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Now I haven't seen it but it wasn't to hard to guess that this might be the problem (if there was/is one)...From the LA Weekly review...
"Now for the bad news: Despite its title, The Black Dahlia is less about Short (very well played by Canadian actress Mia Kirshner, who appears only in flashbacks) than about how her death spurs a crisis in the lives of two LAPD officers and the beautiful-but-dangerous woman who comes between them. It’s essentially the same formula Ellroy deployed to fine effect in L.A. Confidential, where a similar romantic triangle foregrounded another sprawling mystery story. Only here, instead of Guy Pearce or Russell Crowe, we get Josh Hartnett — in what ranks as one of the most head-scratching casting boondoggles since John Wayne played Genghis Khan — as Dwight “Bucky” Bleichert, a quiet “good cop” who finds himself partnered on the Dahlia case with the boisterous, devil-may-care detective Lee Blanchard (Aaron Eckhart). When Bucky starts falling for Lee’s live-in girlfriend, Kay (Scarlett Johansson), Blanchard scarcely notices, so consumed — for reasons the movie never makes clear — has he become by the search for Short’s killer.
No matter the offscreen sparks that reportedly flew between Hartnett and Johansson, we scarcely believe Bucky as a rival for Kay’s affections, because the mumbly, terminally boyish Hartnett is so wholly unconvincing as a grown-up — let alone a rough-and-tumble 1940s prole — that he’s like an acting student who stumbled into a costume warehouse and thought it would be cool to dress up as Sam Spade for a while. And when he has to deliver one of Ellroy’s hard-boiled lines, like “Who are these people who feed on others?” it’s downright laughable. Nor is Johansson (despite still looking like sex incarnate) particularly better, delivering all her dialogue in the same breathy-voiced huff and seeming a far less fatale femme than she did in Woody Allen’s Match Point. Their scenes together grind The Black Dahlia to a halt in a way that all the brilliant stylistic touches in the world can’t reverse."
"Except for the point, the still point, there would be no dance, and there is only the dance. " T.S. Eliot
Follow Ups:
Unless you think a dead woman is sexy.
I jus saw this movie. Terrible. I fell a sleep. Save your money.
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According to critic David Denby in "The New Yorker" Hartnet was chosen for his innocence. I've only seen the trailer so far but even in that he looks mis-cast (of course he always does; I just don't undrstand why he keeps getting these roles).
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"Except for the point, the still point, there would be no dance, and there is only the dance. " T.S. Eliot
[This reads pretty much in lockstep with L.A. Weekly.]"To his credit, De Palma maintains a pulpy clarity pretty much up to the scene described above. But once the body turns up, the film turns into, well, a De Palma movie, with its narrative absurdities, its stylistic excesses, its hammy acting, and your uneasy sense that the whole thing might be a big joke.
"In retrospect, you can see how early signs point to this outcome. The casting, for example."
"James Ellroy talks the way he writes, the way his doomed characters tell the stories of their lives: monotoned, terse, poetic, brutal. Here’s what he says about the origins and the genesis of the film adaptation of his novel The Black Dahlia."-- Boston Phoenix
That's a matter of taste. Read one a ok book, tried Black Dahlia and couldn't get into...yawn.
The book starts out, imo, quite slow and then erupts into nightmare.
The main thing about it is that the Dahlia's murder is really the background for the story about the relationship between the cops and their respective obsessions and the prices they pay for them.
I am actually re-reading it now prior to the film opening here.
Ellroy's style has tightened over the years into a staccatto almost machine gun rattle of patois and invective.
His books are absolutely jam packed with dialogue and thought.
Until I recently learned of the changes to his life over the last couple of years, I seriously doubted he would write another book.
i might give the book a try. If you like nonfiction, true crime try "Excellent Cadavers." I think they made movie based on this book.
His portrayal or america in the 40/50s isn't a pretty one and he writes about a lot of white racists, but his contention is that both government and the police were like this.
His is a dark undebelly world just out of the view of your average person. It can be disturbing.
Good grief Clark, we both like Ellroy.
I don't know which of us should be more scared!
I seem to remember that at one time Ellroy thought his own father might have killed the Dahlia.
Have you read what is it... My Dark Places where Ellroy investigates his mother's murder?
Has anyone seen the film yet?
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