"Forget it, Jake. It's Chinatown."

Chinatown is a perfect example of a Hollywood Factory project- a powerful producer commissions a screenplay written as a vehicle for a big star and then assigns a craftsman filmmaker to direct. On one level, this is collaborative work at its best, but as usual with Polanski, it's also a great work of personal art. The Polish auteur seems unable to shoot a film without dealing with its themes and ideas personally. So Chinatown, while boasting a brilliant screenplay by Robert Towne, is haunted by the director's trademark sense of paranoia and alienation.



I think that the two images above say almost everything about the film and expresses Polanski's very personal view on man's inability to control the chaotic universe around him. Not to mention that it's one of Jack Nicholson's greatest moments onscreen. The intensity of his desire to finally stand up and do the right thing, to try and make a difference in the first image followed by the shattered emptiness, the blank nothingness of the second image which follows the death of his lover Evelyn Mulwray (Faye Dunaway) and the secret victory of her vile father, Noah Cross (John Huston).

In an matter of seconds, Nicholson as private eye J.J. Gittes is shown how small his place in the world really is and how ineffectual his actions are in controlling the course of events even on a minor scale.

"Forget Jake. It's Chinatown."

Chinatown has just been released in a special edition DVD. Click here to read my review of it for CinemaBlend.com.

STANLEY KUBRICK'S XANADU

Last night the Sundance Channel ran the fascinating documentary by Jon Ronson, Stanley Kubrick's Boxes which was a fine, though far too brief, look at the many thousands of boxes Mr. K kept in storage at his home in England. These boxes contained vast amounts of material, all carefully catalogued and organized, pertaining to all facets of the man's career and life.

It's strange that this private man of whom so much gossip ranged regarding his lunacy and hermitage can be seen so nakedly through his calculated filing. The image one gets is not one of a man OBSESSED but of a man of great intellectual curiosity and method. An obsessed man would merely seem eccentric and quirky in his desire to control the world around him. Kubrick went round that bend and into something far closer to a scientist of the physical universe. This was a man who questioned everything from the font on a movie poster, to the size of his newspaper ads, to the kind of ink best used for writing and the construction of these archive boxes themselves. It appears Mr. K was frustrated with the way the tops of the boxes worked and was intent on finding a design that would allow the lids to sit securely but loose enough to slide off easily. It's most telling that the company constructing the boxes left a random note regarding the box construction that supposedly read, "Fussy customer".

Kubrick didn't think wanting things to work the right way to be fussy and this is the same attention to detail that went into all of his films and which makes them so very unique to this day. He believed that either you care or you don't, there's no in between. That kind of pride and dedication to one's work is something I must say I admire greatly.

I thought that Ronson made a fascinating film, particularly when he played detective and hunted down some of the people who sent Kubrick letters which the director filed as "crank" letters.

If you missed it, here it is:



Or you can find the entire thing on google video:
HERE

THE KEY TO HITCHCOCK

Martin Scorsese has been well known for his efforts in film preservation. But as he says in the really great short film, The Key To Reserva, "It's one thing to preserve a film that's been made, it's another thing to preserve a film that's not been made." Apparently the Spanish wine company Freixenet comissioned a commercial from Scorsese and the result is this fantastic 9 minute short in which the Academy Award winning director attempts to film 4 pages of a "lost" Hitchcock film called "The Key To Reserva", Reserva being the company product, of course. Scorsese attempts to "save" this work by shooting it, "The way Hitchcock would've made it then, today. If he was here today but making it then."

 

This is, of course, all just a put on, but it's also a dazzling lesson in cinematic technique. Hitchcock's use of the subjective point of view shot to propel the action is as exciting and relevent a technique now as it was then. There is nothing that can put an audience more directly into a cinematic situation than to show something from the point of view of an onscreen character and then reveal his or her reaction to it. The filmmaker is able to do in seconds what literature needs pages to describe and a play cannot even achieve. Hitchcock spent his entire career making films that were built around people looking instead of talking, conveying in a series of brief cuts what other filmmakers could not without resorting to long scenes of verbal exposition.



Scorsese has everything just right. From the opening credits which mimic Saul Bass's innovative title design for North by Northwest, to the Bernard Herrmann music cues, the short is perfect. Even the color grading captures the look of Hitch's work in the mid to late 50s with cinematographer Robert Burks.








The entire set up at the Orchestra concert is an homage to The Man Who Knew Too Muchwith a cool blonde in the audience who reminds me of Eva Marie Saint in Northwest. Simon Baker seeks for the hidden key as all kinds of Hitchcockian intrigue goes down. There are references to Young and Innocent, Dial 'M' for Murder and evenThe Birds. Check it outHERE.

ATTEND THE TALE OF SWEENEY TODD!

Hey, just to clarify the sneaky ad campaign Paramount is running for Tim Burton's new flick:Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street is a MUSICAL. As in it's got singing in it, lots of singing. It's a faithful adaptation of a great piece of musical theater by none other than Stephen Sondheim who mostly writes musicals. The thing is, Paramount backed this picture knowing full well that Johnny Depp would be crooning as much as he was cutting throats and instead of say, letting the public know what their product was about, they're playing some dirty pool and just conveniently omitting any mention of the singing aspect from their ads. The argument is that the public may want to see a singing and dancing Johnny Depp or they may want to see a fun Grand Guignol thriller with Johnny Depp camping it up as a homicidal barber but they probably don't want to see both at the same time. The Broadway production directed by Harold Prince also faced a similar problem of how to sell a very unique show that marries the penny dreadful with satire and tragedy but it was always understood that it was a musical. If some found it too bloody next to Oklahoma, well, this WAS the original poster-


Maybe Paramount has the right idea, though. If you've heard of Sweeney, you probably already know it's a famous musical. So, maybe you'll come with the "right" expectations. If you never heard of it before, then Paramount can hopefully con you into coming out opening weekend to see the spooky pic they're selling and by the time you toss your popcorn after hearing three or four fully sung songs it's too late they've got your money. The thing is, I always think these marketing gyus underestimate the audience. Who says there isn't a sizable audience that would be interested in seeing Johnny Depp sing onscreen. They came three times to see him play a pirate and a pirate is only half as cool as a mad singing barber out for revenge with a straight razor.