Word: jj
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Chinatown, a smooth, period private-eye yarn that works hard to hark back to the '30s and '40s, comes much more easily to hand. In it, Nicholson makes a shrewd choice to play persona rather than character-a commodity hi rather short supply in the script. His JJ. Gittes is cool, ironic, sympathetically small-time, a guy who stumbles on something a little bigger than he expected, or can manage. He also gets the chance to smile a lot. "That smile of his is simply a killer," says Nicholson's friend Diana Vreeland, former editor of Vogue...
Steve Miller Band. I bought their first album in the basement record department of the JJ Newberry's in Plymouth, New Hampshire. I'm not sure why. It could have been a lark, or it could have been the cover, one of the first of the psychedelic era, and I was fifteen. The five-man Steve Miller Band, with Moby Grape are still the only Hashbury era rock bands I can tolerate over repeated listenings. Miller broke up that band, in favor of a trio, at the musical instant when trios went totally out of fashion. He rode back into...
Karen Black, as the ultimate in unliberated femininity (what was she before JJ came along?), takes him into her apartment (and her heart), calling out from the kitchen, "I can tell you're nice," as he carefully helps himself to loose objects decorating her living room. Mindless she may be, characterless she is not. I can't remember any of her lines, but in spite of a banal script she makes a delightful happy-go-lucky sucker to Segal's dangerous charm...
...film, which begins as a sort of underworld Taking Off. (Taking Off is another first American film by a Czech director, also concerned with drugs, but in a middle-class milieu.) Unlike Taking Off, Passer's film switches suddenly from slick comedy to terror and sordidness as JJ's companion mistakenly shoots himself up with rat poison intended for JJ and crumples to his death. JJ drags him to an elevator, then flees in fright. The body lies inert across the doorway, the arms flexing up over the chest and relaxing as the automatic door tries again and again...
...very end, when JJ walks off carrying a little packet of white powder, he wonders--and we wonder--is it rat poison again? You hope so--there's no other way out of JJ's desperate situation, caught between crooks and cops, developed so convincingly in the second half of the film. If he doesn't get it this time he will the next...