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So did anyone have a chance to see Dahlia? Is it as bad as it was when I saw it six months ago or have they recut it into a decent movie?

anyone got #'s on Artie Lange's Beer League?

Black Dahlia is a very entertaining mess. I can understand people really hating it because it is fairly incoherent, but I enjoyed it for the most part. It won't be as big of a bomb as Mission to Mars, which really left a bad taste in everyone's mouth as it ended.

Surprised that The Covenant didn't have a bigger drop this weekend, but I guess there's only so far it can drop after such a bad opening.

I went with The Last Kiss, and wasn't expecting much out of it, and was pleasantly surprised. It's not Garden State, which will probably piss off some people who wanted to see a quasi-sequel to Garden State. It's a bit more heavier and honestly, I don't find it hard to somewhat despise the Braff's character. Not a 'fun' date movie and probably not the best movie for anyone contemplating leaving their knocked-up girlfriend.

in answer to Mr wrectum's question: NO

not a decent movie and Swank is Terrible...or terribly miscast

On the whole, “The Black Dahlia” suffers from a remote and non-engaging first half.

"not a decent movie and Swank is Terrible...or terribly miscast"

Yup, I thought she was the worst part. Terribly hammy and unsexy. But I was listening to Joe Morgenstern's review on KCRW and he praised Swank and Fiona Shaw while stating that Johannson's performance was abysmal. Opinions vary.

I guess I'm the only person on the face of the earth that liked Hilary Swank the best in this movie. I thought her character was far more entertaining than the others and different from other roles she played, at least more than the other actors who were just doing the same thing they always do.

i guess I found Swank unfeminine, unentertaining and she looked like Hilary Swank with make-up...and Hartnett looked like hartnett with a Jan-Michael Vincent thing going on and...so on. No one seemed to be playing a role that I could believe or get into...and to be honest, ANY noir I would hope to be something to be praised since we don;t get enough of that stuff, but I just didn;t buy it. Nor was I entertained, the most important reason to be at a flick instead of doing something else.

I guess I am still waiting for another LA Confidential. or hoping.

LA Confidential is one of my top 3 fave movies of all time. I'm not holding my breath that there's gonna be another modern film noir like it anytime soon.

I also love noir. I'm disappointed to hear the Dahlia isn't great. I keep hearing about the sex scene with Hartnett and Johansson and that it's distracting. Is it that big of a deal? I won't get to see it until way later. Besides LA Confidential, can anyone recommend a modern noir to me? Thanks in advance.

I really want to see the Illusionist. I haven't heard much about it on this blog. How is it? Have anyone here seen it? Mr. Poland?

i don't know how much dahlia cost, but it seems like it's kind of a hit with an $11 mill 2nd place open.

Another good noir that's kind of underrated is Devil in a Blue Dress. It has a few missteps, but overall a good little film. It's too bad it didn't make much money, would have been great if they continued with the series.

i love noir & particularly the French realism noirs, but there isn;t much modern noir I like since LA Confidential except for some of the Japanese cop stories. The Beat my Heart Skipped (2005) was very good(although some annoying 'habitudes' of the actors) and approaching noir...well sorts. It felt like one. Devil in a blue dress (before LA Confidential...1995?) is alright, and even though Sonatine (1993) isn;t listed as a noir, I always felt like it was.

too few Noirs for sure...

Is The Man Who Wasn't There not considering Noir these day? I always figured it was.

Another yawn enducing weekend.

Ouch for Hollywoodland.

My picks for best recent US noir - WOMAN CHASER and LOST HIGHWAY/ MULHOLLAND DRIVE, LAST SEDUCTION and the wildly perverse ROMEO IS BLEEDING.

Lota - I always enjoy your selections but I must heartily disagree with BEAT and SONATINE being labelled as any type of noir, even though they are both superior works. What elements of BEAT lent itself to noir?

Oh Lota, what you didn't get was that this was a DePalma movie first, a noir after that. Swank's performance was excellent if you can get that she isn't trying to be particularly feminine or sexy even, it's pretty obvious that she doesn't resemble Mia Kirshner in the slightest yet the characters in the movie keep insisting 'you look just like her' which is basically an ironic tactic. There's a lot going on, but unfortunately DePalma can't hold it together and in the end nobody cares.

