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Saw this last night, finally.  (I had to, for research.)  And oh, the flames.   Flames in my head.   I cannot wait for this thing to come out on video so we can DIF it into a puddle.   

It's a textbook case of how to do things wrong - genre, plotting, character development... oh the list goes on.    And just when I thought it couldn't get worse... a second Magic Bean?   Really, movie? 

I agree that the cast was the best feature - Daniel Craig makes a surprisingly convincing cowboy, it was fun to see Harrison play a bad(ish) guy, and I'm always happy to see Clancy Brown in anything.    Oddly enough, Sam Rockwell didn't make much of an impression, any number of actors could have played that role.   

But Olivia Wilde's character - and now I finally know who Olivia Wilde is - shouldn't have been in the movie at all.   From a filmmaking perspective, everything that character said and did, even her very existence, was the wrong choice.    I would have cut that character out entirely, but I suspect the opposite is true - I bet that character was a late addition to the script, when somebody decided the movie needed a deus-ex-machina Explaino-bot. 

Other than some nice trailer-moment action scenes - at least they were able to get THAT right - an unimaginative waste of a potentially fun premise.    Prime DiF material, fer sure.

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Yeah, pretty much agree with all the above.  Which is why they'd make potentially good DIF's, there's stuff to talk about.

But when I say Zodiac was forgettable, I mean it quite literally.  I saw Zodiac, it was well-made and kept my interest throughout.  But there's not a single thing about it that I can remember now, other than the basic facts of the Zodiac case that I knew anyway.

In fairness to Mr. Fincher, in my previous post I forgot he also directed Panic Room, which I would put in my "hit" category.

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Fincher's got plenty of craft, but I don't love every movie he's made.  Same goes for Spielberg and Scorcese and Zemeckis and Cameron and Wright and Darabont and...   

But I will admit Fincher's been more miss than hit with me.   I liked Social Network, Seven, and (in retrospect if not at the time) Alien 3.    The rest, not so much.  *

To be honest, the uncritical Fincher Love that younguns seem to have is a head-scratcher to me - it's definitely a generational thing.  Fincher the man is the same age as me, but for whatever reason his work seems most beloved by twenty-somethings.   There's a doctoral thesis waiting to be written on this someday.

*yes, my miss list includes Fight Club.    *gasp*

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Add a matching Un-like feature and I'm sold.

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Looks like Brian and I will be doing a one-day speedthru on Friday.  But I admit I'm mostly in it for the change of scenery, and hopefully a meal at one of those nice restaurants across the street.

And to look at cosplay girls, of course, duh.

The Dorkman in black fled across the desert and the Gunslinger followed...

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Correct!  Proceed.

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*jingles car keys in front of dkcecil *

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Seconded.  Dorkman wins the page.

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This is a wild guess, but maybe it was Videodrome?  Haven't seen it myself in decades, so I don't remember the specific image you're describing, but - it's an '80's Cronenberg with lots of techno-fleshy images and other similarities to existenz, so maybe that's why you thought it was the latter?

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