An awful/brilliant film. There are some terrific set-pieces (the whole sequence with the discovery of the body is magnificent), though some seem like DePalma retreads (the murder of a major character not only echos Hitchcock's Vertigo but also a reversal of DePalma's Dressed to Kill); but the picture never hangs together as a whole. Like Sonic, I couldn't follow the story, and with the choppy editing (it looked like a TV movie), I stopped caring after awhile and just decided to wallow in the excess of it all.
Much of that wallow came from what has to be the most inept casting of the year. Scarlett Johansson comes off best--she doesn't embarrass herself too much. But everybody is completely out of synch with each other--as if they met each other for the first time every day on the set. Aaron Eckhart is ridiculously silly, Josh Hartnett has the personality of a filing cabnet, and Hilary Swank comes off little better than a teenager trying her damndest to evoke "sophisticated slut" in a high school play--and failing haplessly. But, seriously, thank heavens for Fiona Shaw--her excess was totally right for this glorious tripe of a film.
And Michel Legrand should sue Mark Isham for stealing the love theme from Summer of '42.
The Black Dahlia reviews
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dws1982 wrote:The Original BJ wrote:(I'm sure people will disagree. The folks at Slant will probably champion her for an Oscar nod, so what do I know.)
Why is Slant Magazine always used as some kind of target for derision on message boards lately? On another message board someone said he was looking forward to The Black Dahlia until Slant gave it four stars. That lead to a discussion about the magazine, and only one poster had a thoughtful complaint about them. The others were basically just "I don't like their approach".
Oscar Watch's forums have been exasperated with them for as long as I can remember, but that's a good thing. It means Slant is being read. The question is, why are they so unable to stop reading it.
I read that thread on Backstage, and with apologies to Eric, I thought all the comments were valid, including "I don't like their approach." Haven't we all extrapolated an approach or attitude from a few pieces of writing?
Anyway, I couldn't follow this movie at all, and unlike The Big Sleep, there wasn't much to compensate. It's at its best when it's at its darkest, stepping off the narrative rails for a few minutes and peeping into hidden or damaged psyches. It's almost like a film noir "Far From Heaven", as the film continually steps out of the bounds of material deemed acceptable for 30s crime noir films. But he has no grip on the story and the miscasting is a major bummer. Whatever DePalma is, he is no actors' director. Why else would he think Craig Wasson was an acceptable leading man in "Body Double"? Why else would he approve of John Lithgow's excesses in "Raising Cain"? So Fiona Shaw is just continuing the trend. As for the leading quartet, I'm ready to declare Aaron Eckhart the most inept actor working today, after this and the even worse "Thank You for Smoking". Scarlett Johnansson is too young for her role, and Hillary Swank has bad hair. Hartnett has that quality we love to cheer 'atta boy!' to sexy young leading men trying to carrry a movie, and that is efficiency. He doesn't misdeliver any lines or commit any conspicuous flubs, but there are no dimensions to him. And worse, the guy doesn't have a clue as to how to bring across voice-over narration. Narration in a noir film is when the evoked mood takes form in stylized language. These words are supposed to be poetic expressions! Hartnett should be luxuriating in them. But every word is given equal weight, equal value, as if he were nattering off a financial quarterly report. And that's the problem with nearly the whole cast. Except for Swank, everyone feels too contemporary, delivering Ellroy's stylizations with no sense of the style it was written in. It's completely at odds with the film.
"What the hell?"
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The New York Times joins the fray
Say ‘Brian De Palma.’ Let the Fighting Start.
By A. O. SCOTT
IF you ever want to start a fight in a room full of film critics — and honestly, who doesn’t? — you might bring up Brian De Palma’s “Mission to Mars.” Released in the spring of 2000, the film is an unusually somber space adventure starring Gary Sinise, Connie Nielsen and Tim Robbins as members of a crew of astronauts encountering danger and mystery on the surface of the red planet.
At first glance it does not seem to be the kind of picture that would incite ferocious controversy, since it contains no sexual provocation, little in the way of graphic violence and few obvious gestures toward topical relevance. A disappointment at the box office, it nonetheless stirred up unusually fierce sentiments among reviewers, or at least among its defenders, who used their regard for the movie as a cudgel against some of their colleagues.
“It can be said with certainty,” Armond White wrote in the weekly New York Press, that anyone panning “Mission to Mars” “does not understand movies, let alone like them.” Charles Taylor in the online magazine Salon, revisiting the movie on the occasion of its release on DVD later that year, sounded a similar note when he declared that “a critic who does not recognize the visual rhapsody” of the film ‘‘is about as trustworthy as a blind dance critic.”
