Chinatown

Lee Curtis4.5

Forget a review, It's Chinatown.

Mad4.5

This scumbag can really direct a fucking movie, can't he?

SilentDawn5.0

100So, about that ending. It both *is* and *isn't* Chinatown. It's a part of the city to be abstracted, disembodied, insidiously morphed into a racist calculation of laborious figures by those who are allowed to freely leave. Even as J.J. Gittes submits and wanders into the night, he isn't stranded in the nocturnal wasteland in which he once operated within. He's a man of privilege, relatively, but the system is now seen as not simply vertically integrated but horizontally manipulated by the elite. Noah Cross isn't simply above the police, the law, the bindings of conservatism and sexual formality - he's on his own plane of existence, fueled by the capital he built and is continuing to expand, by shifting the city, and its population, to his own will. All of these people see Chinatown as what they want it to be or what it can be for them, but not what it really is, and Polanski, populating the final frames with people of the neighborhood, staring aloof towards another atrocity, witnessing the conspiracy become undone, and then done away with. There has and always will be something evil about it. That Cross' final moment on screen is dragging his screaming incestuous daughter away into the pitch-black night. That only the right eye on Evelyn is wounded - a flaw in the iris. That Gittes, for the first time in his life, knows that he can't do anything. That, as the credits roll, we know of Polanski living comfortably outside of America. Chinatown, indeed.