This is possibly my favourite american movie ever….it tells a story straight, there’s no excess and just ‘reads’ like a book. You want to turn the page to see whats happening in the next page. I do find a lot of modern movies, even very good ones, forget to just tell the story and get it told, rather than being clever clever. It also transcends the ‘auteur’ by being very chic, hip and ‘art’ but it’s a movie you can watch with your blockbuster-watching mates, having a beer and having a good time.
Nate
One of the most interesting parts of Chinese Bookie to me was the way the cinematography worked to minimize the eroticism, but still not conceal anything. There is a relatively brief shot about half an hour into it, when that girl is in her dressing room getting ready for her audition with Cosmo – the camera starts with her face, and then pans down slowly. The audience-friendly thing to do would be to make sure you can see her breasts for a few seconds before they’re out of the frame. What Cassavetes does, though is show us only part of her nipple very briefly before continuing down and giving a brief, seemingly inadvertent, shot of her panties. Later in the film there are a ton of similar scenes to this. He won’t censor the nudity or the sexual content of the story, but he is able to portray it in a pretty removed way, without any unnecessary eroticism. As a film about a strip-club owner, it doesn’t lack in the nudity department, but Cassavetes is able to portray it for what it is. Cassavetes tries to erase the eroticism without skimming anything over, and he does it brilliantly.