Movie Details
| Title: | Copycat | |
| Director: | Jon Amiel | |
| Year: | 1995 | |
| Genre: | Thriller | |
| Times Seen: | 1 | |
| Last Seen: | 10.02.22 |
Other Movies Seen By This Director (0)
| Date Viewed | Venue | Note |
| 10.02.22 | Internet | I recently watched Ryan Murphy's Dahmer mini-series on Netflix and thought it was very good. Jeffrey Dahmer's one of the last and most extreme serial killers to be caught and I was old enough to remember news coverage and how he affected the culture when it happened. So similar to his OJ Simpson show (but with more gore), I thought this was a good deep dive and have been enjoying the wave of meta content on the internet about how close it stuck to the facts and that sort of thing. One such video was some serial killer expert rating movie clips. They started with the beginning scene from this movie and I realized that they had the actor playing the killer in the audience during the lecture. I also remembered that there was a scene where the killer mimicked Dahmer. That was enough to track this down and give it another watch. A little bit more precursor. Movies in the 90s... this was when i was a teenager so... many of these movies I saw a lot. I'd see them in the theater, then rent them when they hit the home video market, then sometimes record them when they hit HBO. Therefore, many of these types of hollywood 90s thrillers if they were any good at all I saw a bunch. So even though it's been at least 15 years since I last saw this, the story was very familiar. What did feel new was revisiting the era as an artifact. Somehow, 80s movies FELT 80s even when I was watching them new. Lost Boys or Masters of the Universe or even Back to the Future all had a vibe to me, but 90s culture seemed to manifest more on tv with commercials and mtv and whatnot, but looking back now this movie is riddled with stylistic artifacts that seemed cool and hip back then but now strike me as bizarre. Furthermore, I feel like the 90s was the last wave of "good enough" filmmaking where stuff like true facts and fine details didn't really matter because it was hard to look shit up and all you had was a CRT television with interlaced VHS anyway so none of that shit mattered. Nowadays it's all different. A show like Dahmer is ONLY good if it can faithfully recreate stuff exactly as we saw it on the news 30 years ago. This movie uses the subject of serial killers as Backdraft uses firefighting or... The Accountant uses accounting. Not only does it not compare to Silence of the Lambs (which this was probably greenlit in the wake of), but certainly in a post-Zodiac, post-Mindhunters world this falls way short. The names of the killers are real but the crime scenes and photos and all the expert knowledge that Sigourney Weaver babbles is all made up. Harry Connick Jr.'s portrayal is almost comical, and the film's ending - while I think it works in the context which its built for itself - doesn't make much sense. I hate to admit this, but one of the biggest things that bugged me about this viewing was Holly Hunter's performance. She's going for the slick senior detective but all that 90s snark didn't work for me at all. As I remember, this movie was kind of trying to have some authority talking about disturbing the scene and following evidence, so all the nonsense with Will Patton and whatnot just reeks of Keanu Reeves in Speed type stuff. Oh, and the computer shit. The movies have finally moved beyond the magical wonders of computers but this was a reminder of how bad 90s movies were with that shit. Using like a hacked version of Photoshop 1.0 to copy paste then with the double click of a Compaq mouse it's magically a blended animation, and these chat room windows... And Dermot Mulroney with the magical powers of knowing how to read English off a monitor. It's not quite as bad as "This is a unix system. I know this!" but just indicative of how new and mysterious the tech was at the time. heh heh. But... I mean... I didn't hate it. It's just amusing to see now is all. Now that "they're back," the 90s definitely had a unique style. I don't know that I could say the same for the 2000s though. I guess we'll see in 10 years when it becomes retro. So anyway, yeah this is total popcorn mediocrity these days, but I remember it standing out as being better most of its peers, along with stuff like Virtuosity, Bone Collector, Fallen, and of course Seven. |
