"Forget It Jake, It's Just Chinatown"

Current Tunes: My grumbling stomach. When’s dinner?

So I’m not going to spend forever talking about the BCS game. All I have to say is the final score was 37-21. That’s a 16-point deficit. Check yesterday’s post if you don’t believe me when I said I called a 16-point victory for the Tide.

I’m not sure if everyone consciously keeps a list of films that they haven’t seen that they’re dying to finally view like I do. People should though. A few days ago, I finally knocked off the top film on this list of mine. It’s a film I’ve literally wanted to see for years but never got around to it. It might sound silly, but finally seeing this movie was just about equivalent to a major life goal, like buying your own house or something.

After watching it, then reading about so many of the things that went on surrounding the production, I have a special respect and appreciation for Roman Polanski’s “Chinatown.” I haven’t seen it as many times, and it doesn’t have quite the charm that “Casablanca” has, but I really think I have to rank “Chinatown” as good as that film is, and I almost always regard “Casablanca” as the greatest film ever made. I guess I might not ever give “Chinatown” the same label, and it’s for the worst reason: it’s just not as joyful and happy and feel-goody-goody as “Casablanca.” Anyway, enough comparison-talk.

Film is so much a product of the culture and nation from wherever it is made, like all art really. I think will film it gets a little more amplified because with film, the final result of your art is influenced so much by your perception of the world as a whole. That perception of the world is of course influenced by where you come from, how could it not be? The greatest strength of “Chinatown” is how unashamed it was to be dirty, gross, and uncomfortable. It doesn’t try to glorify the place it’s set in, it just shows it, and with a stunning amount of objectivity.

Another especially fascinating aspect of the film to me was Jack Nicholson. There’s already a mountain of commentary about Nicholson’s performance in this film, but I think my perspective is a bit unique, if I do say so myself. I’ve been a Nicholson fan for a long time. I cannot recall seeing a single movie of his that I didn’t enjoy, even if it was technically a bad film. I love his flashy, cocky, blitzkrieg approach to acting. How can you not? He’s absolutely electric.

But in “Chinatown,” I hardly noticed at all that it was Nicholson on screen. His performance is unlike anything else he’s done that I can recall because its so much quieter, so much more nuanced, so much more calculated. In films like “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest” or “The Shining” or even “Batman” and “The Departed” he’s moves and talks with such an anarchic fervor. That’s what’s made him both endure the years and endeared him into the hearts of film fans all over the globe. Not in “Chinatown” though, not at all. He totally made me believe that J.J. Gittes was a real, flesh-and-blood P.I. in Los Angeles. I would have gladly hired this guy to spy on my cheating wife; he’s so clever and composed, brave too.

I’m still soaking it all in. I’ve rarely encountered movies like this that take so much time to really understand my true feelings about what the film presented as a whole. I know that it’s good though; I know that it’s really, really good. I’m so confident of its brilliance because it easily falls into that most wondrous category of films: the ones where I wish with every fiber of my being that I could watch it over and over again as if it were the first time.