The Avengers (Joss Whedon, 2012)

Let's get a couple of things out of the way. The Avengers opens on such a hollow note that its entire first act struggles to find any kind of footing at all. Trapped between a need for some basic exposition and a total disregard for anyone foolish enough to wade into this film without having seen its multiple-franchise foundations, The Avengers thus has nothing for anyone as it slowly, ever so slowly, brings together its collection of superheroes. And though I've never previously bought the charge that Joss Whedon is a smug writer, I nearly blushed at the self-satisfaction in some early exchanges and setups, so obvious and fan-massaging that their cynicism threatened to divorce me entirely from what I hoped would be Whedon's big break. Maybe all that trash-talking he'd done over the years for those who "misread" or "mishandled" his early film scripts was just a smokescreen for a writer whose considerable gift for television writing simply didn't translate to the more concise storytelling of cinema.

Then, something happened that has not occurred in any of the Marvel films leading up to this blowout: the movie kept getting better. Most of the previous films started with intriguing concepts and approaches before fizzling out in half-baked, perfunctorily executed action romps that served only to set up the chess pieces for this picture. Even Captain America, easily the best of the Marvel Studios franchise starters, dipped a bit in the middle, though it differs from its peers in that it finished strong where movies like Iron Man, Thor and The Incredible Hulk ended on lame notes. But The Avengers swaps the usual Marvel dynamic, moving out of a dull, lazy setup into something clever, well-observed and, ultimately, thrilling. By the time everything fell into place, my laundry list of complaints evaporated in the pure rush of Whedon's ambition.

Shutter Island

I noticed when I signed into my Blogger account to write this a whopping five posts in a row discussing Martin Scorsese's much-belated B-movie Shutter Island. Given the broad disinterest shown in the bloggers I follow (not to mention myself) concerning the 2010 features released up to this point, I got a kick out of seeing everyone snap to attention. Adding to my amusement was the fact that the miniature excerpts from all five were variations on "Warning: contains spoilers." I plan to cross-review this for my school paper and I'm too lazy to write two entirely separate articles, so I shall avoid spoilers in this review.

Besides, the various twists and turns of Shutter Island just do not matter, and Martin Scorsese knows it. I have heard grumblings through the grapevine that Shutter Island marks Scorsese's attempt to ape twist-master M. Night Shyamalan. This is categorically untrue; if Scorsese wanted the unlocking of the narrative to be the film's ultimate payoff, he would not have telegraphed it from the first minute. Anyone remotely paying attention to the film can and will deduce its ultimate truth by the 10-minute mark, what with the pointed looks and deliberately overacted emphases on certain key phrases such as "defense mechanisms."

What the director does instead is use the messy pulp of Dennis Lehane's novel -- which I have not read but feel confident on the basis of the film saying is far, far, far removed from his usual output, about as far as Shutter Island is from native Boston -- is craft his best film since Gangs of New York, and his most brazenly cinematic since Bringing Out the Dead. Like Scorsese's underrated mid-'80s style-over-substance feature (After Hours), made in direct response to the aborted first attempt to make The Last Temptation of Christ, Shutter Island is Kafkaesque, though not in a particularly deep way. Where After Hours played its psychological mire for laughs, Shutter Island works as a thriller, but the two share a kinship in their display of Scorsese's boundless visual form and the jollies he gets from throwing caution to the wind.

You can see that the director is having a ball from the first frames of the film, as U.S. Marshal Teddy Daniels (Leonard DiCaprio) converses with his new partner Chuck (Mark Ruffalo) as they ride a ferry to the titular island. The camera jumps between them as if Godard had sneaked into the editing room, further interrupting these jump cuts with visual asides to Teddy's past, of his wife (Michelle Williams), whom Teddy says died in an apartment fire. The two men are headed to Shutter Island and its mental health facility, Ashecliffe, to investigate a missing patient, whom the doctors say managed to slip through the facility's considerable security measures "as if she evaporated straight through the walls."

