Remember all the times you had to watch this in Screenwriting 101? Chinatown in conjunction with Robert McKee's guidebook "Story," is practically the gospel of college film course curriculum, so I had every reason to ignore it by graduation. Well, once again filtering through the old VHS collection I decided it was time to watch it again. I honestly thought I would have missed something after all these years, but the story, the characters, hell, even the dialogue is clear as crystal. Though, consistently seeing it through the perspective of a nit-picky narrative-driven screenwriting teacher, I never took much notice of the movie's technical aspects. This time I noticed the actual movement of the camera, the stylized opening credits, and the de-saturation of the film's color--making it all the more dark, all the more noir. Anecdotally, it turns out I watched this just a day after Jack Nicholson's 70th birthday. (He's 70!)
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