Saturday, February 6, 2010

Matilda (1996)










IMDB


I was in need of some good, uplifting comedy to cheer me up so last night I went to bed at 2 am, started re-watching Matilda on my pocket PC and before I know it was already 4 in the morning.
I really have a lot of respect for mr. Danny DeVito. Not only is he a good actor, he also directed some great movies that I have watched more than once. Hoffa was excellent. Throw Momma From The Train and The War of The Roses are two of my favorite black comedies.

Matilda is a cute 6-year-old girl who is super smart. She has the worst parents in the world. Her bigger brother is a total ass. Her school principal is a walking nightmare. She has a great, caring teacher, though. Not to mention telekinetic power.

I haven't read the book by Roald Dahl but the movie adaptation is simply wonderful. There is none of the sappiness usually associated with children movies here. This is a film that can be enjoyed by everyone (except self-loathing, miserable people).

My favorite scene (makes me smile every time I think about it):
Harry Wormwood: Are you in this family?
Matilda: Mmmm...
Harry Wormwood: Hello?
[short pause]
Harry Wormwood: Are you in this family?
[switches the lamp off]
Harry Wormwood: Dinner timne is family time. What is this trash you're reading?
Matilda: It's not trash, Daaddy, it's lovely. It's called "Moby Dick", by Herman Melville.
Harry Wormwood: Moby *what*?!!
[snatching the book from Matilda and tears the pages out of the cover]
Harry Wormwood: This is Filth! Trash...!

Get the unabridged audio book at:
http://avaxhome.ws/ebooks/audiobook/roald_dahl_matilda_complete_and_unabridged.html

Get the e-book version in html format at:
http://avaxhome.ws/ebooks/others/fadfdfdsfg4.html

And here are the Rapidshare links for a good quality dvdrip:

http://tinypaste.com/093b9

Specs:

File : 968 MB, duration: 1:34:11, type: AVI, 1 audio stream
Video : 882 MB, 1310 Kbps, 25.0 fps, 704*304, Divx v5,
Audio : 86 MB, 128 Kbps, 48000 Hz, 2 channels, MP3, CBR

Q-pel: No GMC: No PB: Yes (can be easily removed using MPEG4ModifierMod.1.4.4.exe).

Thursday, February 4, 2010

Neco z Alenky (1988) aka Alice


Alice thought to herself 'Now you will see a film... made for children... perhaps... ' But, I nearly forgot... you must... close your eyes... otherwise... you won't see anything.


IMDB


While waiting for Terry Gilliam's Alice In Wonderland to come out in theaters here in Montreal, Canada, I re-watched Jan Svankmajer's masterpiece: Neco z Alenky aka Alice (1988) last night. It is a wonderfully creepy, strikingly original interpretation of Lewis Carroll's classic tale. It must have been the fourth time I watched this film over the years but the enjoyment is still undiminished.
If you're new to Jan Svankmajer's work, this would be the perfect introduction. And then you will want more.
=================
Review from Washington Post:
By Hal Hinson
Washington Post Staff Writer
November 23, 1988

What the Czech animator Jan Svankmajer does in "Alice" seems more akin to alchemy than moviemaking. His is an art of dark conjuring, brought to life more by the wave of a wand than the slap of a clapper board.

Anyone who's ever slept in the same room with a larger-than-normal-sized doll will have some idea of the atmosphere of vague dread in "Alice." The film begins with the words, "Now you will see a film for children. Perhaps." They're recited by a pretty blond child (Kristy'na Kohoutova') with large intelligent eyes and a willful expression. The child is surrounded by her toys, some bits of food left over from tea, drawings and other everyday items, all scattered in disarray.

