It's hard to find someone who has seen the movie Chinatown to talk bad about it. Everyone says it's classic, a masterpiece, a triumph of the film noir genre.Well, I'll be the guy to take the contrary opinion. I watched the movie not long ago, and it was all I could do to not fall asleep. For a plot involving death, mystery, and conspiracy, the story is amazingly languid and uninteresting.
The acting does little to help matters. Jack Nicholson plays himself, as he essentially always does, in the form of a 1930s gumshoe trying to crack the case as he cracks wise. Faye Dunaway, as the femme fatale, has left our planet far behind with heaving, gasping, noisy acting that has no connection at all to realism.
Roman Polanski's direction manages to pack only one or two scenes with any tension of any measureable level; the two-plus hours pass like time in line at the DMV.
I can really only say one complementary thing about the movie, is that it is a very effective period piece. Made 35 years ago, the movie is actually set around 35 years earlier still, and all the 1930s trappings are superb and authentic.
But a triumph of noir? Why you'd look here when The Maltese Falcon exists is beyond me. Chinatown numbed me so thoroughly, I'm hard-pressed to even recall much of what I saw, to put words to why I was so bored by it. I rate it a D-.
1 comment:
Haven't see this one.
I remember seeing the "sequel" (The Two Jakes) in the theater, though, and being bored out of my skull. (In fact, I don't remember any of the movie. Just that I wanted it to end.)
Not a franchise worth reviving, I'd say.
FKL
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