| Critic |
Review |
Quote |
Analysis |
This Week's Verdict |
Armond White,
New York Press |
The Black Dahlia |
"L.A. Confidential and Hollywoodland—films that pretend to investigate our
national fascination with movies—look like child's play compared to Brian
DePalma's The Black Dahlia. Instead of exploiting everyone's envy of that
California industry and confusing such pandering with a reflection of society,
DePalma does something more complicated. With his gift for entering the
culture's collective unconscious, DePalma decided to root his Hollywood myth in
the murder of an aspiring actress, resulting in a profound and deliberately
unsettling film...Unfortunately, DePalma's unique vision is compromised by the
superficial sociology of author James Ellroy's source material...How could
DePalma, a genre satirist, political moralist and driven entertainer,
continuously live up to such extraordinary achievement without falling short
once?" |
Translation: I, Armond White, am such a fanboy that even when my hero falters I
will go out of my way to blame it on whoever came up with the source material.
Furthermore, I, Armond White, am such a fanboy that I refuse to believe there
was anything wrong with Phantom of the Paradise, Bonfire of the Vanities, or Mission to Freaking Mars. |
|
Dana Stevens,
Slate
|
The Black Dahlia |
"There's more moral weight in one paragraph of James Ellroy's somber 1987 novel
The Black Dahlia than in all 121 minutes of Brian De Palma's florid,
sprawling, self-satisfied film version. Where Ellroy exposed, with an often
brutal candor, the misogynist rage behind his protagonists' (and his own)
obsession with the beautiful, bisected murder victim of the title, De Palma
exploits that same misogyny without a trace of introspection." |
A review that basically amounts to a restraining order on Armond White (see
above), this one probably hates on our boy De Palma a bit too much. (I can
understand her not loving the awesome Femme Fatale, but when Stevens
mentions a "15-year run of bad films" for the director, could she possibly be
including his 1993 masterpiece Carlito's Way? I mean come on.) |
|
Carina Chocano,
Los Angeles Times |
The Black Dahlia |
"Like the book that inspired it, Brian De Palma's The Black Dahlia feels
a little like a bait and switch — or, more accurately, a bait and dump. The
overripe period detail, doused in thick, glowing amber (is this a movie or a
pancake?), has a kitsch waxworks quality to it, complete with the kind of
hard-boiled '40s-era voice-over that no doubt made Edward G. Robinson a very
popular party guest. The brief glimpses we do get of the Dahlia herself, both as
a gruesome corpse in police photos and as a sad lost girl in myriad screen
tests, are the most compelling thing about the movie. But even she gets lost in
the teeming swarm of morally compromised and terminally obsessive characters,
each burdened with a byzantine past and hulls full of florid baggage." |
The best of this week's litany of Dahlia disses, Chocano's review gets to
the heart of why De Palma's florid expressionism might not have been the ideal
match for Ellroy's tough-guy grit. |
|
Lisa Schwarzbaum,
Entertainment Weekly |
Hollywoodland |
"The Society for the Rehabilitation of Thespian Reputations would be proud of
[Ben] Affleck as he packs himself into his Superman duds, aware of the absurdity
of a grown man hauled around by wires to juvenile acclaim; when the cameras
aren't rolling, his Reeves smokes and drinks like a superhero out of MAD
magazine, not DC Comics. ''You can't see my penis, can you?'' he checks
backstage before making a promotional appearance in full super-underpants
regalia before a crowd of pip-squeaks, as telefilm-trained cinematographer
Jonathan Freeman captures the savagery just behind all that visual
wholesomeness. It's impossible not to be just a little bit more charmed than
usual when it's Ben Affleck asking the question. Look! Up in the air! It's the
likable Clark Kent of a star who survived Gigli, and whose exploits both
on and off the screen have been held up to an X-ray scrutiny intense enough to
burn through kryptonite." |
A bit too in love with her own prose stylings (maybe hanging around Owen's been
having an effect), but Schwarzbaum does a decent job of getting to the heart of
why Ben Affleck is just so damn good in this movie. |
|
A.O. Scott
New York Times |
The Last Kiss |
"Is 30 the new 50, or is it the new 12? This is one of the questions implicitly
raised by The Last Kiss, which is not so much a coming-of-age story as it is yet
another story about how hard it is, these days, to act your age...The refusal of
young (or not so young) men to grow up has been the subject of magazine articles
and advice books since long before many of us reached voting age. If anything,
such arrested development has been a theme in movies for even longer. The Last
Kiss...belongs to a venerable tradition that can be traced...all the way back to
another Italian movie, I Vitelloni. In that great 1953 film, directed by
Federico Fellini, a group of young men chased girls and evaded responsibility
until the father of one of them lost patience and went after his son with a
belt. While I can't condone the brutality of his methods, I couldn't help but
wish that a similarly no-nonsense patriarchal figure would show up and whip some
sense into [Zach] Braff and his pals." |
Actually, a belt isn't nearly as brutal as the method we were thinking of.
Where's the wood-chipper from Fargo when you really need it? |
|