I think what a lot of people didn't get (and at this point, it feels like David should create a Black Dahlia spoiler thread)... is that back during this time period, women wearing all black except for at funerals was probably an oddity and something you didn't see every day, so for Swank's character to show up dressed all in black similar to Kirshner's character, to most people they would think they looked the same. I don't think they were supposed to look like identical twins or anything and I do believe there was some irony meant which I don't think people understood.

Anyway, this movie's not going to have any legs... I've been hearing a lot of negative reactions to it on the 'net...more than any other movie in recent memory.

"I really want to see the Illusionist. I haven't heard much about it on this blog. How is it? Have anyone here seen it? Mr. Poland?"

I really loved it... one of my favorite movies this year, actually, and I'm going to go see it again today.

Why didn't they cast Mia Kurschner (er, however it's spelt) in the Swank role. I mean, it's not like she's in the movie much as the dead girl.

On The Illusionist I've been hearing from reliable friends thats Jessica Biel is the best of the bunch.

What is Crank still doing on the chart?

*****SPOILERS HO*****

Mr Dr Boam's Doctor--I may have indicated (although possibly not since I had way too much Sangria at a Party last night) that they are Not Noirs but FEEL like Noirs to me. You have to feel it baby. I know on the face of it that they are Not. Sonatine deliberately Looks like an anti-noir with all the intense light and almost childlike reflections which are almost like the afterlife extending backward to intrude into life to show what could be (which made things worse and blacker for Takeshi)--everything made to seem the opposite of what's really brewing. But very noir at the base of it--it IS a dark detective story with Takeshi as the "dead man" who is being "invesitgated" until the sad inevitable. I was completely fooled and didn't expect the ending, as I should have.

I don;t know why, but as much as Beat My heart skipped annoyed me mightily at times it just felt like a desperate, I-can;t change-my-fate type of noir. I hated the scumbag lead yet I was desperate for him to succeed.

And I also almost feel like Mulholland Drive feels like a Noir. a F-ed up version of noir that only Lynch can do (that, and Blue Velvet).

Another one, Let Him Have It (1991), one of the few movie ever which has made me cry. Again, that feels like noir even though it is an infamous true case/miscarriage of justice.

Let Him Have it is how you do a "period" noir piece correctly. Excellent. Black Dahlia could have beenefited from the reality infusion--if it had had half the authenticity of Let Him Have it, Dahlia would have been really good.

And JEFF...
"Oh Lota, what you didn't get was that this was a DePalma movie first, a noir after that."

Jeff if Dave ever has a Blog party, I am going to show up just to punch you in your fat head. Please don't tell me I don;t "get" something because I didn't find the mess entertaining.

Yes, "nobody carrs". The reason why, in my opinion is no one is playing a believable part. A good potential good noir for adults turned into an eyesore by a bunch of 20-somethings who can't even act their shoe sizes. And in my opinion, Swank, was the worst thing about the movie simply because the expections of a two time oscar winner are much higher. I guess the best that could be said of Swank's performance is that she didn;t do anything different than her costars. Okay it's unfair to see her as "worse" than her costars but damn if she wasn;t a big glaring mistakes comapred to what she is capable of. Kirshner would have been more beleivable in the Swank role.

Hell I would have preferred Streep to play Swank's part subject to time travel flashback thingy. She can act with black hair and make-up at least, and she can be feminine when she wants to be.

scuse my spelling mishtakes. I'll go have coffee now.

Here are two modern noir films that are basically riffs on the same story - Miller's Crossing and Brick.

No film in recent memory have I seen prompt such a bad audience reaction as Dahlia did last night. The whole thing played like a satire of film noir minus the humor. At some point the people in the theater felt trapped and had to find their own way around the awfulness -- which naturally manifested itself in laughing at the whole thing. And yes, Swank's line about "You fucked her because she looks like me!" brought down the house. What an embarrassment.

As for The Illusionist... it really reminded me of The Sting, but magicians instead of grifters. And like that overrated film, someone should have told the filmmakers that their story ends in the second act.

