criterionforum.org

My understanding is Theron is producing, not acting in the series?

That's probably what will likely happen. I re-read it and realized it would be a series, not a movie. My mistake.

The material is very promising. Hopefully they'll be looking to John Douglas as a technical adviser and drawing from his whole career and maybe some of his other books as well. I suspect Fincher will be interested in bringing some procedural realism back to this genre that's been sensationalized to death (including at least once before by him). The real life details of these cases have always been harrowing enough for me and a similar approach has already made Zodiac his best feature film to date. Since it's for Netflix it would also be interesting to continue to embrace serialization the way House of Cards has, where episodes aren't always so neatly self-contained or satisfying on their own, but act more as chapters in a larger unfolding story. We've seen serialized investigations into a single case spanning a whole season before, but we've never seen it done with the kind of obsessive procedural integrity Fincher at his best can offer. Who wouldn't want to watch the 10-12 hour version of something like Zodiac?

If he and the showrunner can put together something along those lines, and still have the show be something that can stand on it's own and apart from every other show of this nature, that will be impressive. It's good he's going back to Netflix this time, they seem to give him the scope for these projects that maybe HBO buckled at.

When it comes to cinema technology, Fincher is among the most knowledgeable directors.

Has anyone here read the book upon which this is based?

I have. I highly recommend John Douglas' books in general. They're some of the best true crime books and some of the best reading I've done about psychopathy. He has his critics, especially with regard to specific opinions in certain solved and unsolved cases, but there aren't too many people with more raw experience in his field. In a way he was at the right place at the right time, but he was also willing to help pioneer a field that needed people like him to do it. I'm interested to see that the series is actually sticking rather closely to the narrative gist of his book. It appears to be a procedural period piece about FBI profilers set at the dawn of modern profiling, fighting their own bureaucracy and the status quo as much as the killers they're hunting. And needing to depend on other jailed and captured killers (the dynamic Thomas Harris borrowed from John Douglas' experiences) for insights into ones still on the loose.

I read it years ago. Full of detail and insight, though Douglas is something of a blowhard. As I recall, it was pretty wide-ranging, more about the evolution of the 'calling' of profiling than about following a particular case extensively. It makes it wide open for adaptation, or non-adaptation. I imagine that the series will have a more conventional narrative structure.

If I recall correctly, the main narrative framing device of the book is Douglas'

Spoiler

unsuccessful hunt for the Green River Killer, which almost literally kills him from overworked exhaustion and a viral fever that sends him to the hospital.

Oh, and when I endorsed his books above, I meant strictly his nonfiction. I have not read his two novels. For me his best work is probably his book on the BTK killer. And his most important contributions lately have been in helping to exonerate the falsely accused, specifically the West Memphis Three and Amanda Knox.

Glad to see Anna Torv in something high profile like this

The "Fly Like An Eagle" montage in the 2nd episode might be some of Fincher's best work.

Some of the episodes are surprisingly very short (one even barely over 30 minutes).

This was probably the best surprise of the year. I loved the characters and the performances. I thought the transformation of Holden from start to finish was brilliant.

I finally caught up with this, and felt it left a lot to be desired, precisely because the premise was so interesting. There's so much fertile ground for a long-form series here - besides the criminology angle, it's fundamentally about we can better understand human nature - but gradually the show disregards pretty much every facet of that in favor of focusing exclusively on Holden acting like an arrogant ass in very typical and uninteresting ways. Literally every character in Holden's life is reduced to scowling at him disapprovingly when they get any screen time at all, but this is most egregiously true of Wendy. Debbie doesn't fare much better - her main subplot is that she's probably cheating on Holden, a bog standard relationship subplot. Even Bill gets sidelined, even though he's probably the most interesting character of the lot. In fact, Holden's probably the least interesting character of the lot - he's passionate about the work but only superficially curious about it, and at any rate he's too inexperienced to have any idea what he's doing but too arrogant to understand his limitations. In other words, he's just like every asshole in every office who confuses arrogance for boldness and accomplishments for success.

But what really killed me is the ending of the last episode, when

Spoiler

Holden gets a comeuppance of sorts from Kemper. For you see, Holden finally is made to understand the true nature of the darkness that he's scoffed at all this time, when Kemper makes him feel the fear that his victims felt. And whaddaya know, it makes Holden sick. This is such cheap dramatizing - it's like the old Production Code when everyone had to get theirs at the end, and so Holden couldn't escape without being punished for all his arrogant indifference to others' sensibilities. And the narrative contortions the show had to take to get him in that situation to begin with! It was just a horrid piece of storytelling to me.

Still, I'll probably watch the next season. I just hope the creative team gets a little more focused about what they're doing.

Fincher is on the latest episode of Elvis Mitchell's show, and said the drop-date is August 16th.

DarkImbecile wrote: Mon Aug 05, 2019 4:55 pm Trailer for Season 2

Looking good