This kind of language arises with arresting frequency in discussions of Mr. De Palma’s work. Almost from the beginning — certainly since he began to receive wide attention with the lurid, unnerving and strangely comical horror thrillers “Carrie” (1976), “The Fury” (1978) and “Dressed to Kill” (1980) — his name has been a critical fighting word. Sometimes the arguments fasten on a particular theme or issue: the sexual violence in “Casualties of War” (1989), for instance, or the general violence, extreme for its time, in “Scarface” (1983). But more often the combativeness of Mr. De Palma’s committed admirers reveals more about the nature of cinephilic ardor than it does about the filmmaker himself. Rock stars have fans; opera singers have worshipers; but movie directors have partisans. Liking a given director’s movies can feel like a matter of principle, not of taste; failing to appreciate them is therefore evidence of cretinism or, at best, a serious moral and intellectual deficiency.
Last month, in anticipation of the release of Mr. De Palma’s new movie, “The Black Dahlia” (which opened on Friday and which stars Josh Hartnett, Scarlett Johansson, Aaron Eckhart and Hilary Swank), the online magazine Slant, a repository of passionate and often prickly pop-cultural analysis, began publishing a series of essays on this director’s oeuvre. Many of those articles — new ones continue to appear at slantmagazine.com/film/features/briandepalma.asp — are packed with insights and ideas. They are also noisy with the din of gauntlets clattering to the ground.
Introducing the De Palma package — called “Auteur Fatale,” a play on the title of his 2002 film, “Femme Fatale” — the critic Eric Henderson tosses down a bucketful, construing Mr. De Palma’s career as a series of face-offs with his uncomprehending and uptight detractors.
“Perpetually a crucible to critics who liked only the most tasteful dash of sensualism mixed in with their rigid formalism,” Mr. Henderson writes, without naming names, “the release of each new De Palma film would inevitably bring forth offended defenses of sacrosanct cinematic aridity, and that was only if he got off easy.” More than that, it seems that his movies have served as a direct riposte to such critical bluestockings: “De Palma’s oeuvre owes at least some part of its brash vitality to the destructivism his critics sparked in the director’s bruised ego,” Mr. Henderson writes.
Whether or not this is true — and I’m not sure it does Mr. De Palma much of a favor to suppose that his creative potency springs from a vendetta against journalists — Mr. Henderson is hardly alone in taking a defiant, oppositional stance in the director’s defense. The tepid early reviews of “The Black Dahlia,” a tangled period noir based on James Ellroy’s novel about a famous 1947 murder case, may be an incitement to further polemics.
But who (or what, since the “critics” who are always imagined to be ganging up on Mr. De Palma are rarely specified or quoted) is being opposed? And in the name of what?
It depends on whom — and when — you ask. Like a number of other American directors, including Robert Altman, Martin Scorsese and Jonathan Demme, who came into their own in the 1970’s and early 80’s, Mr. De Palma, who turned 66 last week, found an important champion in Pauline Kael. Her long, enthusiastic New Yorker reviews of “Carrie,” “The Fury” and “Dressed to Kill” were not only appreciations of his technical skill and sadistic sense of mischief, but also important installments in her long-running polemic against what she took to be a stuffy, condescending way of looking at — or refusing to look at — movies. In many ways Mr. De Palma’s supremely artful approach to horror movies and slasher films was ideally suited to Ms. Kael’s aesthetic commitment to finding exaltation in entertainments too easily dismissed as trash.
In the “Carrie” review, the words trashiness, tawdriness, candy and schlock appear in the space of a few sentences, and none of them are used disapprovingly. They signal how much fun the movie is, and also that the fun is not mindless but knowing. In Ms. Kael’s account, which remains one of her most persuasive reviews, “Carrie” is at once terrifying and funny, satirical and heartfelt, exploitative and implicitly critical of the machinery of exploitation. It draws promiscuously on the movies of the past — in addition to Hitchcock, Ms. Kael invokes Buñuel, “Splendor in the Grass,” “The Bride of Frankenstein” and “The Wizard of Oz” — to arrive at something lively and new.
To put it another way, the movies that secured Mr. De Palma his critical following (which has not, it should be noted, been limited to Ms. Kael’s followers) exhibited many of the attributes of what people would eventually call postmodernism: a cool, ironic affect; the overt pastiche of work from the past; the insouciant mixture of high and low styles. They were also — sometimes playfully, sometimes vertiginously — self-conscious, making you aware of the psychological manipulations inherent in cinema even as they manipulated your own responses with sadistic glee.