De Palma's a genius, but I just read that Dahlia cost $70 mill. What kind of non-geniuses at Universal greenlight a Depalma/Hartnett movie at $70 million? Are they nuts?

I've read $50 million. What kind of non-geniuses at Universal decided to release a $50 million flick in September... Sandwiched between Hollywoodland and All The King's Men? Are they nuts?

"Gridiron Gang" won the weekend because it was the only new release promoted properly. The other 3 weren't.

"Black Dahlia" name-checked two 80's movies. "Everybody's Hero" was endorsed by two "family values" groups -- always a sign of a flop. "The Last Kiss" name-checked two recent Oscar Bait pics.

Sorry, name-checking is NOT going to convince the public to see your movie! Neither will pandering to the prudes.

For Martin: "Beer League" has an estimate of $320K from 164 theaters. WFAN (all-sports radio station) in New York ran a lot of commercials for that movie.

Mojo says Dahlia cost $50, BO Prophets says $70, and AP says $60. Whatever that case, it should have been made for $30, at most. The higher numbers only make sense when they had Fincher on-board and possibly Pitt. I saw the $11 mill open for a Depalma/Hartnett movie and to me that seemed perfectly fine. But the fact that it's a big-budget movie and was expected to open to $20 mill makes absolutely no sense to me.

i liked Miller's Crossing, forgot about that...but wasn't so convinced by Brick--the youngsters were convinced it was a noir however and that was the target audience I guess, so who am I to say it wasn't beleivable. The IMDB surfer kids seem to love it.

I think the audience reaction where I saw Dahlia was one more of despair & confusion rather than Laughing out loud, although unexpected laughs peppered the atmosphere.

I think all the post-college years folk wanted it desperately to be a good noir (headaches were induced) and the younger set thought it was comically bad and they were doing most of the laughing. It must be on the road to gleaning pretty bad word of mouth. I can;t imagine breaking even on that one, regardless of which is the correct budget cost.

Lota, my head is not fat, sorry.

Whether you find Dahlia entertaining or not is not the point I was making; the point was that DePalma is a director who does what he wants to do, even if it's goofy, and to expect him to make a movie that plays by the rules meant that your expectations going into the movie would be off.

Similarly, I think it should be made clear that it's not that Swank gave a bad performance. Like you said, she's a two-time Oscar winner, so she knows what she's doing. The choices that she and DePalma made in the performance were not to your liking, which is something different.

I can't imagine it really cost $50 million. It was shot in Bulgaria, for god's sake.

Chucky, WHY DO YOU HATE NAME-CHECKING SO MUCH?

If DePalma "does what he wants to do" then he should be giving his Fees back to those who put up the dosh--this won;t be a picture in profit.

He didn't put up all the $$$ for the movie himself, so he should concentrate in future on making a movie that people will want to pay to see instead of doing "what he wants to do"!

I don't think your argument holds up there. Would you tell Orson Welles "why don't you make this B-movie a little clearer to follow and spend more time on Charlton Heston than yourself"? After all, he didn't put up the money to make Touch of Evil.

I'm sorry you didn't get the Black Dahlia movie you wanted, I certainly don't blame you for disliking it.

WHat's to argue Jeff?

STudio & prodcos put up money...director & actors paid to do a decent job. Unless I have been mislead I wasn't under the impression that Brian DePalma was working for 'free' or putting up a large amount of $$$ so he could do whatever he wanted. I don;t think he got Swank & co for Indie SAG rate either.

It's a business, and when that much money is invested in a project, one would hope more care would be taken with the subject matter so those putting up the cash could at least could have a prayer of breaking even.

SImply put--dePalma did an Ed Wood-ization of Ellroy's novel and I didn;t appreciate it. It felt like a rip-off and it felt lazy.

Being a noir and Ellroy fan, I was very annoyed at the liberties that deprived me of enjoyment.

Apparently, "Everyone's Hero" had a giant Friday-Saturday bump (70+%) while Dahlia and Last Kiss flatlined on Saturday, so it's firmly in third for the weekend. Last Kiss was great (and my theatre in NYC was basically sold out), but this is not a movie that's going to play in Peoria. It was mishandled by Dreamworks, which should have platformed it to allow for buzz to build and not tried to sell it as a broad ha-ha comedy. Sad considering how well they sold American Beauty a few years back.

