I love LA, and I love films set in Los Angeles, from Bladerunner to perhaps the most typical genre, film noir.
I finally saw Black Dahlia today on HBO, and it was as bad as they say. Worse, even.
It was one big acting lesson for the wooden juvenile leads, Josh Hartnett and Scarlett Johanson. Watching Hartnett struggle to show grief and shock when his partner plunges to his death was a painful movie moment indeed.
The director was in love with mood shots and voiceover, both of which can be overdone. Then there’s the father daughter make out scene, not too much of a homage to Chinatown. Not a surprise to learn that it was an over-the-top but past his prime Brian DePalma, bhind the violence and leering sex.
“She looks like that dead girl. How sick are you?” The line reading was so great that it repeated in the voice over. “You’d rather fuck me than shoot me.”
And the script…well, the real Black Dahlia, of the dead woman found cut in half in 1947, is considered an iconic LA crime, although who know why compared to the thousands killed in ‘gang-related’ violence over the last There’s not much to hang your hat–or the script-on, so a plot has to be invented, so the filmakers tapped the James Ellroy novel. But the A and B lines about a mob tie-up, girls reading for Hollywood screen tests and a Hollywood gothic family don’t make much sense or cover incoherence with screaming and overacting and grand guignol.
LA Confidental still rules, for three reasons: 1. Actual great acting, particularly the way under-utilized Guy Peerce, but also the world-weary Russell Crowe and Oscar-winner Kim Basinger. 2. Curtis Hanson, really a great, understatted director who can work in any genre and make you care even about a chick flick, In Her Shoes. 3. A well-written script that uses noir elemetns and period cars, sets and costumes but is not overwhelmed by them–and deals with a continuing Los Angeles problem, our ambivalence with the LAPD.
Tags: Black-Dahlia, Curtis-Hanson, film-noir, Guy-Peerce, James-Ellroy, Josh-Hartnett, Kim-Basinger, LA-in-the-movies, Russell-Crowe, Scarlet-Johannson
April 8, 2009 at 5:15 pm |
I like Ellroy a lot, have read most of his stuff. I haven’t seen Black Dahlia; I think I just had a bad feeling about it. (I also haven’t seen Even Cowgirls Get The Blues, another book I liked a lot.)
L.A. Confidential, the movie, encompasses not only the book of that name but also elements of the rest of the L.A. Quartet — Black Dahlia, The Big Nowhere, and White Jazz. I’ve heard that Ellroy’s editor told him that the first draft of White Jazz was way too long, so he took out all the verbs.
I’d like to see a really good director take a shot at The Cold Six Thousand, and here’s my radical idea about how to do it: make a movie about those characters, doing those low-down deeds, but take out all of the “true history” elements. I think the three major characters, and many supporting roles, could carry a story even if it isn’t about assassinating the Kennedys and MLK.