A visit to Chinatown hosted by J.J. Gittes

My apologies for a lack of activity, other than playing with the layout of the blog. I was on a visit home, and while I suppose i could have knocked out four or five movies at my mom's, it was much more fun watching NCIS marathons and movies on the Lifetime Channel with me mum. As I mentioned, I did play around with the layout/template of the blog after some feedback from my brother. We'll see how this works (I think it has messed around with the text of the reviews because I pasted them in from a Word document). I also added tags to the individual entries that may be used for searching, so if you want to find movies that may be kid-friendly, or mysteries, etc., you should be able to search for them. So, back to work.

Chinatown, 3/26/13, Best Original Screenplay, 1974

I finally managed to see Chinatown; my previous attempt was thwarted by a buggy DVD from the library (I am currently being thwarted in watching Bound for Glory). Chinatown is set in the late 1930s, but made in the 1970s, and it has aged well into the 21st century. Jack Nicholson and Faye Dunaway star in this dark and moody mystery set in Los Angeles; Roman Polanski directed it. The story revolves around the fight for water, which was based on the real events from a few decades earlier. Nicholson plays Jake Gittes, a private detective, and Faye Dunaway plays Evelyn Mulray, the widow of the murdered chief engineer for the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power. Mulray is one messed up lady, that's for sure, and she takes Gittes on wild goose chases throughout the movie, and the last one is a doozy. There are a lot of layers in this film, which was nominated for eleven Academy Awards, winning only one, for Best Original Screenplay. 1974 was a great year for movies, with The Godfather, Part II which won six awards, disaster movies Towering Inferno  and Earthquake winning a couple, and Murder on the Orient Express winning as well. I was not sure if I would like this movie or not; I like mysteries, especially period pieces, but I knew nothing about this movie at all until I started watching it. I did like it, I found the setting and the premise intriguing, and I liked J.J. Gittes; he reminded me of Humphrey Bogart as Sam Spade in The Maltese Falcon. As I mentioned, there is a lot going on, some characters are on for a few minutes, some for several scenes, you don't know who will be important and who is a red herring. John Huston plays Evelyn Mulray's father, and it was very cool to see him act. If you do not know, Huston was a writer, director and actor, and directed the aforementioned The Maltese Falcon and The African Queen, to name just two; and is the father of actors Angelica Huston and Danny Huston. The movie is rated R, but I thought it was more like PG-13. Definitely glad I saw it, and you should add this to your ever-growing list.