Word: serials
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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There's no nice way to say it: movies love murderers. Producers may claim the killer's story is a cautionary tale, but they revel--along with the villain and the audience--in the sick grandeur of a hit man, a supervillain, a serial killer. Movies used to show what the audience wanted to be. Then Norman Bates came along, and Freddy and Jason, and Hannibal Lecter, to prove that we also wanted to see what we feared. The psycho creeps toward his victim; we can't watch, and we can't turn away...
...docudrama from scaremeister David (Se7en) Fincher, is about the manhunt for a killer who raised shivers throughout California from 1969 to 1978. He murdered at least five people and maybe many more. Or perhaps other disturbed souls copied his style. Often imitated, never duplicated, Zodiac was the Elvis of serial killers: he had brains, swagger, originality and a flawless sense of p.r. He taunted police and the press with phone calls, coded messages, swatches of his victims' clothes. Bay Area detectives questioned several suspects, but the killer was never caught. In what may have been his last note...
...must have been a film critic, for by 1978, there had been plenty of movies inspired by his exploits. Apparently, he didn't care for the two released in 1971: a no-budgeter called The Zodiac Killer, and Dirty Harry, with Clint Eastwood as a Frisco cop chasing a serial killer called Scorpio. Other films followed; the methodical (read: plodding) The Zodiac came out in 2005. But if the killer was hoping for a synoptic rethinking of his case from an A-level director, he's finally...
Based on a book by onetime Chronicle cartoonist Robert Graysmith, the film is less a serial-killer thriller than an All the President's Men wannabe, with the young Graysmith (Jake Gyllenhaal) as Woodward and Bernstein, and his senior colleague Paul Avery (Robert Downey Jr.) as a crusty Ben Bradlee type with a lot more showmanship and a mile-wide self-destructive streak. Their sleuthing sometimes helps, mostly annoys detectives Dave Toschi (Mark Ruffalo) and William Armstrong (Anthony Edwards). When Toschi is asked, "Have you considered that the killer might be Paul Avery?", he deadpans, "Frequently...
...Dignity is one thing temps don't have in Japan, where a worker is often still judged by the quality of the corporation to which they've pledged their lifetime loyalty. (Indeed, Japanese will introduce themselves company name first: "I'm TIME's Bryan Walsh.") Haken - a serial drama that began airing in January and ends this month - is popular in part because it inverts the accepted rules of a Japanese office and satirizes the social divide between full-timers and lowly part-timers...