Voyeurism, surveillance, the deceitful nature of appearances and the unstable nature of reality: these have been preoccupations of Mr. De Palma’s from the start, so much so that he has sometimes seemed to parody himself. Peeping Toms, mysterious doubles, evil twins, mirrors, video cameras, film clips, tape recordings — all are predictable elements of a De Palma movie.
When too many of them are missing, admirers can find themselves disappointed. Ms. Kael’s review of “Scarface,” for example, was published in The New Yorker under the heading “A De Palma Movie for People Who Don’t Like De Palma Movies.” That the advertisements for “The Black Dahlia” promise a new film “from the director of ‘Scarface’ and ‘The Untouchables’ ” is likely to frustrate true believers, since those two movies, maybe his best known, are also in many ways his least characteristic.
Over all, though, he has remained remarkably consistent. The teasing shock of “Sisters” (1973), with its murderous twins, resurfaces in the underappreciated “Raising Cain” (1992), just as the uncanniness of “Obsession” finds an echo in “Femme Fatale.” (“The Black Dahlia,” though a rare period piece, is nonetheless loaded with the director’s usual themes and visual hallmarks, from the mysterious doubles to the films-within-the-film to the vulnerable and monstrous femmes fatales.) But if he has not changed, his partisans — or at least the terms of their partisanship — have.
Ms. Kael’s celebration of trash has given way to the defense of art. Mr. De Palma, customarily associated with Hitchcock, Dario Argento and other masters of the movie Gothic, is now frequently placed in the company of cinema philosophes like Jean-Luc Godard and Chris Marker. No longer the playful postmodernist, he is now, in the eyes of his admirers, something of a classicist, his critical enemies not high-minded squares but soulless philistines.
In his brief for “Mission to Mars,” Mr. Taylor of Salon claimed that “more than any filmmaker now working, De Palma communicates his meanings almost entirely in visual terms.” The hyperbole in this statement — more than any filmmaker? Steven Spielberg? Wong Kar-wai? — indicates that he sees something at stake beyond the merits of a particular film or filmmaker, namely the continued appreciation of film as a visual medium.
In other words, if you find yourself attending, as professional critics and everyday moviegoers often will, to things like the psychology of characters, the coherence of plot or the plausibility of dialogue, you are missing not only the point, but also the art. And if critics, the presumed protectors of the art, are dismissive of its purest expression, then there is reason to worry, and maybe also to fight.
Even though Mr. De Palma’s detractors are accused of formalism, what elicits rapture from his admirers is in the end nothing other than his formal command. Even in his weakest movies there are moments of intense visual pleasure, in which he moves the camera with the elegant, arrogant virtuosity of a pianist tackling a treacherous passage of Liszt. “The Bonfire of the Vanities,” for instance, can be a chore to sit through — as it was, notoriously, a nightmare to make — but the opening shot, which follows a drunken Bruce Willis on his meandering course from an underground garage, up stairs and elevators, through one change of clothes and several female companions, and into a faceful of poached salmon — well, it will take your breath away, as describing it just did mine.
And Mr. De Palma specializes in choreographing extended set pieces that are variously breathless, breathtaking, heart-stopping and nerve-racking. Even a De Palma dilettante will single out favorites, while the more scholarly will arrange them in motifs. He has, for example, an evident affinity for elevators and stairwells, and for traveling shots in which his camera moves vertically and laterally as if borne aloft by birds or balloons.
He had the nerve to recreate the baby carriage-on-the-stairs sequence from Eisenstein’s “Battleship Potemkin,” in “The Untouchables” (1987). But that scene, in Mr. De Palma’s oeuvre, is just one variation on a theme, part of an anthology that includes the long, intricate chase and shootout in Grand Central Terminal at the climax of “Carlito’s Way” and, most recently, a suite of killings on a marble staircase that forms the centerpiece of “The Black Dahlia.”
Anyone familiar with Mr. De Palma’s work can compile a catalog of marvels, and there seems to be at least one in every picture. (Even “Mission to Mars” skeptics will smile at the image of Mr. Robbins and Ms. Nielsen dancing in zero gravity to Van Halen). But are such moments enough? That, it seems to me, is a case-by-case question of taste, and thus not really a matter for sweeping, all-or-nothing arguments.
In other words, you can like movies just fine and still not like “Mission to Mars.” But behind such combative assertions is a very real worry: that the possibility of recognizing and relishing such moments, and of appreciating the unique visual power of film, is at risk in a culture saturated with cheap, flashy, corrupting images, few of them worthy of a second look. Which is something Mr. De Palma’s films always demand and frequently reward.