For the sake of spoilers, I shall go no further, nor would I feel much inclination to continue following the narrative even if I felt no obligation to protect the mystery for readers. Shutter Island is a giant red herring, and more than that a red herring that flops about and speaks like those awful singing basses that so woefully became the rage around the turn of the millennium when we are all so happy to have survived Y2K that we made some very poor decisions indeed. Unspooling a complicated but hardly complex yarn would suck all the enjoyment out of the movie, as well as the pleasure of discussing it.

What is important, or at least relevant, is how much Shutter Island runs into the open arms of the glory days of the cinema. The overacting, while easily justifiable in retrospect, clearly harks back to the days before Brando tore apart the rulebook, when actors emoted with a capital "E." As an epic psychological thriller, Shutter Island most clearly derives from two sources: Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo and Powell & Pressburger's Black Narcissus (the nature of the asylum and the overacting found within obviously brings to mind Samuel Suller's Shock Corridor). The sheer cliffs of the island match the rock faces that trapped the nuns in Powell's tripped-out vision of India, while the structure of the film, particularly the camera's alignment with the point-of-view of a detective who wrestles with his own perception, comes straight out of Vertigo.

It also marks a return to Scorsese's best kind of filmmaking, the sort that places his camera into the fractured POV of a warped character. Scorsese hasn't filmed in this style since his final collaboration with Paul Schrader, the criminally underappreciated Bringing Out the Dead, and he hasn't lost his knack for spellbinding shots that you can't always trust, even if he's telling a far simpler tale with Teddy than he did with Travis Bickle, Jake LaMotta or Frank Pierce. Helping matters tremendously is the gorgeous photography by Robert Richardson, who won an Oscar for his work on the director's The Aviator.

Combined with Scorsese's energetic, freewheeling direction, the Powell-influenced cinematography makes for some startling moments. Who could sit there and argue that the film isn't "real" or "deep" enough as Scorsese gives us a horrifying glimpse into Teddy's past as a WWII veteran, a scene framed in the same "movie movie" style as the rest of the picture yet filled with a weight far heavier than the heartstring-tugging content of what's on the screen? And what of the foray into the dreaded Ward C, where the most dangerous psychopaths are kept, its dizzying, rusted metal staircases and walkways resembling a post-industrial version of M.C. Escher's Relativity?

So, yes, Shutter Island is, at its heart, a 140-minute paean to Scorsese's abilities as a visual stylist. But for all of us who guessed the ending before moving out of the first act, how many could have expected the inevitable reveal to be so moving, so like Vertigo in its striking moment of pure empathy between audience and character, even if that moment is forced upon us by the director? Shutter Island could mark an important turning point for the director, who suffered under the yoke of the Weinsteins on Gangs of New York and lost The Departed to Jack Nicholson. Now, with Oscar in hand, Scorsese is confident enough to be himself again, something we haven't seen in years. His long-discussed adaptation of Shusaku Endo's Silence appears at last to be on track, and Scorsese himself asked for the final delay in this film's release to tweak a few more odds and ends in post-production, effectively removing the film from receiving any Oscar attention this year or the next for the sake of making the movie he wanted. Let us hope, then, that Scorsese makes of this decade what Spielberg made of the last one: a period of astonishing late-career creativity by a director who no longer has anything left to prove.

Collateral

The best case for Michael Mann's visual genius can be made by comparing his depictions of Los Angeles in Heat, his most well-known and best-received film, and Collateral, his first foray into digital video (indeed the first major use of digital high-definition cameras in feature filmmaking). The L.A. of Heat was gigantic and shimmering, large enough to contain the Wagnerian scope of its epic take on the cops-and-robbers genre. Music, too, informs the aesthetic of the Los Angeles of Collateral, but it exchanges the opera of Heat for jazz.

As such, Collateral is intimate, improvisational, its alternately crisp and blurry landscapes reminiscent of the smoky haze of a hip dive. It shifts tempos and keys and dynamics, as terrifying as it is seductive. Vincent (Tom Cruise), a suave hitman, loves jazz, to the point that he takes the time out from his assignments to enjoy a performance in the same club where giants like Chet Baker and Charles Mingus used to play. As a jazzophile, he loves improvisation and expresses a reverence for the unpredictability of life.

