Zodiac, Black Snake Moan

Zodiac (David Fincher, 2007) - B+

Different interpretations abound; I think it's about the way we try to process evil, subject it to rules and regulations, then prefer to forget about it, push it aside, with the inevitable result that our hands close on air. People have complained about the last scene providing an unsolicited solution to the whodunit, but all I could think was, why couldn't they bust out that photo line-up years earlier? Answer, I take it: because of petty jurisdictional bullshit, cops fighting over territory and struggling to consolidate information, hampered at every step by egos, red tape, and the Fourth Amendment. The implication is that we set up this framework to avoid dealing with evil face-to-face, something Gyllenhaal's Robert Graysmith finally does in the film's most powerful scene; everyone else who gets uncomfortably close bails out for the sake of their lives and families. Fincher loads the 2:40 film with detail -- it's the most intricate police procedural in years -- but our knowledge that the Zodiac was never caught makes everything seem sadly quixotic. Meanwhile, what lurks behind curiously ungrammatical letters and cryptic ciphers -- the killer we never meet (or do we?) -- is genuinely scary.

Black Snake Moan (Craig Brewer, 2007) - B+

I'm tempted to accuse Brewer of being too willing to ditch his daring conceit for more conventional redemption story elements, but the whole thing winds up working so well that it's hard to complain: the final scene, in particular, is a rare movie moment, striking such a powerful chord of hope and sadness, regret and determination... it's just perfect. Amazingly, the story functions on its own terms, lest you think that a black man chaining a white woman to a radiator in Tennessee is only good for metaphor or commentary; the film gets a surprising amount of mileage out of its characters' sparse backstories, even while Samuel L. Jackson is literally dragging Christina Ricci back into his house, hand over hand. Noodles around too much in the second act, but rallies big time in the third; Jackson and Ricci are extraordinary.