Chinatown (1974)
Directed by Roman Polanski
Private eye Jake Gittes lives off of the murky moral climate of sunbaked, pre-World War II Southern California. Hired by a beautiful socialite to investigate her husband's extra-marital affair, Gittes is swept into a maelstrom of double dealings and deadly deceits, uncovering a web of personal and political scandals that come crashing together.
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What critics compared Chinatown to
With its references to classic spaghetti westerns, Johnny Depp films, and “Chinatown,” most critics have reason to cheer.
The more you know about movies, the cleverer and funnier the movie is, especially when you realize that the central plot is Roman Polanski’s Chinatown (1974)—right down to a corrupt politico (Ned Beatty) who’s nothing more, nor less than John Huston’s Noah Cross in the form of a turtle.
The question before us: For whom is this blend of spaghetti Western and “Chinatown” meant?
It is not a coincidence that the mayor (voiced by Ned Beatty) sounds like the evil John Huston character from Chinatown as the film makes an obvious nod toward that film classic as well as the numerous western themes that show up.
Sadly, this irreverent western gallery of personified animals can't quite sustain its gonzo verve for feature length (it's all too easy to see through the plot to the lurking Chinatown revelation, although a third act cameo sets a high water mark of awesome, especially for fans of Deadwood), but it's still as genuinely idiosyncratic and effortlessly entertaining as the best of big-budget family features.
Johnny Depp gives voice to a chameleon who fibs his way into becoming sheriff of a desert outpost; the eccentric residents are plagued by a long drought and assorted predators, the most menacing of whom is a two-faced, water-hoarding mayor (Ned Beatty, channeling John Huston in Chinatown).
But this time West's influences lean into the film-noir classics set in L.A., like Roman Polanski's iconic 1974 hit, Chinatown.
…at one point he’s styled to resemble CHINATOWN’s Jake Gittes…
It feels as if West suddenly wanted to make “Chinatown” (1974) into a horror film without the hardboiled detective.
Kevin Bacon is clearly relishing donning a Chinatown style getup and hamming it up with gravelly heavy accented vocals.
…be it its Chinatown-styled private eye character…
In one sequence, in particular, Bacon resembles Jack Nicholson in Chinatown as he pursues Maxine on the Universal backlot…
The Nice Guys is as much inspired by Black’s own reverence for classic ’70s private eye movies such as Chinatown or the tough guy films of Lee Marvin or John Cassavettes, as it is the filmmaker’s own back catalogue.
It’s in the range of Chinatown and Inherent Vice , though comparing The Nice Guys to these films is prejudicial.
In “The Nice Guys” we’re hanging out in Los Angeles circa 1977 where the neon buzz of “Boogie Nights” is everywhere and the veins of corruption, akin to “L.A. Confidential” and “Chinatown,” run deep.
It just wants you to remember Los Angeles detective conspiracies like “Chinatown,” “The Big Lebowski” and “Who Framed Roger Rabbit,” lean back and enjoy the ride.
Because this is set in Los Angeles in the 1970s, we're supposed to think back to Chinatown and The Long Goodbye and excuse the opaque plot, around which Black's eccentric gags float like seasoned croutons in bland soup.
And while his convoluted plot aspires to stir memories of the likes of Chinatown and L.A. Confidential (the latter starring two of this film's players, Crowe and Kim Basinger), it's really not much more complicated or polished than any given episode of Magnum, P.I.
Like many of his contemporaries, Anderson mistakes movie references for ideas — this one recalls those 1970s sunshine noirs “Chinatown” and “The Long Goodbye.”
Tubeside"), to the meandering plot, recalling The Big Sleep , Chinatown , and -- yes -- Lebowski .
Joaquin Phoenix gives a relatively restrained (for him) performance as a substance-loving private eye who gets drawn into a convoluted conspiracy very vaguely reminiscent of “Chinatown’’ involving a real-estate magnate (Eric Roberts).
The land-development angle recalls Chinatown, of course, but the biggest single influence is Robert Altman’s The Long Goodbye, which similarly told the story of a private eye in a ‘70s-era Los Angeles that had left him behind.
If The Master—a better movie, if only by virtue of being one of the best of this decade so far—riffed on some of the major themes of 1940s film noir (the returning veteran, charlatanism, sexual anxiety), Inherent Vice is closer to Chinatown.