It is out of these ordinary oddities that Svankmajer creates the inhabitants of Alice's sleep. Svankmajer's creations have a quality of wonderment, but of a very peculiar sort; they're partly enchanted, partly haunted, and there's a hint of the morphologist's lab in them, a trace of formaldehyde. In a corner is a glass case containing a large stuffed white rabbit, which comes to life with a kind of shiver. Donning a red velvet livery with a lace collar and a matching top hat, the White Rabbit breaks out of its case, pulls a pocket watch out of a rip in its chest and hurries off, eventually disappearing into a desk drawer.

Desks and desk drawers figure prominently in Svankmajer's world of symbols. Sometimes they're like rabbit holes, passages into other worlds; sometimes they fulfill their normal function, though not quite in normal ways. In one drawer, Alice finds an inkwell, the contents of which she drinks, causing her to shrink into a doll. Later, a bite of a cookie causes her to return to normal size.

"Alice," which according to the credits was "inspired" by the Lewis Carroll tale, sticks fairly closely to the story's basic plot. Along the way, though, Svankmajer departs from the original, in many cases using Carroll's words but taking the liberty to create his own action, his own world. Svankmajer's addition to Carroll's word games is the element of psychological danger. Alice's dreams have the scrambled frenzy of a child who has fallen asleep in an uncomfortable position. The images are troubled, menace-laden.

Traveling through the psychic landscape Svankmajer has created, Alice seems somehow to be at risk. The world seems to be in revolt against her, threatening her, bearing in. Or else it's simply mysterious, alien.

This mirrors a feeling that we often had as children, when objects appeared large and unmanageable, and grown-ups spoke in what seemed to us like code. Svankmajer possesses the kind of technical mastery that carries us over mechanical questions, allowing us to concentrate on the deeper meanings in the work.

But meanings, in the strict sense, are elusive. And what's more, you have no interest in pinning him down, in deciphering the messages. Svankmajer communicates through textures, colors, moods, and he delivers his ideas by implication, obliquely, in a nonliteral, though still accessible, manner.

If he has a deficiency, it's in his sense of narrative. For all its poetic power, "Alice" doesn't reveal Svankmajer to be a very natural storyteller, and occasionally we get bogged down in the enactment of his secret ceremonies. Not lost, but adrift.

Still, Svankmajer's sinister visual music has an irresistible potency and allure. Watching it, we feel the enthrallment of the irrational. It takes us back to a time in the history of movies when audiences responded to the images on screen with a combination of awe and fear, when in submitting to them, we felt as if we were submitting to a spell.
=================
http://tinypaste.com/655a6
=================
Specs:

File size : 1.36 GB (or 1,398 MB)
Type : AVI
Duration : 2:01:10
Audio stream:
Cds: 1 (not splitted)

Video
Size: 1010 MB
Codec : XviD 1.1 (Koepi)
Bitrate : 1165 Kbps
Resolution: 672*352
Frame rate : 23.976 fps
Bits per pixel: 0.204
QPEL: No ; GMC: No ; N-VOP: No

Audio
Size: 388 MB
Codec : AC3
Bitrate : 448 Kbps
Channels : 5
Sampling rate : 48 000 Hz

Language: English
Subs: English (sub and srt)

The Ballad of Little Jo (1993)


