David Fincher Top Ten

With Fincher's first feature in 6 years, Mank, due soon, I figured I'd do a top ten of his other films. Conveniently, he's only made ten features, on top of dozens of music 'videos', as well as some TV and a few shorts. But let's focus on the films.

10. The Curious Case of Benjamin Button (2008)

Where to start? Well, let me say that Benjy is the only Fincher film I hated. Full of heart-felt whimsy attempting depth, it misses just about every mark. This is trite bollocks with very little to raise it, save from the unimpeachable Cate Blanchett. Take her out of it and you're left with a certified steamer.

9. The Game (1997)

Not a bad film, and made with some late 90s panache, but it just didn't elevate for me. Not much wrong with the cast, Douglas and Penn are usually watchable at worst. There are the requisite reversals and rug-pulls but maybe that's part of the problem - too much of this malarkey?

8. Alien³ (1992)

I don't remember the minutiae of this film but I recall it being bloody grim and quite dull, even with sharpy tooth, dribbly face popping up in odd places. The cast is packed with British gems like Charles Dance, Pete Postlethwaite and Paul McGann, and Weaver is top bins as usual but this might be the weakest of the Alien series.

7. The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (2011)

Not a bad stab at adapting the Stieg Larsson novel, with Rooney Mara and Daniel Craig playing the two leads, Salander and Blomkvist. This is mostly on a par with the Swedish version of two years previous but Fincher's style nudges it just above for me. Craig is generally underrated as an actor and the supporting cast is fine but it's Mara who drives the film. She's oddly magnetic but also hard to warm to in this role, which creates a pretty memorable balance.

6. Panic Room (2002)

A nicely paced, home invasion thriller full of Finchery touches and well pitched performances from Jodie Foster, Kristen Stewart and Forest Whitaker. I reckon I haven't seen this since release but I remember it being pretty nerve-jangling fun.

5. The Social Network (2010)

A film that used Jesse Eisenberg's inherent unlikeability to good effect, this gets in the top five due to Fincher's (and writer Aaron Sorkin's) alchemy of making a dull reality into a sparkling Shakespearean twat-bastard-fest.

4. Se7en (1995)

Fincher's second feature (and the second to use a weird number thing in the title), this was his 'name on the map' turn. Pitt was a bit raw but Freeman and Spacey brought the gravitas to this delicately assembled scunge-pit of a film. Aside from Delicatessen, I can't remember a BROWNER film. Or a more unsettling one.*

*These are both good things in my book.

3. Gone Girl (2014)

This film jumps genres like it's scanning the dial for Jim Maxwell. It takes a stab at thriller, black comedy, satire, even echoing number 2 in this list at times (see below). Fincher seems so assured with Gone Girl, like he's completely comfortable with its ultimate destination. Career-best turns from Affleck and Pike, with top notch support in Kim Dickens and Tyler Perry as well as a creeping sense of dread, make this a superbly landed piece of cinema.

2. Zodiac (2007)

Zodiac is the film that took on Iron Man, Hulk and Mysterio and left them floundering. Immensely watchable, mostly accurate account of the Zodiac serial killer case in California in the 60s and 70s. Fincher pretty much found his opus here and his detailed camerawork, suspenseful editing and control of pace and performance make this one of the best films of the 2000s so far. A flipping belter this.

1. Fight Club (1999)

A South African fella named Shane called me over at the pram repair warehouse and said, "Bru, you have to see this new Brad Pitt film, Fight Club!" I think I dismissed him with an eyebrow and a scoffing, "Pitt". But how wrong I was. This is a deliciously anarchic, bonkers, anti-capitalism tract with a lovely pre-21st century twist and visuals to lick dry. Ending on a Pixies song just popped an allergy free cherry* on top.

*I'm actually allergic to cherries.

Comments

Hard Truths

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Tatami

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High and Low

I caught this at the Luna back in November as part of the Akira Kurosawa retrospective and was happily gobsmacked to find screen one nearly full. It was the biggest crowd I've seen at the cinema for a long while. Kurosawa still packing them in! It's actually the first non-samurai film of his I've seen but it has his stamp of lingering, physically moving mid-shots and busy action within the frame of the wider shots. The setting is Yokohama, Japan in the early 1960s (the film was made in 1963). A shoe company executive, Gondo (Toshiro Mifune) is planning a share takeover when his son's friend, mistaken for the son, is kidnapped. The kidnapper demands roughly the same amount of money required to finalise the financial coup, putting Gondo in quite the tsukemono! Mifune is commanding in the lead (odd seeing him in a suit) but detective 'Bos'n' Taguchi (Kenjiro Ishiyama) is the standout. He looks like so many of the oji-sans hanging out at the horse tracks of Jap...

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