DePalma was hired to do a job, yes, but they also hired him and not Uwe Boll or Renny Harlin or whoever, and if the producers didn't like what he was doing, they should have fired him. Which didn't happen. And I personally would much rather see an interesting mess like this movie than something boring and routine.
Like I said, I don't blame you for not liking it, but it was not a lazy film and not an Ed Wood level piece of incompetence. I'm glad that you're at least willing to admit that your ire is largely based on being a fan of the book and Ellroy.

Lota thanks for the clarification... I was impressed with BEAT and the mesmerising performance from the lead. I would have thought you'd check VIOLENT COP for a Takeshi noir. I find there's too much joy in his most of his work, even when the weight of his characters desperation makes it unbearable at times.

LET HIM HAVE IT - again a great film but didn't feel noir to me... perhaps growing up with the beeb and witnessing lots of great cop/detective TV. Have you ever seen OUT? Now thats some UK noir for ya.

Please don't tell me that DePalma has mined the goofiness of RAISING CAIN or FEMME FATALE for yet another round with DAHLIA. How long did they screw around with this project... is it all DePalma's fault or is Friedmans script to shoulder some blame. I guess we should say goodbye to THE BIG NOWHERE and some good old fashioned skullf**king then. Is DAHLIA as bad as its trailers?

The script is definitely not as smooth or coherent as it needs to be. But it's definitely DePalma who orchestrated the huge range in the performances from restrained to absurdly over-the-top.

Mr Dr JBD

do you mean the Trevor Preston written Miniseries 'Out'? It was a bit before my time but I did see it on DVD, it was good underworld stuff, but I DO think Let him Have it is Noir, at least from the perspective of Derek Bentley (if one was trying to put oneself in his place, and I was).

Many of Kitano's movies seem noir to me, excluding "getting Any" which is just offbeat Japanese comedy, and Dolls which is a modern nightmarish fable. I think there is an idealism in Kitano's movies, but bone-crushing real life usually blots it out somewhat. Violet Cop is dark, yes.

well the thread now, as a whole, has a good list of noirs, real and perceived made in the last decade or so anyway!

Dahlia IS as bad as the trailers.

For goodness sake Jeff, that's not much of a reassuring defense of the movie...or the director, acting or editing. You make it sound as if it were all planned. It would have been nice if the marketers let us in on the joke so we were aware that we would get 'not as smooth, or coherent & 'absurdly over the top'...if I had known that ahead of time I coulda saved my $10.

Dare I say it Jeff? in the UK they are referring to Dahlia as "LA inconsequential".

Black Dahlia is simply bad. Period. And LA Confidential shows all the things that are wrong with Black Dahlia. The prologue of LA Confidential perfectly set up the background information and tone while Black Dahlia simply throws in the Zoot Suit Riot because, hey, it looks cool. What's the context of it? Why did it happen? Who cares? Mr. Fire and Mr. Ice are more like Mr. Slightly-Heated Kindle and Mr. Lukewarm Bathwater. You want Fire and Ice, you go to Russell Crowe and Guy Pearce. The acting isn't bad, but it doesn't leave an impression. Fiona Shaw steals the show. Let's think about this: Fiona..... Shaw..... Mrs. Bowser from Super Mario Bros...... Father from The Avengers...... steals the show. What does that tell you about the show? There's NO build-up. None. Everything is disconnected from everything, so there's no build-up and the revelations are plotpoints rather than payoffs. It looks good, but little of it feels authentic. That's maybe the point, but it doesn't do the job. It makes me yearn for Snake Eyes, honestly.

I know nobody will agree with me, but I liked Black Dahlia better than LA Confidential. I certainly wasn't bored by it.

Jeff, that statement made me physically ill. Seriously, my stomach churned.

jeff, nobody puts DP in his place here the way you do and we respect you for that, but there is simply no room for debate about this one. You MUST change your mind about The Black Dahlia... or face the boreworms.

"NO... NOT DA BOREWORMS!!!"

I don't think it's a good movie...just a very uneven one with some high spots (like Fiona Shaw's excellent two scenes) and some low spots. It's better than Mission to Mars. I'm a DePalma fan. There's no accounting for taste.

