Wednesday, March 28, 2007

I watched most of Chinatown last night, always the most horrible, sad, beautiful, prescient film. Not easy to watch, despite its beauty. There is something about the relentlessly tight frame in that film...it's anxiety-producing. Not in a Hallowe'en, horror film way--beautiful. The lighting is so insane, the colors. (Makes me think of the overquoted Ross MacDonald blurb about Chandler being "sun-drenched.") Almost no shadows, so when there are, you really notice them. And they are not clichéd, noir shadows...they're cold.

Julia Phillips wrote in You'll Never Eat Lunch in This Town Again that R. Towne told her about a better, different ending he had for the film, but that "Roman had some things to work out." According to Mr. TCM last night, Towne now likes Polanski's ending better. I dunno. From what I know about the alternate ending--shots of LA as the desert gradually gets filled in with 'civilization'--I think it might hold up better than the luridness of the incest one. I dunno. Gawd, it's awful. I actually admire J. Huston for playing that character; he is unusually, unredeemably horrid. But sometimes it seems like it would have been a better script if the water story played out all the way through to the very end.

Insanely prescient.

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