Movie in brief: The Black Dahlia
I just finished watching the film, and....huh. I'm not really sure how I feel about it, and I don't know if that's because it was a mediocre movie, or if it's due to my own apathy towards noir. It's an odd thing, really. Being a mystery buff, I should love noir, and yet it just leaves me cold. Go figure.
My main complaint with the movie, mehness aside, is the handling of Elizabeth Short. The movie is named for her, and she is, in theory, the mystery around which the rest of the film revolves, and yet she's a background character, a step up from scenery in ultimate importance. We get no sense of who she was beyond 'aspiring actress', making it rather difficult for the audience to care about her, horrible death or no. She's a plot point.*
Of course, I didn't particularly care about any of the other characters either, but that could be the noir thing again.
On the positive side, I loved Scarlett Johansson and Hilary Swank's wardrobes. Fabulous.
Ultimately, I think I must give it two and a half fedoras out of five.
And finally, DO NOT do a google image search for the Black Dahlia. I assumed that the poster would be the first thing to come up and...it's not. I nearly went through the damn ceiling. You don't want to know what came up, and the fact that that is the first image just creeps me the hell out.
This is not the first image that comes up on google. I just felt like I should post a picture of Elizabeth Short, because even her Wikipedia article doesn't have a photo of her, and that seems kind of shitty.
*Upon further reflection, the sidelining of the ostensible main character is in keeping with the case as a whole. Elizabeth Short the individual has long since disappeared, replaced by the Legend of the Black Dahlia, remembered not as a person but as a corpse; not the victim of a brutal crime, but a mystery, waiting to be solved.