A Movie Every Night: The Black Dahlia

The Black Dahlia (2006)
Director: Brian De Palma
Starring: Josh Harnett, Scarlett Johansson, not nearly enough Aaron Eckhart and far too much Hilary Swank

Josh Hartnett doing what he does best: staring into brown space

"Junior Nash was an inbred, Okie shit-kicker."

That's the only line in the movie worth quoting and it's straight out of Ellroy. I haven't read this book in years, but I seem to remember being interested in what happened to the characters. It was a grisly case, no one was all good or all bad, and that trip down to Tijuana and finding Lee and how he really dies ----- dude. My friend Jeff said he had to shower after reading it. In this version we get guys falling from a balcony and death in a fountain (which reminds me, Scarface is on tv tonight). It was really hard to care about what happened to these people and maybe I wasn't supposed to care, but, then again, maybe investing in them might have made it a better movie to sit through because it certainly made it a good book.

I blame the sepia tone. The whole thing is coated in brown except for one artsy moment at the end, one real, colorful, exciting moment and it's OH wait it's a nightmare hallucination.

Color = bad.

Oh Brian ... geez, you know, when you were copying Hitchcock I thought it was really cool. Some people thought you were just being unimaginative. I said nooooooo he's paying homage. He appreciates Hitchcock. He wants to show his love of Hitch's style. And, sure, some of the acting is kind of flat in The Untouchables, but Mamet's hard to do if you're not used to it ("Nice house. I said. Nice. House.") and who cared since the music was Morricone and the clothes were Armani? But you had Ellroy here. You had some hopped up great dialogue and it's drowned in floppy fake music and lost in weird, slow, unnecessary moments of nothingness.

You could have at least kept the Ensenada burial ground.