If the American dream is real to someone, it is real; land and products can be bought and sold as a consequence.
Obviously, for the dream of a better life to be sold to anyone it needs to be established that their current existence is less than attractive. This is why water is diverted away from a city in desperate need of water: the citizens need to be convinced that what they need is somewhere else. Furthermore, all of the town's undesirables are lumped into the center of the city, where they are most visible and most difficult to avoid. Poor minorities, essentially, are caught within the low income housing projects in the inner city. This is why Chinatown is unattractive to white, affluent citizens. Racism is as much of an impetus to leave the city as the stifling drought. The organizational structures in place demand that the Chinese live….

ut apparently, he reached it many years before the film depicts him -- at least by Gittes summation. At a pivotal moment in the film, Gittes asks Cross why he did it and says, "How much better can you eat? What can you buy that you can't already afford?" Cross does not hesitate with his answer: "The Future!" (Chinatown, 1974). This exemplifies Gittes misconception regarding the American dream; specifically, that it ends when you have everything you "need." Yet, by this point in the film Gittes has been one of the few people privileged enough to earn a small piece of the truth behind city planning, organization, and corruption. Many of the social realities that we accept as inevitabilities of the modern world actually came into existence for the personal satisfaction of a handful of wealthy people.
Cross is victorious in every way he wanted and Gittes is left only….

Claude Mulvihill could also be a major subplot character. His confrontation with Gittes leads to Gittes getting his nose slashed.
Ida Sessions, the woman who was hired to play Evelyn in the beginning of the film, would be considered a supporting character in Chinatown. She does not play a major role in the narrative, but she is there at key moments (it is her clues, for example, that allow Gittes to pursue the water scandal.) Walsh and Duffy, Gittes's partners, are also "helping characters" in this respect.

Part Four

With a film as complex in its plot as Chinatown, it certainly helps to reconstruct events chronologically when evaluating the plot of the movie.

As Chinatown is essentially a detective movie, there are numerous clues dropped throughout the movie that the viewer is expected to pick up on and draw inferences out of. One example is the fact that Gittes, who is obviously doing….

Chinatown and The Pianist both exemplify Roman Polanski’s directorial style. However, they are vastly different films. An exploration of each, in comparison with one another, illustrates Polanski’s predilections as a filmmaker and possible also as an auteur. The 1974 film Chinatown bears a dark and gritty stamp that exemplifies in many ways the zeitgeist of the era. Building on the tradition of film noir and its romantic depictions of criminal underworlds, Chinatown is unique in its use of an unreliable narrator: the audience does not necessarily know the truth and is thus deprived of the treat of dramatic irony. Polanski’s 2002 film The Pianist is almost the opposite, as the audience knows fully well the realities of Jews living in Nazi Europe. Both films are dark, sociological, and to a lesser degree political, and both offer sweeping and visually poignant narratives.
One of the main themes Chinatown and The Pianist share….

China Town
Paris actually has two Chinatowns, the 13th district in the southeast and the 19th district in the northwest. Both offer a lot in terms of history, attractions, celebrations and traditions. In fact, the Chinese offer so much that even the culture-biased French are beginning to actively embrace the Chinese in their country. This paper explains why there is so much interest.

The 13th district, on the left bank, really took off in the late 1970's and early 1980's with the arrival of the boat people from Vietnam. Parisians had shunned what they considered to be the ugly and impersonal buildings constructed in that area by the Gaullist government. However, Asians found the area attractive because it offered affordable rents and lots of space. This area has become the largest Chinatown in Europe.

In the mid-1980's, less-educated peasants from rural China began moving into the 19th district, Belleville.

This area is more heterogeneous….

Big Sleep and Chinatown: Depictions of Noir in Hollywood
Film noir rose to prominence in the late 1940s and was initially described as "murder with a psychological twist" (Spicer, 1). Film noir helped to introduce audiences to a new genre that had distinct trademarks and themes. The Big Sleep, directed by Howard Hawkes and based upon the eponymous Raymond Chandler novel, helped to cement and define the genre. Similarly, Chinatown, directed by Roman Polanski, helped to redefine the genre, while at the same time, maintaining several aspects of classical film noir. The Big Sleep and Chinatown, though filmed nearly 30 years apart, are definitive films of the film noir genre, helping to establish the role of the hard-boiled detective in the genre, and adhering to the "murder with a psychological twist" trope.

The term film noir was first utilized by French film critic Nino Frank to describe four recently released crime….

Trip to Chinatown / Hello, Dolly!
One might not ordinarily associate comedienne Carol Channing with formidable erudition, but the Broadway premiere of Hello, Dolly! In 1964 would manage to unite them both thanks to the participation of Thornton ilder. ilder remains persistently underrated in the canon of American drama, partly because his own achievement had originally derived from fiction -- yet an examination of ilder's own notebooks reveals that his own successful stage plays were frequently based on his own critical and scholarly engagement with the most abstruse sort of Modernist texts. ilder would claim that his sprawling 1942 comedy The Skin of Our Teeth, which would win that year's Pulitzer Prize, had been based on James Joyce's Finnegans ake (which presumably would have come as a great surprise to Tallulah Bankhead, who starred in ilder's play). Yet it is my contention that among the many learned influences upon ilder's….

