Because Los Angeles (say it with a hard "g" and you'll get the exact way most "Anglos" said it before 1950) is where desert meets ocean, there lingers over the place a constant aura of the primordial. It can be by turns a tropical paradise or a dusty wasteland. Raymond Chandler captured the feeling as no other writer before or after.
It is his heritage at work in both "Chinatown" (1974) and "The Two Jakes" (1990). Not only the place as shown but the style of writing is a derivative composite. With that kind of material as an inchoate element in every scene and every nuance, the literate viewer is on familiar ground, always ready to settle comfortably into the plot and characters no matter how lacking they are in their own right.
Those of us old enough to remember when L.A. traffic lights had little "Stop" and "Go" flags on them and pedestrians were always given the right of way will recognize this movie as Chandler redux. Jack Nicholson is possibly the best actor around -- now that Robert Mitchum is no longer here -- to play the Philip Marlowe role. And the old plot is still good: hard-bitten detective with heart of gold overbalancing many flaws gets some rough treatment and goes through several femmes fatales on his way to solving the crime.
It is precisely the lack of novelty at this point, together with an odd filter on the lens and some vaguely wrong visual settings, that deter me from giving high marks on this one. That and the melodramatic conclusion which, as in "Chinatown," relies on an odd turn of events exposing the secret. True Chandler fans would look more for a purely logical and organic climax, with a whiff of Lucky Strikes rather than oil fumes in the air.
It is his heritage at work in both "Chinatown" (1974) and "The Two Jakes" (1990). Not only the place as shown but the style of writing is a derivative composite. With that kind of material as an inchoate element in every scene and every nuance, the literate viewer is on familiar ground, always ready to settle comfortably into the plot and characters no matter how lacking they are in their own right.
Those of us old enough to remember when L.A. traffic lights had little "Stop" and "Go" flags on them and pedestrians were always given the right of way will recognize this movie as Chandler redux. Jack Nicholson is possibly the best actor around -- now that Robert Mitchum is no longer here -- to play the Philip Marlowe role. And the old plot is still good: hard-bitten detective with heart of gold overbalancing many flaws gets some rough treatment and goes through several femmes fatales on his way to solving the crime.
It is precisely the lack of novelty at this point, together with an odd filter on the lens and some vaguely wrong visual settings, that deter me from giving high marks on this one. That and the melodramatic conclusion which, as in "Chinatown," relies on an odd turn of events exposing the secret. True Chandler fans would look more for a purely logical and organic climax, with a whiff of Lucky Strikes rather than oil fumes in the air.