Elmore Novel, Seasons Director and a talented cast.... Somehow they still managed to produce canned Spaghetti. Very disappointing movie.

The film takes to back to those days. Happy New Year 1947. It has some classy music running in the background and the movie has been shot beautifully. Scarlett Johansson looks extremely hot as she tries to seduce Josh Harnett. Aaron Eckhart plays his role really well and Josh harnett looks extremely handsome and plays his part beautifully too. An entertaining film that I enjoyed.

Brian DePalma assembled a good cast for this attempt to memorialize a famous Hollywood legend from the 1940s as a film noir. He had already proved with the magnificent "Chinatown" that he could realize the noir style as well as any contemporary director, so we are left to puzzle over what went wrong here. Notwithstanding an excessive amount of screen time devoted to a single boxing match, I still really liked the first half of this movie, which took its time developing the characters and story using classic noir tropes and compelling cinematography, all of which promised a splendid overall experience. Then came the second half, in which the sheer volume of subplots, plot twists, and added complications overwhelmed the actors' ability to fend off self-parody. It made me sad. It was as if DePalma had been halfway through making a good (if overlong) three-hour movie when he suddenly realized he had only a half hour of film left to finish it. (Did he ran out of money?) In the end, he tried to tie everything together with a series of brief, confusing, talky, and even ludicrous scenes that were a poor substitute for letting the audience think along with a protagonist while he pieced things together on his own.

'The Black Dahlia' (2006) saw the sixty-six year old director needing a total of fifteen producers to get the film made. Eleven executive producers, one being the veteran James B. Harris, who had produced nine films ranging from Stanley Kubrick's 'The Killing' (1956) to 'Cop' (1988), which was also based on a James Ellroy novel. The four producers included Art Linson, who had produced 'The Untouchables' and 'Casualties of War' for DePalma, and 'Fight Club' (1999) for David Fincher; Fincher was originally slated to direct 'Black Dahlia'.Set in L.A but filmed in Pernik Bulgaria (only a handful of exterior scenes were shot in Los Angeles), James Ellroy's novel 'The Black Dahlia' is a fictionalized take on the still-unsolved murder of aspiring starlet Elizabeth Short. This is a daylight nightmare City of Angels, and Dante Ferretti (he has worked with Pasolini, Fellini and Scorsese), built elaborate sets of L.A on Bulgarian soundstages, that knowing he's no fool, are intentionally artificial. Good Cop Dwight 'Bucky' Bleichert and the brunette Dahlia doppelgänger Madeleine Linscott stand before a portrait of 'Gwynplaine,' the deformed protagonist of Victor Hugo's novel 'The Man Who Laughs.' Bleichert says, "I don't get modern art," to which Madeleine responds, "I doubt modern art gets you either." The concerns of Hugo's Romanticism (incorporating his critique of aristocracy), Argento's fresco troubles, German Expressionism and film noir all link when the three leads go the cinema to see 'The Man Who Laughs' (1928), based on Victor Hugo's 'L'Homme Qui Rit' (1869). It isn't explained why they are watching a film from 1928 during a film set in 1947, however the deformity in the story mirrors the wounds on the victim Elizabeth. The German expressionism takes full flight during a flamboyant lesbian bar sequences, featuring a performer in full Dietrich drag, singing 'Love For Sale' among slinky French-kissing chorines. 'Giallo' in its gender confusion (and marginally so in the revelation of the murderer), Madeleine's frequenting of lesbian bars, prior to seducing Bleichert, makes her more a 'Giallo' character than 'femme fatale.' However, her biggest problem seems to be one of genes. When Bleichert comes for a family dinner it's not too far removed from a David Lynch scene, complete with her little sister gifting him a sketch she draws of Bleichert doing Madeleine doggy style!One of 'Black Dahlia's' weaknesses is that Madeleine and Elizabeth are supposed to be Doppelganger's; certainly Madeleine is a darker character than Elizabeth, but the link is merely Madeleine stating she heard Elizabeth looked like her (she doesn't), and thought it would be interesting to have a same sex experience with a lookalike. Narcissism in extremis.'Black Dahlia' would be nothing without two classic DePalma set-pieces; the first is the shoot-out in South Central, where DePalma who loves coincidence as much as Kieslowski ('The Double Life Of Veronique,' 1991), has a wonderful overhead crane shot lifting and rising to reveal the 'Dahlia' crime scene behind. It harks back to the Louma crane shot in Argento's 'Tenbrae'. One of the least The least Argento films of of DePalma's thrillers since 'Dressed To Kill', because it's also the least DePalma of the recent DePalma thrillers. A 'Giallo' sequence is squeezed in where Lee Blanchard, all hopped up on Benzedrine is dispatched on a grand staircase at the hands of a man with a deformed face, a woman in black, a shiny switchblade, and in slow motion. 'Black Dahlia' is about the Cops and how they react to the murder rather than the murder itself, much the way David Fincher handled 'Zodiac' (2007), proving he may have been a better choice to direct. DePalma tries to put his stamp on it and in many ways he fully embraces the Dario Argento within; a contrived plot, flashy camera work, performances anywhere from sleepwalking to operatic; the operatic, or rather, histrionic performance is by Fiona Shaw. She is certifiable. She pops up about half an hour in, reappearing at the end as… well, I could be talking about Argento's 'Deep Red'. Shaw's performance is in the tradition of Piper Laurie in DePalma's 'Carrie', or Piper Laurie in Argento's 'Trauma'.If DePalma didn't push the envelope of sex and violence and possess stylish camera work, he could come across as no more than a director of straight to video erotic thrillers of the eighties and nineties; the dialogue and performances don't reach much further. If he wasn't so talented he might have been asked to direct 'Night Eyes Three' (1993).