The Ballad of Little Jo (1993)
Directed by
Maggie Greenwald

Written by
Maggie Greenwald









IMDB


================
Plot (from AMG):
The Ballad of Little Jo is based on a true story -- several true stories, in fact. Suzy Amis plays demure young Josephine Monagan, who in 1866 is run out of her home town after bearing an illegitimate child. Fleeing westward, Josephine is terrified by stories of how treacherous the frontier can be for a woman alone. As a result, upon arriving in the muddy burg of Ruby City, she disguises herself as a man, going so far as to scar her face to suggest that she's been in a few scrapes. In this guise, "Little Jo" does just fine by herself for nearly 30 years! Almost as good as Suzy Amis is Bo Hopkins as gunslinger Frank Badger, Little Jo's best buddy (if only he knew....) Written and directed by Maggie Greenwald, The Ballad of Little Jo does a marvelous job conveying the people and places of its period; and, unlike Bad Girls (which was released around the same time), we aren't bludgeoned to death by feminist revisionism. Unfortunately ignored when it went out to theatres in the fall of 1993, The Ballad of Little Jo has fared rather better on video.
================
Review (from AMG):
by Tom Wiener
Turning the feminist point of view askew, this film offers the premise that the only way a woman could prosper in the frontier West with any dignity was to disguise herself as a man. The fact is, given the constrictions on women at the time, this was likely the only means of prospering for a woman anywhere in America. But Little Jo, née Josephine Monaghan, has a better chance of concealing her identity on the underpopulated frontier, which also was democratically open to an entrepreneur with some talent and determination. Jo learns how to be a sheepherder from Frank Badger (Bo Hopkins), and then turns the tables on him by saving up enough to buy her own spread and flock. They manage to coexist as neighbors, if not outright pals, for the rest of her life. But her secret is discovered rather quickly by another outcast, a Chinese veteran of railroad work (David Chung), who becomes, in turn, her domestic servant and then her lover. Concealing both her identity and the affair almost overwhelms Jo, and the film is distressingly vague on the resolution of the couple's relationship. Another subplot involving a cattle baron trying to buy Jo's land is similarly unresolved. What the film is best at portraying is the isolation and terrible loneliness of life on the frontier. Writer/director Maggie Greenwald's next film, Songcatcher, also dealt with a woman venturing into a isolated culture where she wasn't welcome; in that story, the protagonist made few accommodations. In a rare lead performance, Suzy Amis is persuasive, but because of her character's understandable reticence, the real life of this party is Bo Hopkins' Frank, a man who's sure that Little Jo is some kind of peculiar fellow but is at the same time remarkably tolerant of him.
================
http://tinypaste.com/dd2e5
================
Specs:

File size : 1.36 GB (or 1,398 MB)
Type : AVI
Duration : 2:01:10
Audio stream:
Cds: 1 (not splitted)

Video
Size: 1010 MB
Codec : XviD 1.1 (Koepi)
Bitrate : 1165 Kbps
Resolution: 672*352
Frame rate : 23.976 fps
Bits per pixel: 0.204
QPEL: No ; GMC: No ; N-VOP: No

Audio
Size: 388 MB
Codec : AC3
Bitrate : 448 Kbps
Channels : 5
Sampling rate : 48 000 Hz

Language: English
Subs: English (sub and srt)
Source: R1 WS DVD
Ripper: CroakerBC

Wednesday, February 3, 2010

Hachiko: A Dog's Story (2009)










IMDB

Just watched this newly released movie a couple of days ago. It was really good. I love dogs. I remember when I was a kid, there was this little dog I named Mimi. Every night, after I went to bed, it would wait for me to be asleep then jumped on my bed and slept next to me. I had lots of other dogs, too. But after awhile, my family decided not to have any more dogs. Because it was just so sad when they die.

Anyway, Hachiko: A Dog's Story is a heart-warming, touching tale based on a true story about a loyal Akita dog who was abandoned on the street. A professor found and took it home. Every day, Hachiko would come to the train station to see the professor off to work, then in the evening it would come back to greet him. One day, the man didn't return. For 9 entire years, the dog waited for the train that would bring his friend back, until the day it died.

Would that I had friends as loyal as Hachiko. Maybe I already do. But you never know how loyal your friends are until the shit hits the fan. I am not looking forward to finding out.