Say ‘Brian De Palma.’ Let the Fighting Start.
By A. O. SCOTT
IF you ever want to start a fight in a room full of film critics — and honestly, who doesn’t? — you might bring up Brian De Palma’s “Mission to Mars.” Released in the spring of 2000, the film is an unusually somber space adventure starring Gary Sinise, Connie Nielsen and Tim Robbins as members of a crew of astronauts encountering danger and mystery on the surface of the red planet.
At first glance it does not seem to be the kind of picture that would incite ferocious controversy, since it contains no sexual provocation, little in the way of graphic violence and few obvious gestures toward topical relevance. A disappointment at the box office, it nonetheless stirred up unusually fierce sentiments among reviewers, or at least among its defenders, who used their regard for the movie as a cudgel against some of their colleagues.
“It can be said with certainty,” Armond White wrote in the weekly New York Press, that anyone panning “Mission to Mars” “does not understand movies, let alone like them.” Charles Taylor in the online magazine Salon, revisiting the movie on the occasion of its release on DVD later that year, sounded a similar note when he declared that “a critic who does not recognize the visual rhapsody” of the film ‘‘is about as trustworthy as a blind dance critic.”
This kind of language arises with arresting frequency in discussions of Mr. De Palma’s work. Almost from the beginning — certainly since he began to receive wide attention with the lurid, unnerving and strangely comical horror thrillers “Carrie” (1976), “The Fury” (1978) and “Dressed to Kill” (1980) — his name has been a critical fighting word. Sometimes the arguments fasten on a particular theme or issue: the sexual violence in “Casualties of War” (1989), for instance, or the general violence, extreme for its time, in “Scarface” (1983). But more often the combativeness of Mr. De Palma’s committed admirers reveals more about the nature of cinephilic ardor than it does about the filmmaker himself. Rock stars have fans; opera singers have worshipers; but movie directors have partisans. Liking a given director’s movies can feel like a matter of principle, not of taste; failing to appreciate them is therefore evidence of cretinism or, at best, a serious moral and intellectual deficiency.
Last month, in anticipation of the release of Mr. De Palma’s new movie, “The Black Dahlia” (which opened on Friday and which stars Josh Hartnett, Scarlett Johansson, Aaron Eckhart and Hilary Swank), the online magazine Slant, a repository of passionate and often prickly pop-cultural analysis, began publishing a series of essays on this director’s oeuvre. Many of those articles — new ones continue to appear at slantmagazine.com/film/features/briandepalma.asp — are packed with insights and ideas. They are also noisy with the din of gauntlets clattering to the ground.
Introducing the De Palma package — called “Auteur Fatale,” a play on the title of his 2002 film, “Femme Fatale” — the critic Eric Henderson tosses down a bucketful, construing Mr. De Palma’s career as a series of face-offs with his uncomprehending and uptight detractors.
“Perpetually a crucible to critics who liked only the most tasteful dash of sensualism mixed in with their rigid formalism,” Mr. Henderson writes, without naming names, “the release of each new De Palma film would inevitably bring forth offended defenses of sacrosanct cinematic aridity, and that was only if he got off easy.” More than that, it seems that his movies have served as a direct riposte to such critical bluestockings: “De Palma’s oeuvre owes at least some part of its brash vitality to the destructivism his critics sparked in the director’s bruised ego,” Mr. Henderson writes.
Whether or not this is true — and I’m not sure it does Mr. De Palma much of a favor to suppose that his creative potency springs from a vendetta against journalists — Mr. Henderson is hardly alone in taking a defiant, oppositional stance in the director’s defense. The tepid early reviews of “The Black Dahlia,” a tangled period noir based on James Ellroy’s novel about a famous 1947 murder case, may be an incitement to further polemics.
But who (or what, since the “critics” who are always imagined to be ganging up on Mr. De Palma are rarely specified or quoted) is being opposed? And in the name of what?
It depends on whom — and when — you ask. Like a number of other American directors, including Robert Altman, Martin Scorsese and Jonathan Demme, who came into their own in the 1970’s and early 80’s, Mr. De Palma, who turned 66 last week, found an important champion in Pauline Kael. Her long, enthusiastic New Yorker reviews of “Carrie,” “The Fury” and “Dressed to Kill” were not only appreciations of his technical skill and sadistic sense of mischief, but also important installments in her long-running polemic against what she took to be a stuffy, condescending way of looking at — or refusing to look at — movies. In many ways Mr. De Palma’s supremely artful approach to horror movies and slasher films was ideally suited to Ms. Kael’s aesthetic commitment to finding exaltation in entertainments too easily dismissed as trash.