I thought that "L.A. Cofidential" was quite a bit better than "The Black Dahlia," which as some others have said, has some great parts, but is uneven. On the other hand, "The Black Dahlia" has a terrific ending, while the ending for "L.A. Confidential" was terrible. I thought "The Black Dahlia" was similar to another Ellroy adaptation, "Cop," which was similarly uneven, but ultimately passable based upon its great ending.

What I can't get is why so many critics attacked the film so much for being "incomprehensible." First, it's a noir. Second, sure, for a good part of the movie, a lot of things happen that you can't quite explain at the time, but then in the last few acts, everything seemed to be explained fairly well. I'm realy confused as to what most critics found inexplicable.

SPOILER WARNING, of course.

Colin, I actually liked the film pretty well (in that uneven, De Palma sort of way) and I still had trouble with the film's "explanations" of the plot. First of all, there are like three of them, right in a row, too quick and exposition-y and tangled to offer the kind of revelation the movie treats them as.

Second, they involve a lot of reference to characters we really haven't seen much of throughout the movie. It just felt kinda half-assed to me -- "oh, one of the major culprits was thsi g who we mentioned a couple of times back in hour one."

It's not that I found it completely incomprehensible (critics LOVE to use hyperbole like that -- I remember as a kid reading reviews of Batman Returns and Mission: Impossible calling them "nonsensical" or "incomprehensible" or what-have-you and remember thinking, look, *I* could follow those movies, what's the problem?) -- but definitely lacking the elegance De Palma summons for those set pieces.

I've gotten to be a De Palma half-apologist; I'm not nuts for him a la Kael, but I'm actually getting to accept, even enjoy, the fact that only about a third of his movies are good all the way through. I wouldn't give Snake Eyes or Mission to Mars a hearty endorsement, but there are great, extended passages in both. Black Dahlia is more sustained than those, but not as successful as, say, Carlito's Way (which is a lot better than Scarface, BTW... what a boring-ass movie the latter is!).

Yeah, Jesse, I think our thoughts on the film and DePalma are pretty similar. I agree that some of the reveals weren't handled particularly well, and I wish that's the way critics phrased it.

people didn't like the end of L.A. Confidential?

wow.

some people have balls.

I remember thinking the end of L.A. Confidential was pretty laughable. The good guys couldn't miss while the bad guys couldn't hit anything. Seemed like a silly action movie. A weak way to end and otherwise brilliant movie.

*L.A. Confidential Spoilers*

When I'm talking about the "bad" ending, I'm not talking about the shootout, but the coda that follows it. I'd have to see the shootout again to see if it's laughable, but at least it leaves us with the impression that Bud White (Crowe) dies, which is completely appropriate for his character and the film.

Instead, we get a sacchrine coda where it turns out that White has been injured, but not killed, and he rides off into the sunset with Lynn Bracken (Basinger) as if everything is going to end happily ever after. It's a testament to the rest of L.A. Confidential that this scene isn't enough to undo the rest of it.

*Cop and The Black Dahlia spoilers*

Cop and The Black Dahlia both have much better endings, and they're actually pretty similar. Each is faced with the villain at the end, the villain tells them each that he'd never shoot him/her, and each, of course, shoots and kills the victim.

You think at the end of the Black Dahlia that things might be okay as Bucky returns to Kay Lake's house, but then there's that jolt of the Dahlia's disfigured corpse that tells us that Bucky is going to be very messed up. And in Cop, you know that Lloyd Hopkins will not be returning to Kathleen McCarthy because, well, because he was never really interested in her in the first place.

(spoilers as well)

The shootout in LAC is okay, if rather dull because it's just an action scene stuck in to give the movie a big finish with no thematic importance. The coda is nonsense because it basically says 'and they all lived happily ever after' which is odd for any noir. TBD basically has a similar ending which must be Ellroy working through his issues but for me it works much better in the stylized Lynch-esque way that DePalma used.

DAHLIA was a straight pick-up for Universal; they paid $11 million, so based on the opening and factoring in ancillaries they'll come out okay. DePalma is taken more seriously overseas, so we'll hafta wait and see those numbers, but right now I don't figure this to be a big money-loser.