The real Hachiko

Read about Hachiko at Wikipedia

==================
Hachiko.A.Dogs.Story.DVDRip.XviD-NeDiVx

File : 699 MB, duration: 1:28:46, type: AVI, 1 audio stream
Video : 607 MB, 956 Kbps, 23.976 fps, 624*336 (16:9), XVID
Audio : 92 MB, 145 Kbps, 48000 Hz, 2 channels, MP3, CBR

Language: English
Subtitle: English, Japanese
==================
Links:
http://scenereleases.info/2010/02/hachiko-a-dogs-story-dvdrip-xvid-nedivx.html

http://www.rlslog.net/hachiko-a-dogs-story-dvdrip-xvid-nedivx/

http://www.oneddl.com/movies/hachiko-a-dogs-story-dvdrip-xvid-nedivx/
==================

Wolf (1994)



IMDB

Just re-watched this today and it was as good as I remember. Michelle Pfeiffer is the babest of all babes and Jack Nicholson is, well, Jack Nicholson. Wolf (1994) is not a scary, per se, and does not contain tons of gore or special effects like other werewolf movies but it is one hell of a refreshing, humorous and highly entertaining ride.
====================
Washington Post review:
'Wolf' (R)
By Hal Hinson
Washington Post Staff Writer
June 17, 1994

"Wolf," the new Mike Nichols film starring Jack Nicholson and Michelle Pfeiffer, doesn't take a straight horror film approach to the werewolf genre, and it's not a jokey sendup either. It's something fresher and infinitely more inventive -- a satire about how to climb the corporate ladder that uses werewolf lore only as its metaphorical springboard. In its own delightfully peculiar way, the film is the only one of its kind ever made -- a horror film about office politics.

What Nichols has attempted here -- with the assistance of screenwriters Jim Harrison and Wesley Strick -- is the filmmaking equivalent of a high-wire act. The result is a sometimes shaky, always enchanting Beauty and the Beast story for grown-ups that is the very essence of smart fun -- droll, sophisticated and surprisingly, pleasingly light. The movie isn't wholly great; it starts to unravel just after the midway point. Still, there are charms enough all the way through to make it the most seductive, most enjoyable film of the summer.

Topping this list of enticements is Wolfman Jack himself, who, though playing a beast, hasn't seemed so engaging and effortlessly human in years. Nicholson plays Will Randall, the respected senior editor of a Manhattan publishing firm -- and from the look of it, this low-energy, almost depressive character with his pipe and corduroys was conceived as a sort of inverse joke on the actor's larger-than-life hipster image. At the beginning of the film, the firm is in the process of a corporate takeover and Randall is about to lose his job to a more ambitious, younger colleague (James Spader). It's not hard to see why. For all his "taste and individuality" -- the qualities that takeover tycoon Raymond Alden (Christopher Plummer) praises in his distinguished employee just before giving him the boot -- Randall is pretty much a spent force.

Before long, though, Randall is tossing away the bifocals and shocking his wife, Charlotte (Kate Nelligan), by undoing her robe with his teeth. Feeling frisky as a cub, he also decides to fight for his job, even going so far as to challenge Alden by threatening to take his authors with him.

Of course, the youthful surges of vitality and confidence could have logical explanations, but somehow Randall is feeling better than well. When his senses become so keen that he can eavesdrop on conversations three floors below or even sniff out his wife from all the way across Central Park, he begins to wonder if the bite he received recently from a wolf up in Vermont might have something to do with it.

Up to the point where Randall begins his moonlight prowls, Nichols's direction is as deft and intelligent as it's ever been. And even afterward, when the story focuses on the characters -- specifically, on Randall's developing relationship with Alden's rich-bitch daughter, Laura (Pfeiffer) -- the film maintains its keen satirical edge. The picture toys with an alluring modern theme: Just how friendly should we be with the animal within? The main attraction, though, is Nicholson -- first, last and always -- and it's his modulated suavity and wit that make the film so sublimely entertaining.

In recent years, the actor seems to have been drawn almost exclusively to clown roles; even his blustering career soldier in "A Few Good Men" was a histrionic buffoon. As Randall, though, he lets his voice drop down into a relaxed, sexy growl. Though Randall becomes more formidable as the movie progresses, Nicholson sustains his low-key, self-effacing style, and somehow the more he keeps his natural dynamism in check, the more his charisma increases. Undeniably, the story requires a metamorphosis into a fearsome black wolf, furry paws, fangs and all, but the makeup never takes over the performance. It's the man we're drawn to here, and strangely enough -- especially for Nicholson -- he's a good man. It's virgin ground for Nicholson, and he uses it to give his greatest performance since "Prizzi's Honor."