These are traits largely absent in Max (Jamie Foxx), a cab driver who finds himself Vincent's courier and hostage during a five-stop killing spree. Max is the perfect cabbie: he knows all the back routes in the city and is honest enough to take them rather than deliberately seek out traffic. He has big plans for life, and he insists to his other passengers that he's just driving part-time to save up the cash to start a limo company. Vincent, however, learns that Max has been driving for 12 years. Where the hitman appreciates the constancy of variability, Max cannot act unless has accounts for every detail.

Let's be honest: Collateral isn't revolutionary storytelling. It's blunt. It's contrived. But damn it, i works, precisely because the digital cameras add an air of immediacy and breathlessness. Mann does not strive for a feeling of cheap realism, but he does make the audience a part of the action. His ability to convey intricate details through to-the-point dialogue and fast-paced editing takes Stuart Beattle's script and streamlines it. Furthermore, the digital photography, with its low-light capability, introduces a spontaneity to the strict linearity of the narrative: as the cameras can pick up action in dimly lit conditions, Mann could film scenes without worrying about meticulous lighting, allowing for memorable moments such as the shot of a coyote running across the street in front of Max's cab.

The dramatic weight of the story naturally concerns Max's fear and moral crisis in reaction to ferrying around a killer, and the action -- as is befitting a Michael Mann thriller -- is visceral and gripping (why do people even bother putting gunfire in their movies in a year featuring that contains a Michael Mann film?). Mann and editors Jim Miller and Paul Rubell maintain a constant level of tension between its storylines -- Vincent's engagements, Max's attempts to escape, the joint investigation of Vincent's murders by LAPD detectives (led by Mark Ruffalo) and the FBI (headed by Bruce McGill) -- never quite reaching the masterful level Mann and Rubell exhibited with The Insider but never losing any momentum. Mann can even cut to completely ancillary asides without breaking the flow, such as a humorous trip to the hospital to visit Max's mother (the always funny Irma P. Hall) and an unnecessary but gripping scene in which Max must pose as Vincent to obtain replacement dossiers for the ones he destroyed from Vincent's employer (Javier Bardem).

Below the surface, however, is a battle between ideologies. The clashing outlooks of the two main characters fits each character's occupation: Max takes the shortest, best-planned route not simply because he's a nice man but because he can't accept an imperfection, while Vincent accepts the unpredictability of life because he has to know how to adapt to any situation. Beattle envisioned Robert De Niro in Foxx's role, but that smacks too much of an excuse to have De Niro play the role of a taxi driver again. For once, the producers were right to insist on someone young: by casting in Foxx's age range -- then in his late '30s -- Max can believably cling to his dream of owning a limo company. A man his age is nearing the point of no return for his dreams but, unlike someone in De Niro's age group, he can still fulfill them. Thus, Vincent's influence, vile and twisted as it might be, can actually improve his life, and Collateral is as much about Max's maturation as it is the thriller plot.

When he first gets into Max's cab, Vincent comments upon his distaste for Los Angeles, finding its disjointed structure and dense population confusing and impersonal. Collateral's jazzy style and frenetic pacing reflects the disorienting layout of the city, but Mann uses the story to disprove Vincent's assertion of L.A.'s soullessness. It may be a place that crushes dreams and barely registers its dead, but Mann finds some nugget of worth in there, just as Scorsese did with New York (that Taxi Driver connection is more revealing than it lets on). Tom Cruise, the megastar with eternally youthful looks, frosts his hair to age himself and plays the villain, albeit one who imparts wisdom and perspective onto Foxx, then still easing his way into a film career. By the next year, he'd become the first actor to receive two Oscar nominations in the same year, for this and Ray. I would not fully align Collateral with the cinema, not in the way I would Public Enemies, but it's interesting to note Mann's love for Los Angeles -- inexorably tied to Hollywood even if Collateral never comes anywhere near it or the feel it evokes -- buried beneath the thrills.