ChinatownThe "99% Invisible" episode titled "It's Chinatown" discusses the unique cultural and architectural aspects of Chinatowns in various American cities like San Francisco, New York, Los Angeles, and Las Vegas. This episode gives an excellent context for examining the concept of textual communities and their different readings of a cultural landscape, as outlined in Duncan and Duncan's (1988) work on (Re)reading the landscape.Textual CommunitiesTwo primary textual communities emerge in the context of Chinatown: Chinese immigrants and Chinese Americans, and American tourists and non-Chinese residents. The former group has a direct connection to the cultural and historical elements of Chinatown and views this landscape as a personal and communal space. It represents a piece of their homeland and a center for cultural preservation. For them it is a community hub. This reading is bound up with their own sense of identity, heritage, and experiences of immigration and adapting to a new….

There is a romantic charm in the notion that outsiders only 'pass through' while residents are in a kind of stop time, insular and part of the background, not part of the larger cultural narrative. Thus the Chinatown idea is fundamentally that Asia is 'different' -- exotic, of another world, rather than part of 'America.' This has often subverted the ambitions of those residents who do wish to become more a part of American society, who may struggle acquiring English skills, for example. The existence of Chinatown reinforces the perception that Chinese segregation is self-imposed and that a complex array of social factors such as culture and discrimination have no impact upon mobility and advancement.
The persistence of Chinatown also questions the ethics of what it means to tour another culture -- an issue that also arises when an individual contemplates the ethics touring an Amish village, for example. These….

Chinatown: A convergence of fraud, murder, and incest
Chinatown is the 1974 film noir directed by Roman Polanski. A modernized interpretation of classic film noir, Chinatown stars Jack Nicholson as J.J. Gittes, a Los Angeles private detective, Faye Dunaway as Evelyn Mulwray, a victim of incest and daughter of one of Los Angeles' most powerful men, and John Huston as Noah Cross, a corrupt business man and Evelyn's father. Chinatown, though released in 1974, is set in Los Angeles during the 1920s and not only revolves around a murder, incest, and a conspiracy to control the water supply in the city, but is also one of the few films to make reference to the California ater ars.

In the film, J.J. Gittes is a private detective that has been hired by a woman impersonating Evelyn Mulwray who claims that she wants to hire Gittes to perform marital surveillance on her husband, Hollis….

imagery in the movies Chinatown and Blade unner and compare the film-noir type of imagery against the actual statistics available in the latest Census results from Los Angeles that characterize the complexion of Los Angeles in 2010. In all three arenas, we see a Los Angeles area that is multi-ethnic, grime and dirt included. In many ways, while the movie imagery is different, in many ways all three characterizations have more in common than have differences. In all three portraits, the dirty, gritty and repressive city scape has the potential to swallow up the inhabitants in the Los Angeles darkness that is almost as thick as palpable as the ninth Egyptian plague of darkness. The films accurately and effectively discuss the "feel" of the city and the city's neighborhoods. The author will provide examples from the films to illustrate this, as well as the similarities and differences.
Analysis

In all three….

Given my experiences at Chinatown Teen Post and Blue Phone Wireless, I am very excited about my future prospects in management. Academic skills are valuable for learning business operations, but real-world experience adds missing ingredients needed to fully understand success such as knowing how valuable personal happiness, social responsibility and customer satisfaction really are. I am eager to contribute my wisdom and leadership to the business community after receiving formal business training at the University of California.

I believe that the most important contribution I can bring to the University of California is my great respect for all individuals. Many people assume characteristics and create an image of a person they don't even know. As humans we tend to judge people very quickly based on their sex, race, ethnicity or social class. And, we love to judge people according to their image because it means so much in our society now-a-days.….

Sissy Eng stands out in direct contrast to her younger brother, having fully embraced the American Dream by marrying a white husband -- one who interestingly exoticizes Chinese people and culture -- and capitalizing on her Chinese heritage through the publication and sale of a cookbook, in which she takes enormous pride and pleasure. She, like her father though in a less subservient manner, fully caters to the American expectation of her Chinese identity, and uses it to make her own version of the American Dream. She is quite successful at this as well, and is entirely happy with the life she has created for herself as a staunch Chinese-American. Sissy does not exhibit any sense of guilt or conflict for having "sold-out," but rather accepts the largely artificial identity of her mixed culture or nationality as her natural place in the American systems of thinking and success.

Fred Eng is,….

Asain Studies
The Chinese people place high regard on tradition, honor, and the ongoing nature of personal relationships to both of these cultural imperatives in order to establish their own identity in the world. When San Francisco was settled by coolie laborers during the 1850's and 1960's, the discrimination which they received encouraged them to band together into a china town settlement. The Chinese were able to create a replica of their homeland in the Chinatown. They were able to maintain their own cultural diversity within the boundaries, and they were able to escape, at least for a short time, the discrimination and harassment which faced them daily in the larger community.

According to the "Letter to Jen An, the writer discusses Chinese personal ethics, and the source of the Chinese identity of a worthwhile personhood. He writes that the Chinese philosophy is built around these 5 tenants:

Self-cultivation is a mark of….

Noah Cross from Roman Polanski's "Chinatown" provides the audience with a layer of complexity unseen in other films. On the surface, Noah Cross seems to the unaware soul as a jovial, pleasant man. When one hears him speak he appears untroubled and comfortable in his own skin. His facial expressions also give a hint of self-assurance and openness as he remains friendly-seeming no matter what words come out of his mouth. Along with his perceivable ease with words, he has a faintly chauvinistic charm with a smile always at the ready, managing to avoid displaying even the slightest trace of cruelty or psychosis.
As the film progresses, however, this appealing and harmless exterior reduces, shrinks into the mask that it provided him. Eventually he displays the inner, sociopathic nature the audience realizes he was hiding, making him all the more frightening. He does not care for others. He does not….