In the “Carrie” review, the words trashiness, tawdriness, candy and schlock appear in the space of a few sentences, and none of them are used disapprovingly. They signal how much fun the movie is, and also that the fun is not mindless but knowing. In Ms. Kael’s account, which remains one of her most persuasive reviews, “Carrie” is at once terrifying and funny, satirical and heartfelt, exploitative and implicitly critical of the machinery of exploitation. It draws promiscuously on the movies of the past — in addition to Hitchcock, Ms. Kael invokes Buñuel, “Splendor in the Grass,” “The Bride of Frankenstein” and “The Wizard of Oz” — to arrive at something lively and new.
To put it another way, the movies that secured Mr. De Palma his critical following (which has not, it should be noted, been limited to Ms. Kael’s followers) exhibited many of the attributes of what people would eventually call postmodernism: a cool, ironic affect; the overt pastiche of work from the past; the insouciant mixture of high and low styles. They were also — sometimes playfully, sometimes vertiginously — self-conscious, making you aware of the psychological manipulations inherent in cinema even as they manipulated your own responses with sadistic glee.
Voyeurism, surveillance, the deceitful nature of appearances and the unstable nature of reality: these have been preoccupations of Mr. De Palma’s from the start, so much so that he has sometimes seemed to parody himself. Peeping Toms, mysterious doubles, evil twins, mirrors, video cameras, film clips, tape recordings — all are predictable elements of a De Palma movie.
When too many of them are missing, admirers can find themselves disappointed. Ms. Kael’s review of “Scarface,” for example, was published in The New Yorker under the heading “A De Palma Movie for People Who Don’t Like De Palma Movies.” That the advertisements for “The Black Dahlia” promise a new film “from the director of ‘Scarface’ and ‘The Untouchables’ ” is likely to frustrate true believers, since those two movies, maybe his best known, are also in many ways his least characteristic.
Over all, though, he has remained remarkably consistent. The teasing shock of “Sisters” (1973), with its murderous twins, resurfaces in the underappreciated “Raising Cain” (1992), just as the uncanniness of “Obsession” finds an echo in “Femme Fatale.” (“The Black Dahlia,” though a rare period piece, is nonetheless loaded with the director’s usual themes and visual hallmarks, from the mysterious doubles to the films-within-the-film to the vulnerable and monstrous femmes fatales.) But if he has not changed, his partisans — or at least the terms of their partisanship — have.
Ms. Kael’s celebration of trash has given way to the defense of art. Mr. De Palma, customarily associated with Hitchcock, Dario Argento and other masters of the movie Gothic, is now frequently placed in the company of cinema philosophes like Jean-Luc Godard and Chris Marker. No longer the playful postmodernist, he is now, in the eyes of his admirers, something of a classicist, his critical enemies not high-minded squares but soulless philistines.
In his brief for “Mission to Mars,” Mr. Taylor of Salon claimed that “more than any filmmaker now working, De Palma communicates his meanings almost entirely in visual terms.” The hyperbole in this statement — more than any filmmaker? Steven Spielberg? Wong Kar-wai? — indicates that he sees something at stake beyond the merits of a particular film or filmmaker, namely the continued appreciation of film as a visual medium.
In other words, if you find yourself attending, as professional critics and everyday moviegoers often will, to things like the psychology of characters, the coherence of plot or the plausibility of dialogue, you are missing not only the point, but also the art. And if critics, the presumed protectors of the art, are dismissive of its purest expression, then there is reason to worry, and maybe also to fight.
Even though Mr. De Palma’s detractors are accused of formalism, what elicits rapture from his admirers is in the end nothing other than his formal command. Even in his weakest movies there are moments of intense visual pleasure, in which he moves the camera with the elegant, arrogant virtuosity of a pianist tackling a treacherous passage of Liszt. “The Bonfire of the Vanities,” for instance, can be a chore to sit through — as it was, notoriously, a nightmare to make — but the opening shot, which follows a drunken Bruce Willis on his meandering course from an underground garage, up stairs and elevators, through one change of clothes and several female companions, and into a faceful of poached salmon — well, it will take your breath away, as describing it just did mine.
And Mr. De Palma specializes in choreographing extended set pieces that are variously breathless, breathtaking, heart-stopping and nerve-racking. Even a De Palma dilettante will single out favorites, while the more scholarly will arrange them in motifs. He has, for example, an evident affinity for elevators and stairwells, and for traveling shots in which his camera moves vertically and laterally as if borne aloft by birds or balloons.