The Brothers Bloom

It's perfectly possible that The Brothers Bloom, despite its erroneous title -- one of the brothers is named Bloom, and neither seems to have it as a surname -- is a work of top-to-bottom genius. Meticulously crafted and highly stylized, the film is a labyrinth worthy of Escher, twisting and turning until it reaches the end and refolding upon itself to start anew. If the point of a con-man movie is to keep the audience guessing, then I suppose it succeeds wildly.

With only one prior film under his belt, director Rian Johnson certainly hasn't wasted time in establishing a distinctive visual flair: his Brick -- a film I once watched but was too distracted to follow properly -- has a reputation for visual acuity, and those I know who have watched it studiously assure me that its use of pitch-black noir in a high school setting is interesting and engaging. I shall return to it someday (soon, I hope), but for now let us focus on his latest feature, the con caper The Brothers Bloom.

Bloom's titular brothers have been running scams since childhood. Stephen (played in adulthood by Mark Ruffalo), planned the schemes, invented the characters and wrote the scripts, while little brother Bloom (Adrien Brody) did what was asked of him. Before they even hit puberty, they can run advanced cons: Stephen tells their schoolmates of a fairy in a cave and collects $30 from the other kids to reveal the location. When the parents come to collect their children's money, however, the narrator informs us that the real payoff came from the local cleaners who washed all those kids' muddied clothes.

25 years later, Bloom is 35 and at last fed-up with playing second fiddle to his brother's whims. He agrees to help Stephen for, yes, one last job, though he does not do so immediately, presumably just so the crew could visit Montenegro. Stephen's mark is Penelope (Rachel Weisz), a gorgeous heiress isolated from the world due to misdiagnosed allergies in her youth and the burden of caring for dying loved ones in early adulthood.

From here the plot slowly begins to corkscrew. After they ingratiate themselves to Penelope -- albeit not entirely according to plan -- Bloom, Stephen and Stephen's girlfriend/explosives expert Bang Bang (Rinko Kikuchi, who may or may not have a "no speaking" clause in her contracts for Western films) "reveal" themselves to be art smugglers, aware that the reclusive Penelope will be intrigued enough to follow them around.

There's always a danger when you can see actors having fun with their roles; occasionally the sense of fun can add to a film's sense of whimsy, but if we're meant to take the story seriously it can break the audience's connection to the narrative. Despite the lightweight feel of The Brothers Bloom, it's trying to work as a complex caper, yet the glee evident on the actors' faces is a delight. Ruffalo is terrific as the rakish confidence man, almost always unflappable even when plans go so wrong as a miniature diversion inadvertently blows out the wall of a basilica (well, he at least places his face in his palm on that one). Brody is an underrated straight man, and he's the closest thing the film has to a believable character. By far the most interesting, however, is Weisz: Penelope comes alive with the gang, and she proves a capable companion. In the film's best scene, she infiltrates that basilica that accidentally blew up, and when the chief of police captures her on the way out with a stolen book she manages to convince him to let her go (she even keeps the prize). When she discovers the truth of her new friends' intentions, the look of confusion morphing into pain, balanced with a slight willingness to overlook this betrayal to keep her buddies, is heartbreaking.

These actors are so interesting, in fact, that they manage to keep up interest long after the plot loses all grasp on self-control. Johnson crams every twist he possibly can into two hours, yet he has a shoddy feel for pacing. The Brothers Bloom moves it fits and spurts, lingering in some areas so Johnson can waste our time with beautiful yet arbitrary and ancillary shots of the surrounding area -- admittedly, one must admire how he visited all these gorgeous locations and kept the budget at $20 million. Then, we he hits upon a section of the story that deserves closer attention, Johnson leaps ahead, preferring to move to the next batch of exposition rather than focus on any emotional impact of all the double crosses. By the time "one last job" becomes a precursor to the real farewell gig which leads to yet another con, whatever technical expertise exists in the script is wholly irrelevant to the sense of ennui even the punchiest script can create when it gives you no sure footing with anything. I'm not asking for a cut-and-dry narrative without surprises, but this gang embarked on more farewell gigs than KISS.

