Daily Blague

Lots of critics don't like The Black Dahlia, but I was hooked. I liked the movie for many of the reasons that the critics didn't. I knew that it was going to be somewhat hieratic: The Untouchables, a De Palma film that I've come to treasure (even if I do save it for special occasions), taught me that there would always be something, I don't know, South American about these movies. Hilary Swank's magnificent performance is characteristic: she's not only acting her part, but acting in it. The same is true of Scarlett Johansson, who channels Gloria Grahame in In A Lonely Place and makes something new out of it. Aaron Eckhart is perfect - how can anybody think otherwise - and as for Josh Hartnett, I see what the complaints are about; I just don't happen to share them. He's sweet and seems always about to weep, which is just what this study in disillusionment needs. But he's not very, I don't know, South American.

I can't wait to own the DVD of The Black Dahlia. I am going to watch it over and over until ieither it makes sense (Chinatown, LA Confidential) or making sense doesn't matter (The Big Sleep, Murder, My Sweet). One way or the other, I am going to get to know and love it. That I had a hard time following the dialogue at the beginning, that the loose ends tied up at the end seemed to make more knots than there was room for - I don't go to pictures like The Black Dahlia expecting to figure them out at the first go. I don't want to figure them out the first time! I want to be scared.

And Dahlia provided plenty of scares. The Hollywoodland scene (no relation to Hollywoodland) had me at the edge of my seat, hands at the ready to cover my eyes. And lets not overlook Fiona Shaw, who is very, I don't know, South American. Wow, does she ever chew up the scenery! Mark Isham's score is also creepily effective, an a nice tribute to Jerry Goldsmith, who wrote the scores of both of the "makes sense" movies that I bracketed.

Complaining about The Black Dahlia, New Yorker critic David Denby writes,

A documentary on this subject, from 2004, was called "Los Angeles Plays Itself." Yes, and plays itself with decreasing vitality. Imitation and pastiche come easily to a photographic medium, and films set in Los Angeles are often garlanded with stylistic flourishes from earlier LA movies. Brian De Palma's period re-creation, The Black Dahlia, suffers from the rampant allusiveness. The picture is a kind of fattened goose that's been stuffed with goose-live pâté. It's overrich and fundamentally unsatisfying.

I couldn't agree with this paragraph less - it will be a touchstone of Mr Denby's somewhat dyspeptic criticism for me from now on. I begin to wonder if the critic knows what the movies' power is all about. I, for one, would celebrate the "rampant allusiveness," not regret it. And as for the culinary metaphor (a true boo-boo), the minute we have to start counting our cholesterol at the movies is the minute I give up.