Some of the mysteries intersect and resolve — akin to “Chinatown,” with land swapped for water — but most crest and recede rather than coalesce into a clearly delineated conspiracy.
He references other films--CHINATOWN and CITIZEN KANE most notably--yet this too is a way of showing the timelessness of the examined themes.
His performance has lead to comparisons with John Huston (probably most famous these days for his turn in Chinatown), but in a way it's more reminiscent of De Niro's violent boxer Jake La Motta in Raging Bull.
Normally an exceptional performer, Day-Lewis has opted, either through Anderson's direction or of his own accord, to channel John Huston -- and probably Noah Cross in Chinatown -- into his character, speaking with the same educated, growling, snakeskin drawl.
But Anderson overreaches in the movie's lengthy epilogue set in 1927, which seems loosely inspired by "Chinatown."
In Roman Polanski’s Chinatown , detective Jake Gittes became suspicious of a devious California millionaire named Noah Cross, played by the great John Huston.
But Day-Lewis, who seems to have modeled his courtly-demonic vocal drawl here on John Huston's Noah Cross in "Chinatown," is one of the few actors who can infuse a symbolic character with the lifeblood of passionate, lived-in experience.
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(A similar approach to another time period, the 1950s, powered Curtis Hanson's L.A. Confidential, another superior color noir effort.)
One of the reasons "L.A. Confidential'' is so good, why is deserves to be mentioned with "Chinatown," is that it's not just plot and atmosphere.
Critics are already comparing “L.A. Confidential” to movies such as “Chinatown” and “Pulp Fiction.”
It helps that they're working with a gifted cinematographer (Dante Spinotti), a composer with deep roots in this genre (Jerry Goldsmith of "Chinatown") and a great script.
A big critical hit at the last Cannes Film Festival, it has been compared repeatedly to "Chinatown," Roman Polanski's classic 1974 L.A. noir (written by director Hanson's onetime mentor Robert Towne).
A lot of people have been comparing "L.A. Confidential" to "Chinatown," but, aside from the obvious noir detail and the setting (and the great, piano-driven music by "Chinatown" composer Jerry Goldsmith), the only thing the two movies really have in common is that absolutely nothing about the crime is what it initially seems to be.
Johnson was lucky to land Gordon-Levitt for the role; a veteran of the sitcom 3rd Rock From the Sun, he's proved a formidable dramatic actor in indies like Manic (2001) and Mysterious Skin (2004), and in Brick he holds the screen as powerfully as Jack Nicholson in Chinatown.
Still, the lousy sound and a creeping narrative murk prevent ''Brick" from fully becoming the ''Chinatown" of high school flicks, and the final scenes don't lift off from private-eye cliches so much as cave in to them.
Taking visual cues from Chinatown, gifted DP Steve Yedlin favors shots from below, and stark under-populated exteriors that convey menace even in California sunshine.
It's true that Roman Polanski's "Chinatown," a 1974 neo-noir, was bathed in L.A. sunlight; but that film had an inventively sinister plot, and a dark sexual kink.
In fact, the movie most commonly referenced here is "Chinatown," the Jack Nicholson film that, while certainly noirish, was shot in color and released in 1974.
Brick is what it would have looked like if Bogart went to high school–an adolescent Chinatown with shades of Kurosawa, peppered with the rapid-fire, hard-boiled, cryptic speech of A Clockwork Orange and wrapped in the very deceptive skin of a teen drama.
The movie’s wit and energy hold your interest, but they don’t spark the pleasure of the unexpected, the thrill you felt in Laura, The Last of Sheila, Chinatown, The Sixth Sense, or the 1974 adaptation of Christie’s Murder on the Orient Express (not Kenneth Branagh’s inept remake), movies whose big reveals surprise you in their elegant simplicity.
Over the years, I have found that many of my other favorite examples of the genre—things like “The Maltese Falcon,” “The Big Sleep,” “The Long Goodbye,” “Chinatown” and “The Big Lebowski”—have tended to lean that way as well and that is why they have managed to stand the test of time.
Where previous Pixar movies have jammed in the pop culture references thick and fast, Inside Out is almost completely stripped of them, so the few that remain — a Chinatown gag, a visual nod to Contact’s intergalactic wormholes, a jellybean-like voice actor in Dream Productions who looks like voice superstar John DiMaggio — really hit home.
Movies with jabs at San Francisco’s new-agey vibe with organic broccoli pizzas and jokes requiring the viewer to know things like the last line of Chinatown (1974) are not entirely aimed at 9-year-olds.