Roger Ebert compared the too-smug feel of the film to Wes Anderson's bloated and listless The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou, a comparison I find rather fitting: both demonstrate visually striking artists whose hip characters and exacting camerawork and set design are let loose without restraint, a soulless display of technique that deceptively flirts with greatness on a surface level but reveals its emptiness upon even a cursory inspection. I confess that I found Brody, Kikuchi, Ruffalo and Weisz so entertaining that I didn't terribly mind that my time had been wasted -- I should also mention the great Robbie Coltrane, who makes the wholly unnecessary character of "The Belgian" a welcome edition with his natural and charmingly overbearing screen presence -- but The Brothers Bloom is clearly the work of an artist who still has some growing to do. If Johnson can put his considerable talents toward a story with some degree of human connection, he might just morph into a formidable force.

Where the Wild Things Are

There are so many places where Spike Jonze's third feature Where the Wild Things Are could go wrong. If I told you that the first ten minutes consisted of the director setting up its protagonist as a child in a broken home, neglected by a divorced mother trying to keep her job to continue to support her children, you'd probably -- Hey, come back! Let me finish. What on paper sounds like the beginnings of some half-assed Sundance feature becomes, under Jonze's wondrous direction and Dave Eggers' celebration of pre-pubescent angst, one of the finer films of the year and a technical marvel.

Jonze has a genuine find in Max Records, who plays the young hero Max. Imaginative but petulant, Max cannot connect with either his teenage sister nor his mom, and when mom invites a boyfriend over, an already cheesed Max acts out and ultimately runs away. Suddenly, he finds a sailboat that looks suspiciously like a small model he made for a miniature world in his bedroom, and sails until he reaches an island inhabited by huge monsters. Eggers and Jonze don't waste time in these first 15 minutes: as soon as he stumbles across the monsters, locked in the middle of some sort of argument, Max proudly strides in the middle of them and avoids being eaten by declaring himself their king.

Now that he's established the plot, Jonze slows the proceedings down and begins to explore this strange little world and its characters. Each of the monsters reflects a certain aspect of pre-teen moods: Alexander (voiced by Paul Dano), a goat-like beast, is timid and largely unheeded despite his keen observations; Judith (Catherine O'Hara) has the general snottiness and tactlessness of an impish child. Carol (James Gandolfini), the most prominent of the wild things, comes closest to Max's full range of emotions; Carol is the first to accept Max into the group, and he places all of his hopes on Max to keep the splintering wild things together.

Jonze has proven his visual acuity with his music videos as well as, to a more formal extent, his work directing his previous two features, both of which nicely juggled believable scenarios and set design with the skewed vision of Charlie Kaufman. Here, he at last unleashes the full range of his visual skill. The sharp, stripped branches jutting out from trees, and the houses and forts made from those sticks, reflect the characters' feelings of angst and loneliness, and one wonders how these large, hollow balls offer any sort of warmth or comfort to its residents. In one lovely segment, the wild things all pile on one another and Max, who is so dwarfed by this giant fur dome that he can wander freely in the middle of his new buddies.

I cannot honestly say, however, how well children might respond to this adaptation of a beloved children's book. Maurice Sendak's short story consisted of only 10 sentences and communicated the rest through illustrations, leaving a lot of space for Jonze and Eggers to fill. The script contains a number of fantastically funny moments -- many of them involving Alexander's quiet protests -- but for the most part the two focus on the sadder side of youth: their Max doesn't rebel because of unrestrained adolescent impudence but because he feels unloved and unwanted. Jonze keeps this idea grounded by presenting his mother's neglect without words and also inserting a number of shots that clearly demonstrate people caring for Max to prove that some of his feelings are hyperbolic and selfish. The mixture allows him to present Max both as a typical brat, but one with some pathos that never allows him to drift into the extremities of either unlikability or transparently sympathetic. The wild things also have their issues, and I found myself caring as much about whether this weird family stayed together as Max and his problems.

