The idea is to fill Facebook with a few good movies. The game is easy: to anyone who likes this post, I will assign a director. All you need to do is post the poster of your favorite movie of the assigned director on your wall and continue the game. Phil Speer gave me David Fincher. This was tricky as Fincher has several movies I really love, but I think Ill have to go with Seven as my favorite, mainly because, to me, the movie is a nearly perfect example of how to set a tone, introduce a mystery, and then slowly ratchet up the tension with every scene until you get to a truly worthy, gut-punch of an ending. I think it works so effectively for several reasons. First, and probably most importantly, Fincher allows time for scenes that give the main actors (Pitt & Freeman) time to bounce off each other a bit. You see some initial tension, and you get to know them as people, which means youre invested & care about them as people by the time the plot starts to roll out its twists. This dynamic hooked me almost immediately and it allows the director to show you (rather than tell you) what the characters are thinking & feeling. Even if the mystery had turned out disappointingly bland (which it doesnt), the movie had me emotionally invested as a viewer, which is one of the most important things you need to do when telling a story. Second, though people sometimes will say to me, isnt that movie really violent?, its actually pretty sparing with any actual violence shown. Instead, most of the horrors committed by the killer are inferred, which is often even more terrifying, because youre only given pieces of information of what happened, and your imagination is filling in everything else. In fact, the only scenes where any actual physical violence happen almost exclusively involve Pitts character, which makes sense when you get to the end of the film and you understand the arc for his character. When many movies show you horrific violence, in graphic detail, happening to empty characters you dont care about, its a movie like Seven that reminds you how to make a movie that is truly scary and has you feeling afraid for what might happen next but still so riveted you cant look away! Third, Fincher is a director that has his own visual style, and while it was obvious from his early films, this is the first film in his filmography where I feel his style really shines. The environments looked detailed, realistic, and lived-in. The tension is built and maintained, nothing happening to kill the tone or the mood. The camera angles are inventive and often working, along with what is happening in the story, to give the viewer information. There doesnt seem to be a single superfluous scene! Every moment, you are learning more, either about the case, or about the characters, or both. And all the while, there are little touches foreshadowing the ending to come, which makes the movie rewarding when seeing it again! And fourth, what a villain! Like Psycho, The Dark Knight, Misery, The Silence of the Lambs, The Shining, The Usual Suspects, Die Hard and several other wonderful gems, this movie has a fantastic villain that I wont ruin in the off chance you still havent seen this movie yet. In fact, if youre reading this & you havent seen Seven, please do yourself a favor and put this film on your must watch list! It is one example of a film where almost everything works, and so many other films look cheap in comparison to it. A true classic!
Posted on: Thu, 30 Jan 2014 14:22:51 +0000