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MOVIE REVIEW
The Killer (2023)
The through line of David Fincher’s work is contempt. His characters display their contempt for the world around them through elaborately staged revenge plots of various kinds, usually murder. “Gone Girl” was an outlier in his oeuvre in that it was a woman expressing her contempt for her husband, her family and society at large. But with “The Killer” Mr. Fincher is back on home territory with this story of an assassin (Michael Fassbender) who is better than the world and everything in it. Except, of course, this is not true, but Mr. Fincher and his movie only understand one of the reasons why.
Continue reading “Moving Target” »
Merrick Morton/20th Century Fox
MOVIE REVIEW
Gone Girl (2014)
After failing to inspire warm fuzzies or much Oscar gold with “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button” and “The Social Network,” David Fincher seems to have resigned himself to familiar territory. But his ambition for recognition doesn’t seem to have subsided, as he has attached himself to genre material with a literary pedigree like “The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo” and now “Gone Girl.”
Continue reading “House of Cards” »
Karen Ballard/Lionsgate
The big story in film in Britain in 2010 was the closure by the coalition government of the UK Film Council, the centralized funding body for British films with the caveat that the productions had to be aimed at the people in the region where it was filmed. The resulting movies tended to appeal to no one at all, although there were several glorious exceptions, this year's "Tamara Drewe" among them. The responsibilities are instead being shifted to the British Film Institute, which runs the BFI London Film Festival and an Imax, manages the BFI National Archive, publishes books on cinema and releases DVDs of various classic or neglected films. These responsibilities are so new and vague, the BFI hasn't yet bothered to update its website. And since the government has already developed a history of backtracking on its cultural cuts (eg. the furor over Bookstart, a charity providing free books to underprivileged kids), it's still uncertain what is going to happen.
Continue reading “C.G.I. and Rental Stores, They Were Expendable” »
MOVIE REVIEW
The Social Network (2010)
M. Tsai 
David Fincher: “The Social Network” is entertaining only because of Aaron Sorkin’s script, and even then in the most trivial sense. Besides your unmistakable visual vocabulary, you’ve brought little else to the film as a director. It pales in comparison to even your lesser works such as “The Game” and “Panic Room.” In fact, the whole thing is simply too brisk and lacks dramatic weight.
Wednesday at 11:59pm · Comment · Like · See Wall-to-Wall
M. Tsai Aaron Sorkin: There’s no shortage of admirers of your snappy dialogue, but it’s difficult to take anything you write too seriously. It’s fine when the subject is a presidency that no one would mistake for the real thing. But you continue to put Sorkinese in the mouths of your characters in “The Social Network” despite the fact that it’s the true story of the founding of Facebook. Nobody motormouths like that in real life.
Wednesday at 11:55pm · Comment · Like · See Wall-to-Wall
Continue reading “The Writing Is on the Wall” »
MOVIE REVIEW
The Curious Case of Benjamin Button (2008)
Merrick Morton/Paramount Pictures
Like Danny Boyle, David Fincher is a filmmaker whose stylish sensibility almost always leaves moviegoers cold. But also like Mr. Boyle, Mr. Fincher has this year stumbled upon a movie with a heart and excelled. Based on an F. Scott Fitzgerald short story, “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button” would most likely have been a horrific, vomit-inducing train wreck in the hands of a Steven Spielberg or a Ron Howard. The aging-backward premise notwithstanding, the film is basically “Forrest Gump” meets “Legends of the Fall” meets “Meet Joe Black,” complete with Gumpian historical anecdotes (Teddy Roosevelt instead of JFK this time!) courtesy of “Gump” screenwriter Eric Roth. Thank goodness Mr. Fincher has the clinical precision of a music video director, and here counterbalances the otherwise go-for-broke sappiness of all the separations and deaths in the “Benjamin Button” screenplay.
Continue reading “A Box of Chocolates Is Like Life” »
MOVIE REVIEW
Choke (2008)
Jessica Miglio/Fox Searchlight Pictures
“Choke” marks the second big-screen adaptation of a novel by Chuck Palahniuk, a sardonic chronicler of our hidden neuroses and otherworldly fetishes. The first, David Fincher’s “Fight Club,” rode raw fight scenes, a stark vision of an anti-consumerist uprising and Brad Pitt’s muscles to cult-classic status. This one replaces Mr. Pitt with Sam Rockwell; the focus on pleasurable physical violence shifts to sexual perversion; and writer-director Clark Gregg’s film has an altogether less dreary tone than Mr. Fincher’s dark, deadly serious project.
Continue reading “First Rule of Strip Club” »
