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Things I like about Chinatown:
- the complicated and interesting plot
almost entirely hangs together;
the ending is as good as the beginning --
typically a problem for a paranoia thriller, usually the
conspiracy doesn't live up to its initial billing. Here,
it does;
the great depiction of evil as an
insatiable appetite -- John Huston's "The future, Mr.
Gittes," as a simultaneous explanation for why he
wants to fuck his daughter/granddaughter and build the
San Fernando Valley, I mean, jesus;
Booze, broads, bullets, and car chases;
the nice inversion of Chandler with the
hero not a shop-soiled Galahad but slick doofus; the
Patriarch as evil and the blonde as good. All, in all,
maybe the best movie ever made and nearly perfect.
Reasons I don't like Chinatown
- the nose bandage;
- the plot hole at the beginning when Diane
Ladd calls up Jake, for no reason and tells him
obligingly and obliquely that one of her employers was in
todays obituary. In addition to the inexplicable phonetip
from one of the villians being the way that Dan Tanna of
Vega$ usually solves his cases, why would the evil bad
guys running the operation tell some two bit prostitute
that they were buying land in the name of some old
geezers at some rest home.
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