Knowing (2009)

Knowing (2009)

Written by Ryne Douglas Pearson, Juliet Snowden, & Stiles White, based on Pearson’s book.

Directed by Alex Proyas

            

            This one was a mixed bag of different sci-fi norms, with one big unique twist thrown in at the end.  Was it original? Yes.  Was it good? Meh.

            Knowing was directed by Alex Proyas, one of my favorite sci-fi auteurs.  Nicholas Cage is the lead.  And it’s about the end of the world.  How can a movie like this go wrong?  Well, easily, apparantly.  Alex Proyas is pretty amazing.  The Crow, Dark City, these are classics.  They were done on lower budgets, with lesser-known actors (at the time), and they have huge cult followings.  But when Proyas tries to go big-budget and do a studio flick, he fails.  See I, Robot and, now, Knowing for examples.  It’s just something about trying to conform his film to appeal to the masses that takes away from it.  Also, it’s quite possible that Cage is at fault here.  When I was a kid, Nicholas Cage was the shit.  He’s won an Academy Award.  He was in Con Air, Face/Off, Raising Arizona, Snake Eyes, Wild at Heart, and Trapped in Paradise.  I mean, c’mon! Those flicks were bad freaking ass!  Somewhere along the way, Cage lost his sanity.  And his hair.  And what we’re left with is this.

            Knowing started out great.  You see, in 1959, a bunch of kids at a little elementary school in Massachusetts put some pictures and some letters into a time capsule, the whole town vowing not to open for another 50 years, conveniently, in 2009.  There’s a scary ass little girl (SALG) that has some sort of problem, and on her paper she writes down numbers furiously until her bitch of a teacher rips it out of her hand.  During the burial of the time capsule the SALG goes missing.  She is soon found in a janitor’s closet, furiously scratching at the door with her fingernails until she bleeds.  Jump forward to 2009.  Nicholas Cage is an astrophysicist (this is where the movie loses all believability) with an adorable son.  Also, he’s an alchoholic (and now I believe again!).  When the time capsule is taken out of the ground, Cage’s kid gets the letter from SALG.  Nicholas Cage finds it and immediately becomes obsessed with the numbers, convinced they have meaning.  Perhaps not coincidentally, the numbers coincide with most disasters since 1959, predicting the dates, places, and number of people that will perish.  Cage sees that there is a disaster predicted for tomorrow, and he sets out on a mission to prevent it.  Because one person can prevent the death of 81 people.  This leads to the best scene of the movie, which you may have seen part of in the trailers, a scene which the rest of the flick unfortunately fails to live up to.  It involves a plane crash.  It’s all done in a 2 and a half minute continuous shot with Nicholas Cage walking through the wreckage of the plane looking for survivors.  It’s haunting and gruesome, and awesome.  However, the next action scene isn’t for another 20 minutes, and it’s a looooong wait.  He finds the descendants of SALG – played by Rose Byrne (from Sunshine, one of my favorite sci-fi flicks) and the same child actress that played the original SALG!!!  Ahhhh, too many Scary Ass Little Girls for me!!!

            As you can see, the movie’s a little convoluted, and if you’re not following, you’ll probably get a little lost.  Also, I haven’t mentioned the last 45 minutes of the movie because there is a pretty ridiculous twist that you won’t see coming, and it’s pretty corny.  You see, this movie would have been great if they hadn’t gone with Nicholas Cage, and if it wasn’t directed towards the non sci-fi lover.  Nicholas Cage’s hairpiece and over-acting simply take you out of the flick.  Most of his dialogue is laughable and his crazy eyes are gut-bustingly hilarious.  He hasn’t done a serious flick since Leaving Las Vegas for christ’s sake!  Everything with him is over the top, and it doesn’t work here.  It might work great in Bad Lieutenant or Kick Ass, but it most certainly does not work here.  Just as well, don’t make us think that the flick is about a world-ending disaster, because it most certainly was not.  It was about the bond between mother and daughter/ father and son.  That’s why you threw that “tear moment” in at the end.  Because we were supposed to care about Cage and his kid, but how can we care about Cage when he’s constantly putting his kid in harm’s way, despite everybody telling him not to?  And what about Rose Byrne and her SALG? Why were we supposed to care if they died or not?  I don’t get it.