He had the nerve to recreate the baby carriage-on-the-stairs sequence from Eisenstein’s “Battleship Potemkin,” in “The Untouchables” (1987). But that scene, in Mr. De Palma’s oeuvre, is just one variation on a theme, part of an anthology that includes the long, intricate chase and shootout in Grand Central Terminal at the climax of “Carlito’s Way” and, most recently, a suite of killings on a marble staircase that forms the centerpiece of “The Black Dahlia.”
Anyone familiar with Mr. De Palma’s work can compile a catalog of marvels, and there seems to be at least one in every picture. (Even “Mission to Mars” skeptics will smile at the image of Mr. Robbins and Ms. Nielsen dancing in zero gravity to Van Halen). But are such moments enough? That, it seems to me, is a case-by-case question of taste, and thus not really a matter for sweeping, all-or-nothing arguments.
In other words, you can like movies just fine and still not like “Mission to Mars.” But behind such combative assertions is a very real worry: that the possibility of recognizing and relishing such moments, and of appreciating the unique visual power of film, is at risk in a culture saturated with cheap, flashy, corrupting images, few of them worthy of a second look. Which is something Mr. De Palma’s films always demand and frequently reward.
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Your hunch is correct to the extent that Keith, author of Slant's Dahlia review, wrote me in praise of Shaw, saying "that woman has balls!"The Original BJ wrote:The worst of the bunch, though, is Fiona Shaw, who should be on the shortlist for the year's worst performances. (I'm sure people will disagree. The folks at Slant will probably champion her for an Oscar nod, so what do I know.)
dws, where is this anti-Slant forum? I won't barge in, I just wanna gawk.
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Please, let me make it clear: I LOVE Slant Magazine.
I think the folks over there are fantastic.
What I meant was that I think that performance is bound to divide people into adore/loath camps, and given Slant's tendency to fall on the "adore" side of all things De Palma, I figured someone over there would be the most likely to champion a performance MANY will find atrocious.
I greately admire the opinions of those Slant, and so, jumping the gun of course, if Fiona Shaw's performance were to be loved over there, I would feel like I was genuinely missing something rather than that they have bad taste. Hence the "so what do I know" comment.
I really did not mean to deride the magazine at all, because I feel quite the opposite about the mag.
I think the folks over there are fantastic.
What I meant was that I think that performance is bound to divide people into adore/loath camps, and given Slant's tendency to fall on the "adore" side of all things De Palma, I figured someone over there would be the most likely to champion a performance MANY will find atrocious.
I greately admire the opinions of those Slant, and so, jumping the gun of course, if Fiona Shaw's performance were to be loved over there, I would feel like I was genuinely missing something rather than that they have bad taste. Hence the "so what do I know" comment.
I really did not mean to deride the magazine at all, because I feel quite the opposite about the mag.
Why is Slant Magazine always used as some kind of target for derision on message boards lately? On another message board someone said he was looking forward to The Black Dahlia until Slant gave it four stars. That lead to a discussion about the magazine, and only one poster had a thoughtful complaint about them. The others were basically just "I don't like their approach".The Original BJ wrote:(I'm sure people will disagree. The folks at Slant will probably champion her for an Oscar nod, so what do I know.)
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Let me first say that I think The Black Dahlia is probably the most impressive picture of the year thus far. But before I get to my thoughts on the film, I'd like to take some of the critics to task for their latest dismissal of De Palma.
Let me make it clear, too, that I do not consider myself a De Palma-head. I find him a dazzling, often thrilling stylist who, like fellow mainstream auteur Steven Spielberg, often works with less-than-stellar scripts, and thus, can often get less-than-stellar results. While I won't miss a move by either filmmaker, I think both have produced cinematic outputs more inconsistent than their talents may deserve. (And as far as recent De Palma goes, I have absolutely no affection for Mission: Impossible, Snake Eyes, or Mission to Mars, and think they deserved their critical beatings.)
But the largely negative reviews thrown at Femme Fatale and now The Black Dahlia have me absolutely scratching my head. I don't think either picture is one hundred percent successful, but I found both to be audacious, original, visually sensational, and provocative works that maybe bite off a LITTLE more than they can chew, but whose excesses I am more than willing to tolerate in the face of such ambition. Perhaps what makes me particularly distressed this go-round is that I've been rather perplexed at how some recent films have received such showers of acclaim, most notably Half Nelson and Sherrybaby, two absolutely inconsequential nothings. Despite typically strong (though not revelatory) work from their leads, both films are completely ugly visually, have only the barest story threads, and quite simply don't seem to be striving for anything. So when along comes a mainstream film that looks and sounds glorious, that features a rich and complex plot, and that mounts one ambitious set piece after another, excuse me if I don't think it's cause for celebration. And excuse me for being disappointed with those critics who have all but panned this meaty and challenging work.