As the world-weary Laura, Pfeiffer doesn't have nearly as much to work with, and so, ultimately, she lends more of her beauty than she does her talent. But with beauty like hers it would seem churlish to complain. Even so, she does bring a ring of true emotion to this bad girl's jaded snarl. Chemistry between the two stars is essential here, and Pfeiffer makes us believe in this improbable love affair.

It's Pfeiffer's combination of compassion and terror that carries the last section of the film and gives it class. Otherwise -- with Nicholson locked up in a stable like a junkie in rehab -- the film might have deteriorated into a campy joke. It seems almost always on the verge of it anyway. In truth, when "Wolf" tries to be a werewolf movie it falls on its face. The special effects are cheesy and unconvincing, and the makeup is ludicrous. (In Nicholson's case, it makes him look more like a cranky pirate than a demon wolf.) Only up in those ruthless glass towers are the movie's fragile conceits completely in balance.

Even when it's bad, though, "Wolf" is bad in ways that are appealingly unexpected. Traditionally, it's the Beauty's love that tames the Beast, but "Wolf" provides a neat new variation -- one that's satisfying and full of weirdly sexy possibilities.
====================
http://tinypaste.com/df587
====================
File size: 2.25 Gb
3 audios: 1) Russian 2) Russian 3) English

Specs after removal of Russian tracks:

File : 1.59 GB, duration: 2:00:32, type: AVI, 1 audio stream
Video : 1.50 GB, 1784 Kbps, 25.0 fps, 704*416 (16:9), XVID
Audio : 98 MB, 114 Kbps, 48000 Hz, 2 channels, MP3, VBR

Tuesday, February 2, 2010

The Two Jakes (1990)


What I do for a living may not be very reputable. But I am. In this town I'm the leper with the most fingers.








IMDB

The Two Jakes is a direct sequel to Chinatown. It always irks me to see Chinatown get so many mentions in film-noir discussion and make the top of many best-of lists, yet people tend to overlook or ignore or downright diss this masterful work by Jack Nicholson. The Two Jakes is, imho, every bit as good as Chinatown. It's a real shame Jack Nicholson didn't direct anything else after this.

There was meant to be a third movie, titled Cloverleaf that would complete the trilogy started with Chinatown. Due to the poor box office performance of The Two Jakes, Cloverleaf never saw the light. A damn shame.
=========================
REVIEW BY ROGER EBERT / August 10, 1990

Here at long last is Jack Nicholson's "The Two Jakes," seven years in the trade papers, center of prolonged teeth-gnashing at Paramount Pictures, and it turns out to be such a focused and concentrated film that every scene falls into place like clockwork; there's no feeling that it was a problem picture. It's not a thriller and it's not a whodunit, although it contains thriller elements and at the end we do find out whodunit. It's an exquisite short story about a mood, and a time, and a couple of guys who are blind-sided by love.

The movie takes place in postwar Los Angeles - the 1940s of the baby boom and housing subdivisions - instead of the 1930s city where "Chinatown" was set. It's not such a romantic city anymore. And private eyes like J. J. Gittes (Jack Nicholson) are a little more worn by time and care. The Gittes of "Chinatown" was the spiritual brother of Philip Marlowe. But now it is after the war, and Gittes has moved out of the two-room suite into a building of his own. He heads a staff of investigators. He belongs to a country club and has a fiancee and has put on some weight. One of these days he's going to stop calling himself an investigator altogether and become a security consultant.

But he still handles some of the old kinds of cases. The cases where the outraged husband bursts into the motel room and finds his wife locked in the arms of an adulterer, and then the investigator leaps in with a camera and takes photos that will look bad in divorce court. He knows, Gittes tells us in the film's opening narration, that he shouldn't get involved in messy situations like that anymore. He's outgrown them. They're beneath him. But sometimes he still takes the jobs.

