Los Angeles, 1937. Jake Gittes (Jack Nicholson) is a private detective specialising in domestic cases. One day a woman (Diane Ladd) shows up at Jake’s office and hires him to follow her husband, Hollis Mulwray (Darrell Zwerling) who she suspects is having an affair. Jake tracks Mulwray and does indeed photograph him embracing a much younger woman. He gives the photos to Mrs. Mulwray, and soon sees them printed on the front page of the newspaper, only to discover that the woman who hired him wasn’t Mrs. Mulwray, and the real one (Faye Dunaway) is somewhat irked that her husband has been publicly humiliated and has now disappeared, and all this is just the start of a web on intrigue that leads further than Jake could have imagined.
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Tag Archives: Chinatown
My Week in Movies, 2015 Week 44
You know what my sin is? Envy. And also Pride. I’m also quite gluttonous, can be pretty lazy and have bouts of wrath now and then too, so I’m covering everything except greed and lust, so 5 out of 7 ain’t bad, I suppose. Mainly it’s the envy thing though. My life is controlled by list, and no more so than this blog. It’s entirely a product of of my own doing, I get that, but structuring my writing around a pre-determined selection of films that must be reviewed can lead to a lack of variety and motivation at times. That’s why I enjoy writing for other sites like French Toast Sunday and Blueprint: Review because, whilst I often still end up reviewing a List film, I also review other things that interest me, like new releases or pieces about a specific, non-List film or subject.
I heard Alex Withrow from And So It Begins (a site you should not check out if you hate amazing film blogs) on a podcast a few months ago. When it came to the end of the show he was asked what he had coming up soon, and his response was along the liens of “You guys don’t just come up with an idea and post it?” I found this whole concept of not planning ahead and posting on a whim to be utterly alien, especially now when I’ve mapped out a plan to get achieve as many of my goals before the end of the year. I’ve drawn up a list of approximately 120 tasks, some minor (“Watch a 2015 film”) some more time consuming (“Archive all the Lambcast shows” [though admittedly that’s been broken down into chunks]) with the aim of completing at least 2 a day from now until 2016. So far, three days into this mini-mission, I’m ahead of schedule, and finishing this weekly post will cross another task off the list. I get a spring of joy whenever I can highlight something in green, but I can’t help feeling envious of those other less restricted bloggers who don’t suffer my qualms of meeting deadlines. The ones who don’t beat themselves up for not writing a review on a film they don’t have much to say about.
Also, next year’s missions will be far less restricting. I’m still planning to aim for reviewing a lot of films – I’m currently thinking at least 100 off the List – but the break-down as to what each of those films should be will be far less strict, which should see me complaining on these weekly posts a whole heap less. Speaking of which, a busy week with two podcasts to edit and a bunch of DIY to do (redecorating the guest bedroom/my office) saw me watching not a great deal this week. Here’s what I saw:
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Top 5… Movies About Noses
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