David Fincher is a director I know I am supposed to admire — his fans will be happy to make this crystal clear for you, if you have anything approaching a misgiving — but whose films frequently leave me cold. Zodiac is the exception that proves the rule.
“Well, I ain’t talkin’ philosophies, I’m talkin’ cars,” says the local sheriff in Dirty Mary, Crazy Larry, a 1974 chase movie that was all-but-forgotten until predictable super-fan Quentin Tarantino started peppering his films with references to it.
The sheriff is referring to his own department’s need for vehicles, but out of context it could stand in as the film’s tagline.
“I guess I wasn’t built for this.”
“Nobody was. It’s all just a trick we perform, when we’d rather not die immediately.”
Stanley Kubrick’s first feature Fear and Desire – famously considered lost for years, and famously dismissed by Kubrick himself as “a bumbling amateur film exercise” – is an existentialist war movie.