That's how he meets the other Jake - Jake Berman (Harvey Keitel), a property developer who thinks his wife (Meg Tilly) is fooling around with his partner. So Gittes tutors Berman on how to act when he bursts in through the door, and what to say, and then they stake out a motel where the evil act is confidently expected to take place. But Berman doesn't follow the script. A gun appears from somewhere, and the partner is shot, and the partner's wife (Madeleine Stowe) thinks that maybe it wasn't a case of adultery at all. Maybe it was cold-blooded murder, and Berman intended to kill his partner so that he and his wife could collect the partner's share of the property development. That might make Gittes accessory to murder.

So far, what we have here is the kind of plot that any private eye movie might have been proud of. But "The Two Jakes" uses the plot only as an occasion for the deeper and more brooding things it has to say.

Everyone connected with this movie seems to have gone through the private eye genre and come out on the other side. The screenplay is by Robert Towne, who at one stage in the project's troubled history was going to direct it. He has not simply assembled some characters from his "Chinatown," added some new ones, and thrown them into a plot. This movie is written with meticulous care, to show how good and evil are never as simple as they seem, and to demonstrate that even the motives of a villain may emerge from a goodness of heart.

Jack Nicholson directed the film, and Vilmos Zsigmond photographed it, in the same spirit. This isn't a film where we ricochet from one startling revelation to another. Instead, the progress of the story is into the deeper recesses of the motives of the characters. We learn that Gittes - fiancee and all - still is deeply hurt by the murder of the Faye Dunaway character in "Chinatown"; he never will be over her.

We learn that the property being developed by Berman has been visited before by Gittes, in that long-ago time. We learn that love, pure love, is a motive sufficient to justify horrifying actions. And we learn that when the past has been important enough to us, it never will quite leave us alone.

The movie is very dark, filled with shadows and secrets and half-heard voices, and scratchy revelations on a clandestine tape recording. Out in the valley where the development is being built, the sunshine is harsh and casts black shadows, and the land is cruel - the characters are shaken by earthquakes that reveal the land rests uneasily on a dangerous pool of natural gas.

The performances are dark and gloomy, too, especially Nicholson's.

He tones down his characteristic ebullience and makes Gittes older and wiser and more easily disillusioned. And he never even talks about the loss that hangs heavily on his heart; we have to infer it from the way his friends and employees tiptoe around it.

Right from his first meeting with the Keitel character, when he notices they are wearing the same two-tone shoes, he feels a curious kinship with him, and that leads to a key final confrontation that I will not reveal. And he feels something, too, for the Meg Tilly character, who has been deeply hurt in her past and is afraid to express herself. She is like a bird with a broken wing.

The point of "The Two Jakes" is that love and loss are more important than the mechnical distribution of guilt and justice. When Nicholson and Keitel, as the two Jakes, have their final exchange of revelations, it is such a good scene because the normal considerations of a crime movie are placed on hold. The movie really is about the values that people have, and about the things that mean more to them than life and freedom. It's a deep movie, and a thoughtful one, and when it's over you can't easily put it out of your mind.
=========================
http://tinypaste.com/11daf
=========================
File : 893 MB, duration: 2:17:33, type: AVI, 1 audio stream
Video : 767 MB, 779 Kbps, 23.976 fps, 608*352 (16:9), XVID
Audio : 125 MB, 128 Kbps, 48000 Hz, 2 channels, MP3, VBR

Chinatown (1974)








Of course I'm respectable. I'm old.
Politicians, ugly buildings, and whores all get respectable if they last long enough.

IMDB

I don't think this classic noir needs introduction, but just in case you haven't seen it: it's a film-noir and it's a classic. Yes, I am a master of stating the obvious.

