A DEADLY MATTER
The real crime taking place in The Black Dahlia is that the story strayed from the true tale
BY LAUREN ALLEN
After seeing The Black Dahlia, I concluded that I'll no longer allow myself to be tortured by anything else that Josh Hartnett stars in. I don't care who surrounds him, how intriguing the story line appears to be, or even if I'm paid to go. No more, I scream! No more!
After seeing his performance in Pearl Harbor a few years back, I didn't think he could get any worse. I couldn't have been more wrong.
Although I didn't read this particular Dahlia book by James Ellroy that the movie is based on, it seems to me that something, somewhere, must have gone horribly wrong in the translation. Why? This movie has very little to do with Betty Short, a.k.a the Black Dahlia. In fact, after about 30 minutes into the film, I leaned over to my friend and asked, "Isn't there supposed to be a girl that gets killed in this thing?"
I think the people at Universal Pictures must have liked the name Black Dahlia so much that they just decided to slap it onto their next picture.
Not only did the picture have very little to do with the actual events and characters (I'm pretty sure that Betty Short's character was one of the few that actually ever existed), the story that it was tying to tell was the most convoluted piece of crap I've ever seen.
At one point, it's a tale about a cop trying to throw a boxing match. In another, it's the story about one cop falling for a girl. Then there's some lesbianism and prostitution tossed into the mix, a couple of cops on the take and finally some loony-tooned socialite who's spent too many years hitting the bottle.
In the end, I'd say that the film actually spent maybe 30 minutes on Betty Short's life, death and attempt to solve her murder.
One of the most shocking aspects of the film was how director Brian DePalma managed to extract some of the worst acting performances in the history of film from such talented and established actors as Hilary Swank, Scarlett Johansson and Aaron Eckhart. Of course, I'm still trying to figure out how they got talked into being involved with this junk in the first place.
It really makes you wonder how, with as many pictures as Scarlett Johansson is in these days, she could be this desperate for exposure.
As for Hilary Swank, well, I can only say that I'm terribly disappointed. You know, she had reached the level of being someone who you could almost always count on to pick a winner. Let's just hope that she's fired whoever brought this to her in the first place.
The real crime that took place here is that everyone involved was given an amazing real-life story to draw from, and yet this is the picture they developed. I'm sorry to say that this picture gets two big fingers from me. LW