Interestingly, one segment of the film draws not from Sendak but Antoine de Sant-Exupéry and his classic Le Petit Prince: as Max and Carol wander through a desert (itself a clue to the scene's influence), Max relays something his science teacher told him earlier, that the sun would die one day. With only a moment's pause, Carol happily shuns such thoughts. "You're the king, and I'm big!" he says, "How could guys like us worry about a tiny little thing like the sun?" For all the film's dark themes of alienation and isolation, that one line is like a Beatles song in prose: I defy it not to bring a little cheer to people.

Most striking about the film, however, is the bizarre and magnificent design of the wild things. A combination of CGI and traditional puppetry and animatronics, the monsters can tread the line between purely fantastical (their heads are wider than their shoulders) and the realism that comes from an actual object being in the scene with the human actors. Often these creatures can be frightening, but I found myself strangely wishing to hug one of them, just one (probably not Judith).

Sadly, the film occasionally falters, such as its large storyline concerning a romance between the petulant and childlike Carol and the more reasonable KW (Lauren Ambrose), which drifts in and out of being interesting and grinds the picture to a halt when it isn't, as well as the ending, which to be fair couldn't really drawn upon Sendak's lack of resolution but fails to effectively conclude the story in its own way. These are minor quibbles, however, in the face of this charming but introspective young adult -- that's likely the area the film should be placed in, irrespective of the book -- feature that celebrates and contemplates the unrefined emotion of youth in equal measure. Now if you'll excuse me, I'm going to go try to start up a dirt clod fight.

Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind

Love is a dangerous game. It's a nerve-wracking, devastating affair full of desperation, anger, regret, and a pain so indescribable that all the music in the world has never captured it all. At least, that's what love represents when you lose it. Breakups and unrequited love generally result in a sort of emotional fallout, the kind that leads a man to spill his secrets to the barkeep before drunkenly singing "their song" to a room full of increasingly uncomfortable patrons. The reminiscing doesn't come until later.

Joel Barish hasn't reached that stage yet. At the start of the film he's dealing with a nasty break-up with Clementine (Kate Winslet), a free spirit who conflicted greatly with his own withdrawn persona. Jim Carrey takes all that manic energy he usually forces upon the audience and buries it under layers of nervousness and an empathic sense of shame. Already reeling from the end of their relationship, Joel gets another sock in the gut when he learns that Clementine went to the experimental medical firm Lacuna, Inc., which specializes in memory deletion and reconstruction, to erase the relationship from her mind.

Dejected and enraged, Joel rushes in and demands that Dr. Mierzwiak (Tom Wilkinson) perform the same procedure on him. That'll show her. Even though Lacuna is inundated for the Valentine's Day season, the doctor pencils him in and tells our hapless protagonist to go home and collect anything with a sentimental attachment to Clementine. He returns to the office, sits in a special chair, and Mierzwiak's assistants, Patrick and Stan (Elijah Wood and Mark Ruffalo), get to work.

And that's where any possibility of describing the plot in words ends. Director Michel Gondry has always been someone fascinated with the wavy line between dreams and reality, but that was before he partnered with modern legend Charlie Kaufman. Kaufman too deals with the bizarre and fascinating line between dreams and awareness, and the two prove to be a formidable team. The result is a film that continuously pulls the rug out from under you just as you managed to get back up after the last time.

As the process erases Joel's memories, we see his dream personification wander through each memory, constantly upended as the world literally crumbles around him. As the process whisks him into each subsequent scenario Joel finds himself forced to confront the memories he paid to have erased, and he slowly reaches an epiphany: eradicating Clem from his mind will erase the only happiness he ever knew. Eventually he manages to convince the Clementine from his memory of what's going on and the two essentially try to outrun the universe that caves in around them.

