Homework Movie - Chinatown (Revised review)

When someone wants to get dirt on his or her spouse affairs or someone they are doing business with that they don't trust, the call Jake Gittes. So when JJ is confronted by not one, but two woman as Evelyn Mulwray, he gets just a bit confused and wants to get to the bottom of this. So begins Chinatown starring Jack Nicholson and Faye Dunaway. Solving that case of mistaken identity wraps Jake up into a messy case of murder and politics.

Roman Polanski directed this movie in 1974, twenty years after making his first movies. By this time Polanski had crafted a great storytelling technique and a great visual style that was very imaginative. The use of long camera shots and mirror tricks gives the audience the impression that they too are watching someone as a detective.

When everyone's a suspect, there's no one to trust. Everyone in this movie has an agenda involving the water and Gittes has to sort it all out before he loses his whole nose. Fingers are being pointed in every which direction and Gittes complicates things when he get personal with the real Mrs. Mulwray late in the story.

Detectives and reporters work in the same way in the movies we've watched this week. They check their facts against news clips and photos, talk to the right (or wrong) people, and then they get their big payoff in either a check from their employer (people of interest), or by capturing the correct person for the now solved murder. Each protagonist is obsessed with solving their crime (Chinatown) or getting their story (Shock corridor) so much that it takes over their life.

Homework Movie - Black Sunday (1960)

When you start off messin' around on your significant other, you just have to know that something wrong is going to come of it. Such is the case in Black Sunday Staring Barbara Steele and directed by one of Horror's best-known directors, Mario Bava. Barbara plays multiple characters that can't seem to keep their hands off the other men in her life when she's supposed to be married as both characters. In both cases it ends very badly for more than one guy. Infidelity doesn't just end with Mrs. Steele's character.

Dr. Gorobec is messing around with the older woman in the beginning, who it turns out to be a younger woman later on in the story that wants the Dr. to take over the estate of the wife/Jenny characters. He then hires a competent doctor that has been looking after Jenny at an asylum before the story takes place and has him move in for a while to study Jenny's behavior to see if she's suitable for the estate or if Dr. Gorobec should watch over and inherit the money/property of Jenny's.

This movie marked the first of many horror genre films for Barbara Steele, including in the 80's the original Piranha for Roger Corman's New World Pictures. Steele has worked on everything from dramas to some comedies, but she's always made time for the horror genre.

Starting off as a cinematographer, Mario Bava didn't rise so quickly into the role of the director until almost 20 years into the business. Sure he'd directed some documentary films and shorts in that time, but his first major film being Black Sunday, this makes watching this film especially fun to see his style start to emerge on the scene. Since the 60's, Bava has rarely strayed from the horror genre, being named one of the godfathers of the modern horror film.

Watching some of his other works in class, Black Sunday is a good start to anything he's done over the years. The whip and the body we watched in class and it was cheesy is some parts and somewhat laughable. Thinking about Black Sunday in the terms of when it was made, it could have scared the pants off of you if you weren't keeping track of where people were in the house.