20,000 or so in financing and is rewarded with being Facebook's original Chief Financial Officer, steadfastly refuses to move to California with Zuckerberg during the time of the company's first great expansion, instead diddling around in New York failing (so far as we can tell) to sell advertising. When he's harshly removed from the company, one can see Zuckerberg's point: Saverin is a fool.

The hilariously privileged Winklevoss twins, who claim that Zuckerberg stole their idea for a Harvard-centric social networking site, are the comic highlight of the movie, bumbling Aryanesque Supermen who, in the funniest scene in the film, get castigated by the President of Harvard for essentially being whiny assholes.

And the Rosebud stuff...well, the way it's handled here, it's basically screenwriting 101, where every character has to have a simplistic motivation for everything he or she does. Awkwardly giving Saverin a crazy girlfriend he met because of his Facebook exacerbates the problems of the film's reductionism: Facebook leads to bad relationships! Give me a break. The Social Network is beautifully shot and edited, and the performances pretty much uniformly strong. Did it get robbed of a Best Picture Oscar? I don't think so. Recommended.