Then things just get weird. Joel, in an attempt to "protect" Clem (this is dream Clem, mind you), he runs into older memories, regressing into his childhood while Clementine stares on in bemusement. Editing isn't normally the filmmaking aspect one focuses on with a romantic comedy-drama, but Valdis Oskarsdottir had his work cut out for him when he made a film written by Charlie Kaufman and directed by Michel Gondry. Images jump, buzz, fade and warp like a hyperspeed music video, yet the style never gets in the way of the deep human understanding Kaufman and Gondry convey.

That understanding ultimately is what propels the film from being just an interesting experiment into one of the all-time best romantic films ever made, and certainly one of the ten best of the decade. Joel's not the only one with issues; the real Clementine must deal with the confusion left by suddenly removed memories, while a mysterious subplot involves Lacuna, Inc.'s secretary (Kirsten Dunst). Patrick's got something up his sleeve as well. Each of these stories adds levels of intrigue and depth to a story already overflowing with both, and it ensures that repeat viewings are rewarding.

Eternal Sunshine is one of those films I have trouble writing about, not only because I want everyone to experience it for themselves but because I worry that I'd only get lost in my platitudes. So perfect is every element -- the editing, the direction, the off-the-wall yet piercing script, the acting -- and so expertly and originally are they arranged that it stands on its own island. I can't imagine anyone having the balls to try to duplicate it, because it's so singular any attempt to build on it will immediately be seen as a ripoff. It boasts career-best performances from Carrey and Winslet, and at the very least all the other actors put in excellent work. Kaufman's script might lack the ambition of his later opus Synecdoche, New York and the wit of Adaptation, but he injects such a knowing sadness and hope into the film that he finally proves true the saying so many dismiss as pithy: 'twas better to have loved and lost than never loved at all.

Zodiac

David Fincher is certainly no stranger to crime thrillers: his breakthrough Se7en remains one of the best pieces of neo-noir ever produced. But his return to serial killer dramas, Zodiac, stands as his finest achievement. Based on the real life murder spree of the unknown "Zodiac Killer" in the San Fransisco Bay Area in the late 60s and 70s, Zodiac follows the lives of the detectives and reporters who got caught up in the case that spanned numerous county lines and decades and was never officially solved.

If nothing else, it's a bold film: Fincher opens the film with a string of the Zodiac's murders and then structures the other two hours or so as a police procedural in which a handful of people who become obsessed by the case try to sort out the various clues and cut through the red tape to find the truth: who is the Zodiac Killer? The early murders play out with a horrifying quality, not only because of how Fincher understates their deaths but because we know these people actually died, and for no other reason than they happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.

After the Zodiac murders a young woman and seriously injures her boyfriend at the start of the film, he sends in a cryptic letter to the San Fransisco Chronicle, admitting that he shot the two teenagers and promising to kill again if the editors don't print a portion of a cypher he sent to them (he sent the other two parts to other newspapers). Crime reporter Paul Avery (Robert Downey Jr.) gets on the case, and is soon joined by an unlikely aide: cartoonist Robert Graysmith (Jake Gyllenhaal), a man who loves puzzles and obsesses over the killer's cypher.

For over two hours, Graysmith tries to put all the pieces together as all those around him give up; Paul Avery becomes paranoid when the Zodiac announces an intention to kill him, and eventually loses everything to alcoholism before winding up with emphysema. Detective Dave Toschi (Mark Ruffalo) works with Avery and Graysmith but eventually gets buried under the red tape involved with the cross-county investigation. That in particular made the Zodiac so brilliant: by committing crimes all over the place he prevented any one person from figuring it all out.

But Graysmith never gives up; years after the Zodiac stops killing, he tries to consolidate the various pieces of evidence into a book in the hopes that, if all the facts are placed in one location, maybe someone can figure out the identity of the killer. People repeatedly ask if the intrepid, doe-eyed young man is "some kind of Boy Scout or something," to which he chirpily responds "Eagle Scout, First Class!" His dogged determination wins him the grudging respect of many of the detectives who find themselves routinely astonished by the things that Robert digs up.