            This flick did have good parts.  The cinematography was pretty spectacular.  The action sequences were intense as hell.  The music was foreboding and creepy and perfect.  That plane crash was fucking sick!  But there was enough about it that was just “meh” to make me not care about it.  If I had to rate it, I’d give it 2 ½ stars out of 5.  This flick was mediocre all the way through.

Zodiac (2007)

Zodiac (2007)

Written by James Vanderbilt, adapted from the book by Robert Graysmith

Directed by David Fincher

           

           

           I’m marking this as one of my top 10 favorite flicks of the past 10 years.  This film has absolutely nothing wrong with it.  From the stellar performances, to the captivating set-pieces, this movie is a bonafide thriller.

            I’m a big David Fincher fan.  I’m one of the three people that actually likes Alien³, I’ve watched Panic Room more than once and I still enjoy it, despite the fact that Kristen Stewart is in it, Fight Club is my favorite movie, and Seven is another perfect movie.  You may have noticed (or not) that I left out Benjamin Button and The Game, well that’s because I think The Game is terrible, but I blame it on the screenwriters (Fincher delivered on a well shot, finely acted, tense drama, but the story lacked) and I think Benjamin Button is about an hour too long, and a bit too pretentious for its own good.  So, when Zodiac came out a few years ago, I was first in line to see it.

            Zodiac chronicles (you guessed it) the search for the Zodiac Killer in San Francisco, California.  For those of you that don’t know, there were a bunch of unsolved murders in the Bay area in 1968 and 1969.  Soon after each of the murders, somebody mailed letters to the newspapers in the area claiming to be the killer.  The letters were simply signed “The Zodiac Killer.”  The killer (or killers) was never found.  The amazing thing about this flick, is that this is not where all of the tension comes from.

The film itself starts off with the second attack, on July 4^th, 1968.  We follow Darlene Ferrin and Mike Mageau on their date.  When they get up to lover’s lane, another car approaches theirs and takes off after a few seconds.  Minutes later, another car pulls up and a man gets out.  He simply walks up to the window and shoots both Darlene and Mike several times.  He starts to walk away, but when Mike and Darlene start moving around because they’re still alive, he returns and fires a few more rounds into each of them.  Mike lives.  The plot then moves to the offices of the San Francisco Chronicle, and we see the discovery of the first letter from the Zodiac.  Next, we meet Robert Downey Jr.’s Paul Avery and Jake Gyllenhaal’s Robert Graysmith.  Graysmith started out as a political cartoonist for the paper, but quickly became interested in the case.  Paul Avery on the other hand, took a little while to get into it, but he soon became the number one journalist associated with the Zodiac, eventually receiving letters and threats directly from the killer.  RDJ and Jake soon become bosom buddies, and obsessed with the Zodiac.  The movie follows them and their fixation for the rest of the flick, but we eventually see a few more murders, and a little more than an hour in we meet Mark Ruffalo and Anthony Edward’s detective characters.  The movie explores a few of the potential suspects, eventually landing on Arthur Leigh Allen as the number one suspect (as I said earlier, the case was never solved and the killer never found, but the movie gently points a finger towards Allen as the culprit).

What makes this flick amazing is not the investigation part, but how it shaped and changed the lives of the individuals involved.  This case consumed Robert Graysmith’s life (he eventually wrote a bestselling book about his experience, and obviously, this flick was made).  For a movie that is basically a whole bunch of nothing, Fincher does a superb job filling it with tension, and he proves that he’s a master at conveying a lot of information through tight dialogue, and slow, deliberate set-pieces.  The cinematography is excellent (as usual for Fincher, he used the excellent cinematographer Harris Savides, who has done work on most of Gus Van Sant’s better flicks) and the atmosphere of late 60’s/early 70’s is perfectly conveyed.  One of my favorite parts was how they showed the passage of time.  In one key passage, the passage is shown through time-lapse photography, showing the erection (hehehe I said erection) of a building.  In another scene, the screen is black for about 2 minutes while we only hear about the case through radio and television audio broadcasts.

Overall, I’d definitely say that Zodiac is one of the 10 best flicks of the decade, and it definitely deserves your time.  A word of caution – it is a little long (it’s about 2 hrs and 45 minutes) and there is some BRUTAL violence, although the gore factor is surprisingly low.  Once again, it’s not so much about the murders themselves, but about the affect they had on the people of San Francisco.  See this now.