Ultimate Addict: ‘Black Dahlia’ Review
Posted on: January 09, 2007 | Filed under: Film News, The Black Dahlia | 0 Comments
Brian De Palma’s stint in film noir — a stint that reached its height with the release of crime classic ‘Scarface’ in 1983 — continues over twenty years later with this adaptation of James Ellroy’s novel, ‘The Black Dahlia’. In this typically 40′s crime drama, Josh Hartnett and Aaron Eckhart are two L.A. cops on the hunt for the brutal killer of aspiring Hollywood actress Elizabeth Short. Bucky Bleichert (Hartnett) and his partner Lee Blanchard (Eckhart) are drawn into the investigation, but when Blanchard begins to obsess over the case, Bleichert is left to pursue it alone, meeting along the way what can only be described as a very against-type Hilary Swank as Madeleine, the mysterious, sumptuous daughter of Hollywood tycoon Emmet Linscott. But as Blanchard grows ever more unstable, Bucky is drawn closer to his wife Kay, played by Scarlett Johansson.
The Badger Herald Review of ‘The Black Dahlia’
Posted on: September 20, 2006 | Filed under: Film News, The Black Dahlia | 0 Comments
The real standout in the cast, however, is Mia Kirshner (TV’s 24), who turns in a haunting, blisteringly effective performance as Short. Even though she is seen only in four key scenes, Kirshner’s performance is so evocative and searing that she should earn an Academy Award nomination, even though the movie is a disaster. Whenever she is on the screen, her performance is better than De Palma and his movie deserve.
BBC News Review of ‘The Black Dahlia’
Posted on: September 18, 2006 | Filed under: Film News, The Black Dahlia | 0 Comments
As with most reviews of The Black Dahlia, this video review (click on “Latest Programme” button in the sidebar located under the images of the two women to view) on the BBC News website is a scathing one, but also like other reviews, they praise Mia Kirshner’s performance as Elizabeth Short. Be sure and check it out when you have a free moment.
Thanks again to Mifunes for sending in the link.
Source: BBC News
Los Angeles City Beat Review of ‘The Black Dahlia’
Posted on: September 18, 2006 | Filed under: Film News, The Black Dahlia | 0 Comments
Nearly 60 years old now, the Black Dahlia case continues to cast its pulpy mythic spell over Los Angeles culture. It represents a time and a place that only a few of the living can remember for real; for the rest of us, postwar L.A. is a world of black and white, of nocturnal jazz, of tough guys in fedoras and sultry dolls in heels. In short, it’s the world of classic film noir, made at the time, about the time.
Of course, everyone knows that those films rarely had pretensions to realism, let alone documentary truth. But with the passage of time they are the images that endure and shape our collective memories in a way that may never again be possible. A world of camcorders and 24-hour news provides detail that is harsh and overexposed, if no closer to the truth. Despite its notoriety, the O.J. Simpson case – with everything but the initial violent act transmitted in real time as it occurred – can never achieve the sort of mythic status that has grown up around the sad life and gruesome death of Elizabeth Short.
Interview: Brian De Palma
Posted on: September 15, 2006 | Filed under: Film News, Interviews, The Black Dahlia | 0 Comments
Brian De Palma has made legendary crime and noir-ish thrillers, so adapting James Ellroy seems like a perfect fit for him. His film of Ellroy’s The Black Dahlia combines all those elements – seedy gangsters, hard boiled detectives, violent crimes and a macabre sense of humor. He talked about that and more when I caught him out junketing for The Black Dahlia.
“But that’s the tone of the book,” said De Palma. “That very much exists in the book. I was just talking to some journalist about this is closer to Sunset Boulevard with the funeral of the monkey and when he arrives at Norma’s estate. It’s like, ‘Okay, how are we supposed to take that?’ I mean, you take Bill Holden’s kind of wry analysis of what he’s watching and this is very much true in this piece too because once you’re at the Linscotts, you’re in a nut house. These people are insane and the way that Ellroy wrote it is sort of like a comic opera. I don’t know how else to explain it, and so what I did in order to get that approach to the audience originally was to shoot the entrance in first person. I said, ‘Okay, you want to see these people? Let them look at you. Let Mrs. Linscott just look at you like you’re trash.’ ‘How is a policeman in my living room?’ So that was the adjustment that I made. When you have a dog stuffed with the newspaper with his first million dollars and Hilary [Swank] just started tosses it off like the weather, I mean, you go, ‘Wow. I’m in a looney bin here and everyone seems to think it’s quite normal.’ That exactly how I did it. It was very much in the tone of the Ellroy book”
‘Dahlia,’ a postmortem
Posted on: September 11, 2006 | Filed under: Film News, The Black Dahlia | 0 Comments
In his neo-noir mystery, “The Black Dahlia,” director Brian De Palma brings his camera into a morgue where the remains of the mutilated murder victim, Elizabeth Short, are displayed on an autopsy table. Through the director’s lens, we gaze with grim fascination at the grotesqueness of the crime, wondering not only who this woman was and how she met her fate but what twisted mind could carry out such a heinous murder?
In real life, Short’s remains were discovered on Jan. 15, 1947, by a passerby pushing a stroller past a vacant lot near 39th Street and Norton Avenue in Leimert Park, touching off a mystery that endures to this day.
CHUD.Com Exclusive Interview: Brian De Palma
Posted on: September 08, 2006 | Filed under: Film News, Interviews, The Black Dahlia | 0 Comments
“What’s it like to work with Scarlett Johansson?” I may not be the most adept interviewer, but I’m not about to blow my twenty minutes with Brian De Palma at the historic Biltmore Hotel in downtown Los Angeles with so routine a query. Actually, it’s the director himself posing the question, only it’s with weary sarcasm and to no one in particular – a grim acknowledgment of the boilerplate interrogations he’ll be enduring all day at the hands of personalities from Entertainment Tonight, Access Hollywood, Extra and all the other glitzy, low-cal entertainment news shows.