What a diappointment. If only it could’ve been more like The Zodiac.
No, really, I mean it. Looking back on it now, I liked Zodiac, especially compared to…well, whatever the hell happened to Dahlia. I guess it had something to do with the book it was based on.
I guess I went into the movie-watching experience all wrong. I was expecting a movie about an interesting unsolved murder from way back when, and instead I’m watching some movie about a couple of cops who are into boxing and there’s this chick who smokes funny and this other rich chick who likes slumming it, and hey, whaddyaknow, a dead person, but who cares, there’s sex and intrigue and we’re burning bodies here!
And all through it, all I wanted to do was shake the movie and remind it that it was called The Black Dahlia not The Miserable Lives of the Cops Who just so Happened to Be on Scene that Day. I felt a little insulted at the end when it felt like they went for a really cheap scare by showing the body again.
After that, I was so desperate for anything better to watch that I went through a bunch of trailers OnDemand, and then watched The Sixth Sense, which is still very good, and makes me feel a little sad for the horrible mess that guy’s made of himself.
The trailers were probably the best part of watching TV last night. I found out about 30 Days of Night, which looks like it could be good, and then was reminded of Invasion, which is really just Body Snatchers Version 28 — can we stop remaking that already? Then there was I Am Legend, which falls right into the same ‘why?’ category as Halloween. And I got tricked into watching the same, annoying Resident Evil: Extinction trailer because it was marked as new….
Too bad that 1-18-08 trailer isn’t available OnDemand yet. I think I’d like to see that a few more times on a screen a little bigger than my monitor [and without having to be exposed to a bunch of idiotic comments on YouTube….
I haven’t seen The Black Dahlia, but I doubt the problem was the book. The book is fantastic, even though it isn’t at all an accurate account of the case. James Ellroy just used the case as a jumping off point for going off on his own idiosyncratic psychodrama about the murder of his own mother when he was 12.
I would imagine that the real problem with the movie is that it was directed by Brian DePalma, who hasn’t made a decent movie since The Untouchables. Seriously, Cronnenberg should have made this movie.