Because the Pixar brain trust (which, besides Docter, includes executive producers Lasseter and Andrew Stanton) is brilliant at story, the saga of "Inside Out" finds room for crisp action, genuine jeopardy, cartoon slapstick, even adult humor like a jest that references "Chinatown."
Almost every scene contains at least two simultaneous gags, one visual, the other verbal (has there ever been another cartoon aimed at children that contained a shout-out to Chinatown?)
When a character in Pixar's Inside Out makes an allusion to "Jake," it jogs the Chinatown core with aplomb.
The jokes flash by at synaptic speed, buoyed by an exuberant score from composer Michael Giacchino (Jurassic World, Up, Rataouille), and with shout-outs to such adult pleasures as the movies Vertigo and Chinatown.
The eviction is what gets the surface story going, as the old man, Carl Fredrickson, voiced by Ed Asner, grumpy sounding, and animated to look like a mix of Kirk Douglas and his square chin and raisin nose, and John Huston with his unsettling gravely voice, specifically his creepy performance in Chinatown , finds a way to airlift his house with balloons to go on the trip to South America he'd always promised his patient, and now dead wife that they'd go on.
Borrowing its portrait of L.A.-style corruption from "Chinatown" and James Ellroy's novels, it's heavy on atmosphere and revels in the nastiness of it all, only to conclude with a simplistic moral that integrity begins in the home.
Because of its tone and subject matter, Mulholland Falls recalls Chinatown, albeit incompletely.
The very title of Mulholland Falls carries a whiff of Chinatown, whose character Hollis Mulwray (the husband of Faye Dunaway's Evelyn Mulwray) was based on the Los Angeles robber baron William Mulholland.
The missing link between Chinatown and Reservoir Dogs, Lee Tamahori's Mulholland Falls introduces a band of independent Los Angeles cops (Nick Nolte, Michael Madsen, Chris Penn and Chazz Palminteri) who drive around wearing hats and beating people up.
In fact, had he looked at "The Big Sleep" or "Chinatown," Tamahori might see that those movies are exercises in the power of subtlety, while "Mulholland Falls" is an exercise in excess.
Based partially on a true Los Angeles land-grab scandal of the early 1900s (involving L.A. water engineer William Mulholland, who manipulated water rights for profit), Chinatown is a far superior script compared to a more factual take on the same story—the tedious Mulholland Falls.
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The closest parallel in Polanski's past movies is to "Chinatown," another mystery about a little guy who finds solving the crime easier than challenging powerful interests.
Unlike Polanski's troubling, sordid and passionate Chinatown, The Ghost Writer is more elegant exercise than inspiration.
Here, as in the cruel ending of " Chinatown ," a character may die off-screen, out of frame, but traffic -- the motion that fools us into believing we are headed somewhere -- rolls on.
That’s the juicy question buried in the depths of Roman Polanski’s “The Ghost Writer,” an extraordinarily precise and well-made political thriller—the best thing Polanski has done since the seventies, when he brought out the incomparable “Chinatown” and the very fine “Tess.”
Survival in a wolfish world has been the career-long theme of the sardonic director of Knife in the Water , Rosemary�s Baby and Chinatown, and people sniff for parallels between the auteur�s personal traumas and foibles and those of his characters.
While many will point to “Chinatown” as Polanski’s masterpiece, I found this was to be as intriguing and interesting to watch.
The classical camera style (no director does shot/reverse-shot as elegantly as Polanski) reminds one of the fatalistic visuals of Chinatown and Rosemary's Baby.
If Roman Polanski were not the same man who directed "Chinatown" and "Rosemary's Baby," he might never have been equipped enough to tell a story as difficult and poignant as that of "The Pianist."
Polanski, bringing his own Holocaust survival memories to the table, has made his best film since 1974's "Chinatown."
Yet, Polanski ("The Ninth Gate," "Chinatown") and screenwriter Ronald Harwood ("Cry, the Beloved Country," "The Browning Version") have also adapted Szpilman's amazing tale as an individualistic piece that takes an unflinching and mostly unsentimental look at that tragic period in history.
With The Pianist, his best movie since Chinatown in 1974, Roman Polanski does just that.
Not since 1974's Chinatown has Polanski reached such dramatic heights.
