"You can't eat the Venetian blinds. I just had them installed on Wednesday."

Rating: 10/10 (7 December 2014)

Roman Polanski's decision to take on the film noir genre after it had given birth to so many timeless classics was a bold choice. He was diving in to a deep sea of talent and ingenuity decades after the grandmasters of film had sold their souls to Satan for the black magic necessary to take the limited and restrictive technology available at the time and make the delicious oreo visuals that made great films even greater despite something like technicolor visuals still being the fever dream of a schizophrenic whisper. But despite the Vesuvian challenge lain out before them, the people responsible for Chinatown managed to make a film so great that there's no doubt in my mind it could go toe to toe with any of the classics and end up absolutely busting its sorry face. I'm talking a good old fashioned jaw- ripping, tooth necklace making face busting. That is to say if Chinatown were faced with a "Two films enter, one film leaves" type situation, my money's on Chinatown.
First of all, you cannot deny that Chinatown's screenplay is absolutely immaculate. It's a known fact that when da Vinci painted The Last Supper, he had looked into the future and found his inspiration in Chinatown. By the time I reached the credits I couldn't even handle how totally and completely impressed I was by how excellent the story had been. The events were so cinematic, yet it never stopped being believable for a single solitary moment. This was a story that spent the film's entire 130 minute runtime twisting and gnarling into an incredible mystery. It was like a political thriller mixed with a horror movie. J.J. Gitties was sent through a labyrinth of despair. The man was so broken and beaten when the credits started rolling, if he was a real person I wouldn't be surprised at all to hear he had collaspsed and died from the mental exhaustion. This brings me to the ending. I wouldn't even hesitate to say this film has the best ending in the history of film. It's so satisfyingly tragic I felt like all my emotions had been emulsified into a gray caustic sludge and tossed into the ocean. The look on Jack Nicholson's face when Walsh tells him "Forget it Jake, it's Chinatown." is going to be burned into my mind forever. I thought his performance in Cuckoo's Nest was amazing, but he was just perfect in this role. This movie is the juice. The juicy juice.