I have a lot of thoughts on The Black Dahlia (as I assume many will after seeing the picture), but I'll begin by saying that the film initially surprised me for what it is not: an investigation of the Black Dahlia murder in the way that Hollywoodland is an investigation of George Reeves. While the murder in Hollywoodland consumes the picture, the Black Dahlia case is practically reduced to a subplot. While watching the opening reel of Black Dahlia, I became aware that the film was taking a long while to introduce the murder into the narrative, and yet, I never felt like I was waiting for the story to get started. Rather, I realized that THIS story—of the cops played by Hartnett and Eckhart, and the lady in their triangle, Ms. Scarlett—and these relationships would make up the bulk of the picture. This feeling solidified when, in an absolutely bravura sequence, the Dahlia murder is discovered on the sidelines of the picture, as both cops stumble upon it while in the midst of another case.
I certainly won't reveal the narrative twists and turns that follow (not that I could explain them if I tried), but I will try to partially defend the film's most oft-criticized element: that convoluted resolution. This is not to say I didn't have problems with the way the murder is resolved. There is LOTS of exposition in that final reel, and after all the talkety-talk about who did what to whom and why, I still felt very confused about exactly what the film believes happened to Elizabeth Short. And so, on a narrative level, I agree that the picture does not wrap things up in a satisfactory manner.
However, I have to admit that the confusing nature of the resolution hardly hindered my enjoyment of the picture, mainly because I think "solving" the murder of the Black Dahlia was never really the film's number one agenda to begin with. (Again, compare this to Hollywoodland, which I found mostly unsatisfying because the murder investigation occupies so much space but leads NOWHERE.) I almost wonder if the rush through the murder explanation wasn't done on purpose, as if to rather cynically illustrate that very few of the film's corrupt characters actually seem to care about this poor victim of Hollywood and her gruesome death. I'm not sure how well the film works as a murder mystery, but as a horror film about the greed, power, and broken dreams that lie at the heart of American institutions (law & order, big business, and, of course, Hollywood) I think it works gangbusters.
I had problems with some of the acting. Hartnett is surprisingly solid as a noir hero, and Eckhart is strong too. But the women fare shockingly worse. I think Scarlett Johansson, an actress I LOVE, is just wrong here. While a perfect femme fatale, she didn't work at all for me as a homemaker type. That she speaks in an unnaturally high voice (for her) throughout the picture only makes her seem more out of place. And Hilary Swank has gotten strong reviews, but she seemed a mite too affected for me. (She and Diane Lane must have practiced their Old Hollywood "mannerisms" together.) And there's no way this won't sound unbearably sexist, but . . . well, I just don't think Swank is sexy enough for this role. There, I said it. Sorry.
The worst of the bunch, though, is Fiona Shaw, who should be on the shortlist for the year's worst performances. (I'm sure people will disagree. The folks at Slant will probably champion her for an Oscar nod, so what do I know.) Let me just say that she didn't work at all for me. Not. At. All. She was practically acting in a different country she was so far off the wavelength of this film.
The standout for me, though, is unquestionably Mia Kirshner as Elizabeth Short. Her screen tests (and another, um, film she appears in) are riveting, disturbing, and devastating, and provide the film so much of its necessary gravitas.
I will be very interested to see what y'all around here think of this film. I still do wish it had resolved a bit better at the end. But what I most remember about The Black Dahlia, even just the morning after, is not the convoluted plot, but the series of frightening, sad, and grotesquely beautiful images and sounds that De Palma puts on screen. I don't mean to overrate the thing, because it's got its bumps, but after a summer of dull and tedious films that barely seemed to strive for anything, it's nice to finally see a picture that reminds us how thrilling an experience going to the movies can be.
Let me make it clear, too, that I do not consider myself a De Palma-head. I find him a dazzling, often thrilling stylist who, like fellow mainstream auteur Steven Spielberg, often works with less-than-stellar scripts, and thus, can often get less-than-stellar results. While I won't miss a move by either filmmaker, I think both have produced cinematic outputs more inconsistent than their talents may deserve. (And as far as recent De Palma goes, I have absolutely no affection for Mission: Impossible, Snake Eyes, or Mission to Mars, and think they deserved their critical beatings.)