You don’t need to be Sigmund Freud, however, to deduce that the master stylist who made “Rosemary’s Baby” and “Chinatown” has unfinished business with America.
Even more expansively set Polanski pictures, like his hits " Rosemary's Baby " and " Chinatown ," contain sequences in which the walls seem to be closing in on the characters and even the viewers, and his film prior to this one, " The Ghost Writer ," got a lot of mileage out of cinematically manipulating the planes of the bleakly ultra-modernist beach house in which most of its action is set.
I can't call "Carnage" a major work at all, though when you consider such past classics as "Rosemary's Baby," " Chinatown ," "Repulsion," "The Tenant," or even last year's terrific " The Ghost Writer ," even very minor Polanski can still be a mean and frosty treat.
Few directors are more skilled than Polanski at peeling back niceties to reveal our feral instincts; just think of John Huston, chomping his fish in “Chinatown.”
Carnage comes from famed, Oscar-winning director Roman Polanski , who has brought us such memorable films as The Pianist and Chinatown.
This is hardly surprising, for back in 1973 Polanski directed what may be the most handsomely packaged narrative film of the modern era, Chinatown.
Polanski's reputation will forever be defined by three things: the murder of his first wife, Sharon Tate, at the hands of Charles Manson, his conviction on one count of statutory rape, and his direction of one of the best noir thrillers of all time, Chinatown.
"The Ninth Gate," an alleged mystery-thriller from famed, yet controversial, director Roman Polanski (1968's "Rosemary's Baby," 1974's "Chinatown"), is a wildly overlong 133-minutes sludge through well-worn territory and predictable twists and turns, seemingly leading up to a whopper of an ending.
After all, this is the guy who gave us Repulsion (1965), Rosemary's Baby (1968), andChinatown (1974).
The horror genre has been degraded for so long that having Polanski ( Repulsion , Rosemarys Baby , Chinatown ) back in charge feels like the restoration of a monarch.
Back in the days of such bona fide classics as "Repulsion" (1965), "Rosemary's Baby" (1968) and "Chinatown" (1974), or even the deliciously ludicrous "The Tenant" (1977), Mr. Polanski seemed to possess a direct pipeline to the nature of madness and evil.
And certainly not his recent fare, which has included duds like Bitter Moon and The Ninth Gate.
"The Tenant," which opened yesterday at Loews Tower East, is the most successful and most consistently authentic Polanski film in years, and in saying that I realize that a lot of people prefer the Polanski who turns out films more or less tailored to popular tastes, like "Chinatown" and "Rosemary's Baby."
Redeeming the carte blanche ticket he earned for Chinatown 's success, Polanski made The Tenant, a masterpiece of anguish that harks back to his earlier mindfucks Cul-de-Sac and Repulsion (in fact, The Tenant is all but a mirror image of Repulsion) while being more substantial than either of them.
Reeves also hits the sweet spot with composer Michael Giacchino and cinematographer Greig Fraser who shoots Gotham with a glossy lens that invoked memories of “Casablanca” and “Chinatown.”
As it gradually turns out that there is the long shadow of past all over the case, Wayne delves more into the underworld of Gotham City, and the movie naturally becomes quite noirish as evoking a number of neo-noir films ranging from Roman Polanski’s “Chinatown” (1974) to David Fincher’s “Se7en” (1995).
Reeves’ film influences for “The Batman” include “Chinatown,” “The French Connection” and “Taxi Driver.”
Muy lejos de la fábrica de chorizos del hijo de puta de Kevin Feige de la factoría Marvel, responsable de dos décadas de bodrios que califican de productos excrementicios y/ o insufribles, aunque asimismo manteniendo una buena distancia para con los desastres pomposos, sensibleros y seudo importantes de Zack Snyder y los demás autómatas o mercenarios de DC Cómics que empezaron la catarata de exploitations de aquellas tres maravillas de Nolan con Christian Bale, Reeves nos ofrece un neo noir hecho y derecho con toques de horror, cine de acción y thriller testimonial que está inspirado en simultáneo en Barrio Chino ( Chinatown , 1974), de Roman Polanski, por las constantes alusiones al entramado de corrupción que atraviesa a toda Ciudad Gótica, ahora con el narcotráfico reemplazando a la especulación inmobiliaria y los chanchullos basados en el sistema de irrigación, y en Klute (1971), de Alan J. Pakula, especialmente en lo que atañe a esa premisa centrada en el devenir de un detective, el John…