April 03, 2005

• Thanks, Doris! Great link. Chinatown and The Conversation are two of my favorite films.
• Basic research would have helped the writer of this article. Among the errors: Manchurian Candidate came out in 1962 not '63 and Harry Caul did have a telephone in The Conversation, in fact, among the early scenes he sits down to call his landlady to tell her not to open his mail anymore. I don't think the writer saw any of these films.
• Speaking of which, Pollack's new one, The Interpreter, is actually pretty good. Which was a pleasant surprise. A bit hokey in parts, a bit preachy in other parts, but overall a tense, quite clever and not entirely soulless production. Excellent scene on a bus, which could have come right out of a 70s conspiracy thriller.
• Yes, I saw a screening of The Interpreter recently and it's quite good. Pollack hit all the right notes.
• Several of the films mentioned here are among my favorites, and Pakula is the most underrated director in recent times in my book -- his trilogy of Klute, the Parallax View, and All the President's Men is the filmic equivalent of the Rolling Stones 1968-1972 string of great records, Beggars Banquet, Let It Bleed, Sticky Fingers, and Exile on Main Street. Artists at the peak of their powers, tapped into the mainline of the zeitgeist.