But the largely negative reviews thrown at Femme Fatale and now The Black Dahlia have me absolutely scratching my head. I don't think either picture is one hundred percent successful, but I found both to be audacious, original, visually sensational, and provocative works that maybe bite off a LITTLE more than they can chew, but whose excesses I am more than willing to tolerate in the face of such ambition. Perhaps what makes me particularly distressed this go-round is that I've been rather perplexed at how some recent films have received such showers of acclaim, most notably Half Nelson and Sherrybaby, two absolutely inconsequential nothings. Despite typically strong (though not revelatory) work from their leads, both films are completely ugly visually, have only the barest story threads, and quite simply don't seem to be striving for anything. So when along comes a mainstream film that looks and sounds glorious, that features a rich and complex plot, and that mounts one ambitious set piece after another, excuse me if I don't think it's cause for celebration. And excuse me for being disappointed with those critics who have all but panned this meaty and challenging work.
I have a lot of thoughts on The Black Dahlia (as I assume many will after seeing the picture), but I'll begin by saying that the film initially surprised me for what it is not: an investigation of the Black Dahlia murder in the way that Hollywoodland is an investigation of George Reeves. While the murder in Hollywoodland consumes the picture, the Black Dahlia case is practically reduced to a subplot. While watching the opening reel of Black Dahlia, I became aware that the film was taking a long while to introduce the murder into the narrative, and yet, I never felt like I was waiting for the story to get started. Rather, I realized that THIS story—of the cops played by Hartnett and Eckhart, and the lady in their triangle, Ms. Scarlett—and these relationships would make up the bulk of the picture. This feeling solidified when, in an absolutely bravura sequence, the Dahlia murder is discovered on the sidelines of the picture, as both cops stumble upon it while in the midst of another case.
I certainly won't reveal the narrative twists and turns that follow (not that I could explain them if I tried), but I will try to partially defend the film's most oft-criticized element: that convoluted resolution. This is not to say I didn't have problems with the way the murder is resolved. There is LOTS of exposition in that final reel, and after all the talkety-talk about who did what to whom and why, I still felt very confused about exactly what the film believes happened to Elizabeth Short. And so, on a narrative level, I agree that the picture does not wrap things up in a satisfactory manner.
However, I have to admit that the confusing nature of the resolution hardly hindered my enjoyment of the picture, mainly because I think "solving" the murder of the Black Dahlia was never really the film's number one agenda to begin with. (Again, compare this to Hollywoodland, which I found mostly unsatisfying because the murder investigation occupies so much space but leads NOWHERE.) I almost wonder if the rush through the murder explanation wasn't done on purpose, as if to rather cynically illustrate that very few of the film's corrupt characters actually seem to care about this poor victim of Hollywood and her gruesome death. I'm not sure how well the film works as a murder mystery, but as a horror film about the greed, power, and broken dreams that lie at the heart of American institutions (law & order, big business, and, of course, Hollywood) I think it works gangbusters.
I had problems with some of the acting. Hartnett is surprisingly solid as a noir hero, and Eckhart is strong too. But the women fare shockingly worse. I think Scarlett Johansson, an actress I LOVE, is just wrong here. While a perfect femme fatale, she didn't work at all for me as a homemaker type. That she speaks in an unnaturally high voice (for her) throughout the picture only makes her seem more out of place. And Hilary Swank has gotten strong reviews, but she seemed a mite too affected for me. (She and Diane Lane must have practiced their Old Hollywood "mannerisms" together.) And there's no way this won't sound unbearably sexist, but . . . well, I just don't think Swank is sexy enough for this role. There, I said it. Sorry.
The worst of the bunch, though, is Fiona Shaw, who should be on the shortlist for the year's worst performances. (I'm sure people will disagree. The folks at Slant will probably champion her for an Oscar nod, so what do I know.) Let me just say that she didn't work at all for me. Not. At. All. She was practically acting in a different country she was so far off the wavelength of this film.
The standout for me, though, is unquestionably Mia Kirshner as Elizabeth Short. Her screen tests (and another, um, film she appears in) are riveting, disturbing, and devastating, and provide the film so much of its necessary gravitas.
I will be very interested to see what y'all around here think of this film. I still do wish it had resolved a bit better at the end. But what I most remember about The Black Dahlia, even just the morning after, is not the convoluted plot, but the series of frightening, sad, and grotesquely beautiful images and sounds that De Palma puts on screen. I don't mean to overrate the thing, because it's got its bumps, but after a summer of dull and tedious films that barely seemed to strive for anything, it's nice to finally see a picture that reminds us how thrilling an experience going to the movies can be.
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anonymous1980
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