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).
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.
(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.
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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.
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.
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.
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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Anachronisms be damned, the film is set in 1985, but West takes inspiration from all across the 20th century, be it its Chinatown-styled private eye character, a Goodfellas-esque one-er in the first act, or the eponymous protagonist wearing makeup straight out of Blade Runner during a club scene.
In one sequence, in particular, Bacon resembles Jack Nicholson in Chinatown as he pursues Maxine on the Universal backlot; and the Hollywood homicide detectives played by a fun if underused pairing of Michelle Monaghan and Bobby Cannavale might as well be out of any ‘80s cop movie—complete with MaXXXine's third act detour into action movie spectacle.
Kevin Bacon also joins the ensemble as a cheeky detective with a plastered nose, like Chinatown’s Jack Nicholson.
But this time West's influences lean into the film-noir classics set in L.A., like Roman Polanski's iconic 1974 hit, Chinatown.
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.