Yeah, even if the movie loses money overseas, from the opening credits it was clear it was all German tax-shelter money, so nobody's really going to be hurt too badly.

So now we know what Woody Allen has in common with DePalma - neither of them can work in America any more.

You're right Colin. I had forgotten all about that. That was bad.

"I know nobody will agree with me, but I liked Black Dahlia better than LA Confidential."

You're likely right Jeff...at least, I really hope that no one else on this forsaken planet likes Black Dahlia better than LA COnfidential, otherwise why I am I busting my ass trying to make this world a better place?

That was funny Joe Straat, but I didn;t go as far as to yearn for Snake Eyes. It was more like, I got to thinking I really should start carrying a hip flask so the bad-Hollywood movie-release-rampage (really since 2002) goes down a little easier when I am in the theater.

Actually, I already knew I wasn't alone.

http://nypress.com/19/37/film/ArmondWhite.cfm

http://mattzollerseitz.blogspot.com/2006/09/all-is-loss-brian-depalmas-black.html

okay so you managed to find two humans (debatable) who appear to warm to the Dahlia, so I won't kill myself yet, but I am nauseated by that Armond White article to be sure.

Armond White-- It's the Man Who LAUGHS (1928)

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0019130/

How anyone can compare one of the greatest movies EVER to Black Dahlia is beyond me.

Sick-en-ing

Well, you have to remember that Armond White is insane. I do find it amusing that he blames Ellroy for the movie's weaknesses (I don't have anything against Ellroy - but it's a bold and perverse argument White makes).

Blaming Ellroy's "sociology" made me mad enough I couldn;t write about it.

Then he calls the hollywood movie The Man who laughs" by the wrong name and with incorrect reference--he should have been referencing Gwynplaine.

idiot. needs. editor.

it isn;t bold and perverse Jeff, just dumb. Lets see Armond construct anything nearly as lucid as an Ellroy tome.

It is true that Armond is often not lucid. But regardless of whether he's dumb or not, he's saying something nobody else would say, and he's speaking contrary to all manner of conventional wisdom, which certainly define 'bold and perverse' to me.

I guess my point is, just because he's crazy and can't remember the proper title of the film, it doesn't mean he's stupid. He can connect the dots better than any film critic on the planet when he's not blinded by auteurism.

"he's saying something nobody else would say"

Often hear that from a Pal who works in a Psych ward jeff!

Doesn;t mean what he's saying makes any sense--he could have said he liked the movie without diss-ing other movies, the source material & author.

Victor Hugo wrote The Man Who Laughs, or the Laughing Man, depending on what translation you get. The Man who Laughs is also available on DVD.

I suggest reading that excellent novel or movie adapted from it instead of going to see Black Dahlia.

Or better yet, to make a weekend of it, try to get a copy of The SIlent Partner (1978) one of Curtis Hanson's (LA Confidential) early writing endeavors, and watch that too (VHS).

Yeah, and you could also argue against his terms instead of simply dismissing him as an idiot.
If you read him consistently, you also know that he literally cannot write without dissing other movies.

"He can connect the dots better than any film critic on the planet when he's not blinded by auteurism."

What makes you think that he isn't blinded by auteurism here? The whole argument is based around De Palma as an auteur.

no point in arguing about terms that are nonsensical to me--and I will argue one thing...I disagree with just about every single thing he said in his article.

any writer dissing other movies instead of reviewing the movie in question seems to me is worthy of 'idiot', but I do apologize since I should not resort to namecalling. I am sorry. AW is not an idiot, rather, he is misguided and needs a copy editor.

Does he actually get PAID for writing like that? It is kind of like free-form verse.

No, he clearly is being blinded here, sorry if that was unclear.

Ellroy is the exact opposite of Alan Moore. He doesn't give two hoots about what a director does with his novels as long as he gets money from it.

...also, I really like Femme Fatale. Every word Roger Ebert wrote is true.

This might be an interesting side topic: All the critics gave World Trade Center good reviews. And yet, our 2nd run theater is starting its run of WTC on Friday 5 weeks from release.

That's front-loading + the Sept. 11 anniversary being past + (in my opinion) the movie being fairly mediocre and audiences not fully connecting with it.

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