Word: zodiacal
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...horse head is a particularly symbolic artifact to China. It was one of 12 pieces representing the Chinese zodiac that were crafted by Jesuit missionaries. They sat atop sculptures of human bodies to form a water clock in the Summer Palace, the home of the royal family. The clock, which was designed so each head would spout water for two hours each day and all would spray in unison at noon, was said to be a favorite of the Qianlong emperor...
Movies judder past on my little screen, so I watch the end of Zodiac on a Singapore-Narita flight, having watched the beginning, I think, on Singapore-Delhi. Books blur into one another until the best answer seems to be to read the novels of Haruki Murakami, which feel like the mellifluous sound of Muzak heard during jet lag, with their floating characters situated in Japan but living in the America or Italy of their heads. Just to make my disorientation complete, I get off a plane in Sydney because we are going to take on passengers from another (canceled...
...Besides Van Sant's, there were four other U.S. films in the Competition - Joel and Ethan Coen's No Country for Old Men, Quentin Tarantino's Death Proof, David Fincher's Zodiac and James Gray's We Own the Night - and none of them received a prize. Readers in the States may be wondering if all four films were less laudable than the nine that won something...
...inherent drama in the coiling of tension as Mariane and a host of Pakistani and American officials track down clues about those involved in leading Danny into the hands of his murderers. This is essentially a police procedural, an accretion of small, agonizing details, rather like the recent Zodiac, which opened in the U.S. in March and is being shown in competition here. And since anyone interested in seeing A Mighty Heart is likely to know the awful outcome, the film also has an inherent lack of drama, despite Jolie's commitment to the project and her occasionally volcanic histrionics...
...scene doesn't prove that Allen is Zodiac. (Neither, conclusively, does the film.) But it does suggest that psychosis has a kind of charnel charisma--that murderous evil is the majesty of the depraved...