Technically, the film employs Fincher's visual genius, but in a far more understated manner than his usual effects. He uses digital tricks not to add in the expressionist nightmares of Se7en or the fantasy splendor of The Curious Case of Benjamin Button but to cast a dreary gloom over the Bay Area. Fincher never shows us the media phenomenon the murders created, but he captures the mood of a city gripped in fear with its muted colors and dour feel. It works so well that it's a little hard to make out the effects at all

I've heard some people complain that the film fails because it doesn't tell you who the killer was. Some people are just plain stupid: is Fincher really supposed to solve an actual cold case for the purposes of entertainment? Personally, I find the film to be astonishing; Fincher throws a lot of facts and figures at us for 2-1/2 hours and not once did they bore me. At its heart, Zodiac is a police procedural about police procedurals, whose hopelessness and cynicism is tempered by the knowledge that even if crimes go unsolved, a few individuals are willing to do their best to solve them no matter the cost. Fincher has a few modern classics under his belt, but here is his first true masterpiece.

Blindness

There’s a lot of promise that comes with “Blindness,” the new film based on the richly metaphorical, Nobel Prize-winning book by José Saramago. Not only is it based on a great novel, it’s got a killer cast and it’s directed by Fernando Meirelles, director of “City of God,” a film that comes abut close as one possibly can to being an amalgamation of Martin Scorsese’s best work without being plagiaristic. Unfortunately, some books are better left alone.

The story takes place in three parts: the first is the outbreak of the blindness plague and the initial quarantining, the seconds covers the breakdown of the containment camp, and the third follows a band of survivors who escape the camp. Leading them are an optometrist (Mark Ruffalo) and his wife (Julianne Moore); the latter seemingly the only one unaffected by the epidemic. They set up their containment ward to be a solid, peaceful fraternity. You’ve got everyone: a kid, a kindly ex-prostitute, a thief, and Asian couple, and a wise old man who not so wisely continues to wear an eye patch.

As the soldiers guarding the quarantine zone become more and more afraid of infection, they care less and less about the inhabitants, leaving them to ration their own food and chores, even take care of disposal of bodies. Enter the leader of another ward, the self-proclaimed “King of Ward 3,” who first forces other wards to pay for food (as if money or jewelry has any value anymore), then demands women after the tribute runs out. He has miraculously gotten his hands on a gun, though where or how remains as much a mystery as the pathology of the blindness. This eventually sparks a war, which of course the good guys win because they have a leader who can see the others frantically waving pipes and rods, hoping to collide with someone.

Little is done right in this film. The characters are all absurdly one note: the good guys in Ward 1 all stay good, and submit to the demands of the “King” in order to feed each other. Meanwhile, everyone in Ward 3 is entirely evil; they savage the women sent to them in glee, and not one for a moment pauses to consider the abject horror of their choices. Moore does all she can with the role, but no one has a background or any two-dimensionality, so there’s nothing to work with. The book can afford to be almost entirely metaphorical because, well, it’s a book. Books can do as they damn well please; that’s what makes them superior. A film, on the other hand, has to have something driving it, otherwise it just meanders.

The biggest surprise is the directorial ineptitude on display. Meirelles established himself as one of the most gifted new directors with “City of God,” and, from what I hear, he did a bang-up job with “The Constant Gardener” as well. But here he tires to recapture the alternately gritty and glamorous style of his masterpiece. Much of the film is dark, taking place in the shadow of shadows, making it impossible to piece together a scene. He shows us horrors, but these horrors do not help us understand the story better; they just disgust. Too often the screen changes into a bright, milky white, not only to visualize the “white blindness” but seemingly because Meirelles feels like it. This effect drifts in and out of thematic relevance to the point that it undermines the times it's used correctly.

Recently groups of blind people protested that the film (and the book, I assume) painted a negative portrait of the blind. I won’t say that they fail to see the point because that would be crass, but there is a definite misunderstanding; blindness is used only as a macguffin to bring out panic and base instincts in these people. To be fair, though, the allegory was a little thin as a book, and the lack of subtlety on display here could offend just about anyone. If you want to see a good film about a mysterious, unexplained disease that brings about a terrifying image of what man can regress to, watch “Children of Men.” Or stick to the novel.