REVIEW BY ROGER EBERT / June 1, 1974

Roman Polanski's "Chinatown" is not only a great entertainment, but something more, something I would have thought almost impossible: It's a 1940s private-eye movie that doesn't depend on nostalgia or camp for its effect, but works because of the enduring strength of the genre itself. In some respects, this movie actually could have been made in the 1940s. It accepts its conventions and categories at face value and doesn't make them the object of satire or filter them through a modern sensibility, as Robert Altman did with "The Long Goodbye." Here's a private-eye movie in which all the traditions, romantic as they may seem, are left intact.

At its center, of course, is the eye himself: J.J. Gittes, moderately prosperous as a result of adultery investigations. He isn't the perenially broke loner like Philip Marlowe, inhabiting a shabby office and buying himself a drink out of the office bottle. He's a successful investigator with a two-man staff, and he dresses well and is civilized and intelligent. He does, however, possess the two indispensable qualities necessary for any traditional private eye. He is deeply cynical about human nature, and he has a personal code and sticks to it.
There is also, of course, the woman, who comes to the private eye for help but does not quite reveal to him the full dimensions of her trouble. And there are the other inevitable ingredients of the well-crafted private-eye plot, as perfected by Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett and practiced by Ross MacDonald. There's the woman's father, and the skeletons in their family closet, and the way that a crime taking place now has a way of leading back to a crime in the past.

These plots work best when they start out seeming impossibly complicated and then end up with watertight logic, and Robert Towne's screenplay for "Chinatown" does that with consummate skill. But the whole movie is a tour de force; it's a period movie, with all the right cars and clothes and props, but we forget that after the first ten minutes. We've become involved in the movie's web of mystery, as we always were with the best private-eye stories, whether written or filmed. We care about these people and want to see what happens to them.

And yet, at the same time, Polanski is so sensitive to the ways in which 1930s' movies in this genre were made that we're almost watching a critical essay. Godard once said that the only way to review a movie is to make another movie, and maybe that's what Polanski has done here. He's made a perceptive, loving comment on a kind of movie and a time in the nation's history that are both long past. "Chinatown" is almost a lesson on how to experience this kind of movie.

It's also a triumph of acting, particularly by Jack Nicholson, who is one of the most interesting actors now working and who contributes one of his best performances. He inhabits the character of J.J. Gittes like a second skin; the possession is so total that there are scenes in the movie where we almost have telepathy; we know what he's thinking, so he doesn't have to tell us. His loyalty is to the woman, but on several occasions, evidence turns up that seems to incriminate her. And then he must pull back, because his code will not admit clients who lie to him. Why he's this way (indeed, even the fact that he's this way) is communicated by Nicholson almost solely in the way he plays the character; dialogue isn't necessary to make the point.

The woman is Faye Dunaway, looking pale and neurotic and beautiful, and justifying for us (if not always for him) J.J.'s trust in her. And then there are all the other characters, who revolve around a complicated scheme to float a bond issue and build a dam to steal water from Los Angeles, in a time of drought. Because the film depends so much on the exquisite unraveling of its plot, it would be unfair to describe much more; one of its delights is in the way that dropped remarks and chance clues gradually build up the portrait of a crime.

And always at the center, there's the Nicholson performance, given an eerie edge by the bandage he wears on his nose after it's slit by a particularly slimy character played by Polanski himself. The bandage looks incongruous, we don't often see a bandaged nose on a movie private eye, but it's the kind of incongruity that's creepy and not funny. The film works similar ground: Drifting within sight of parody every so often, it saves itself by the seriousness of its character.

[Followed by a long-delayed sequel, "The Two Jakes," in 1990, directed by Nicholson.]
=======================
http://tinypaste.com/abf2d
=======================
File : 1.26 GB, duration: 2:10:32, type: AVI, 1 audio stream
Video : 880 MB, 943 Kbps, 23.976 fps, 704*304, XVID
Audio : 418 MB, 448 Kbps, 48000 Hz, 6 channels, AC3, CBR
This blog was created on January 15, 2010. Since then there has been a staggering amount of pageloads.