I wasn't comparing Haneke and Fincher head-to-head. Go back and read what I posted. You could easily remove the Haneke part and it'd still make sense.
Okay...
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It seemed it like it was trying to be wide open and mysterious like a Haneke film, but it ended up feeling overpolished and just average.
Wide-open and mysterious. Well, it goes to enormous lengths to, if anything, de-mystify the case. It's the opposite to "wide-open", to me. What do you mean by "overpolished"? Slick and smooth? Clean-looking? As opposed to grainy, perhaps, and hand-held? I don't see how being "overpolished" is a bad thing.
That's exactly what I mean by overpolished. It works sometimes, like in 2046 and Magnolia, but when the film rarely leaves a suburb/office/car setting like in Zodiac, it ends up being painfully dull.
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But a lot of our perceptions about a film's aesthetic is affected by what's actually happening in the film too.
I don't understand this, really. What's your point? Do you mean subject matter, as opposed to a film's style or "form"?
Yeah. For example, at first glance, Godard's films are nothing special visually, but when you watch the film, his visual style is always perfectly suitable to what he's filming.
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Yeah, I noticed the change in cinematography. So what? I'm all of a sudden suppossed to enjoy the film because Fincher paid great attention to detail?
There are some beautiful flourishes in there, regardless of period detail - the period detail, which people often amount to "realism" or "historical accuracy" - doesn't really excite me all that much, since I never lived in San Fransisco and never have; it's a far-away reality to me. But you didn't find worth in the overhead tracking shot of the taxi - which belied any use of CGI for me, and seemed incredibly ambitious and difficult in concept, but pulled off very well.
I'll tell you what, I'll anticipate a quote from you: "So what, it's a nice tracking shot, now I'm supposed to care about the film?"
Well, yeah; even if you deem it as a gimmick (which it may or may not be), it's still beautiful enough in and of itself to be "of worth", no? I mean in strictly cinematic terms.
It's of worth to you since you found it to be a beautiful shot, and at the time I might have thought of it as beautiful as well (I can't really remember, which shows just how small of an impact the film had on me). But in the end, it's only one small part of a film that I hated.
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You don't make the film in the first place.
Oh, but then I could ask why make films in the first place? Why make anything? Why live?
I could easily say the same thing as you but apply it to Stalker. Tarkovsky didn't need to make that film to tell us about existentialism, did he?
Of course he didn't. But Stalker changed my life, so I'm glad Tarkovsky made it. I'm also glad Fincher made Zodiac, Juenet made Amelie, Anderson made Boogie Nights, and on and on. Watching bad films is essential in order to appreciate the films you love.
