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Moriarty Solves DePalma’s BLACK DAHLIA!!
SPOILER ALERT !!
Hi, everyone. "Moriarty" here with some Rumblings From The Lab...
Brian De Palma is a major American film artist. His place in the pantheon of the great ‘70s generation is absolutely deserved. Anyone who dismisses De Palma by invoking the name of Hitchcock just plain misses the point. De Palma is a master craftsman, as adept in the language of film as any of his peers.
But for some reason, he can’t catch a fucking break.
He made a lot of films before he got around to SISTERS in 1973, which is the moment where he started to put it all together. He made a classic his next time out with PHANTOM OF THE PARADISE, and another classic two years later with CARRIE, which was his first giant hit movie. CARRIE was a pop culture landmark, making both De Palma and Stephen King in the same moment. I like THE FURY, HOME MOVIES, and DRESSED TO KILL, but I think BLOW OUT is a goddamn masterpiece, a great movie that any suspense fan would do well to study. It’s not just empty technique, either. BLOW OUT breaks my heart. It features the best work John Travolta’s ever done on film, and a great creepy John Lithgow performance. SCARFACE is a full-blown cult phenomenon at this point, and deservedly so. See a great print in a theater, with a big crowd, and you will appreciate the genius and majesty of SCARFACE.
I have a general love for many of his other films. BODY DOUBLE. THE UNTOUCHABLES. CASUALTIES OF WAR. Especially CASUALTIES OF WAR. CARLITO’S WAY. The generally-hated-but-deliriously-bizarre RAISING CAIN. MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE. There are very few of his films I actively dislike, but the ones I do are just ambitious misfires, failures that overreach. BONFIRE OF THE VANITIES. SNAKE EYES. MISSION TO MARS.
In my fantasyland version of Hollywood, where people are rewarded for being talented, De Palma would work a lot, and he’d get his pick of mainstream properties. De Palma would be A-plus-list, just like his peers Lucas and Scorsese and Spielberg.
I find myself confounded by his last two films, though. My review of FEMME FATALE was mixed. I have watched it a few times since, and I find myself really impressed each time by the sheer command De Palma has over what he’s doing, even as I find myself disconnected from it. And I think it’s hilarious how I missed the biggest piece of the puzzle of the film when I wrote about it that first time. It’s even more of a head game than I first thought, and I admire that about it now.
I can’t help but wonder how my own feelings about THE BLACK DAHLIA will evolve. Right now, I’m fascinated by it, but I think it’s got some really bizarre material in it that will stop mainstream audiences cold. The film shifts from tone to tone several times, doubling back on itself in some really deranged ways. De Palma, working from a screenplay by Josh Friedman (author of one of the funniest blogs around on the days when he actually updates it), has made a reasonably faithful adaptation of James Ellroy’s novel, and in doing so, he has made one of the most overheated movies of the year, a film that veers into high camp in places (and never on purpose, which makes it truly glorious camp) even as it impresses, a film that fails as often as it succeeds.
First things first, this is not really a film about the Black Dahlia murder case. The murder and the subsequent investigation are definitely a big part of the film, but this is far more concerned with Ellroy’s characters, the policemen assigned to tracking down Elizabeth Short’s killer. For the first thirty minutes or so, there’s no indication of the Black Dahlia murder or Elizabeth Short at all. Instead, it’s all about the unlikely partnership between Bucky Bleichert (Josh Hartnett) and Lee Blanchard (Aaron Eckhart). They meet in the middle of a Zoot Suit riot, and right away, they recognize something similar in the way they dispatch the guys attacking them, the way they run a suspect down. When the department needs to raise some money, they throw an exhibition boxing match, pitting Bucky against Lee. It’s a brutal fight, but afterwards, the two guys have a new respect for each other, and they’re partnered in a new division designed for the serving of major warrants. Bucky and Lee kick ass together, and De Palma shoots this whole first stretch of the film at a delirious pace, enjoying every bit of it.
Oh, yeah. There’s a dame. There’s always a dame.
In this case, it’s Scarlett Johansson, and she’s a visual treat. De Palma shoots her with a lecherous eye, but she never really settles into her character. I generally like her work, but she’s a stiff in this film, and as the figure of desire at the center of the story, she never really convinces. Part of me almost suspects De Palma did it on purpose in a subversive desire to make this a love story between Bucky and Lee. He certainly gives them more lingering looks of suppressed passion than the whole of BROKEBACK MOUNTAIN. If Kay’s a cold fish, a curiously sexless sex bomb, then it’s okay because she’s just the beard in the romantic triangle.
The crowd at the Monday night press screening was openly hostile at times, reminding me of the LADY IN THE WATER screening I went to, and it was obvious that some of the people there actively hated the movie. I think that’s because the collision of De Palma’s style and Ellroy’s style results in something so overcooked, so completely daffy, that it’s hard to tell if De Palma and his actors are kidding or not. This is definitely De Palma’s riff on the conventions of noir, from the deliberately artificial quality of the world to the pervasive voice-over to the actual stylistic choices he and his amazing cinematographer, Vilmos Zsigmond, have made. Mark Isham’s score works just as hard as the movie does, pouring it on. I’m watching one of the Fox Film Noir releases, SHOCK, as I write this review. It’s a Vincent Price vehicle about a murderous psychiatrist, his black widow mistress, and an innocent girl who witnesses a murder. It’s got the same sort of score as the one Isham’s written for DAHLIA; big and lush and overly communicative. It tells you what to feel at every possible moment, just as much as Hartnett’s nearly-continuous narration does. But as much as I think the style of the film itself annoyed some of the viewers last Monday, it’s the narrative that led to the open hostility, and that I think will confuse and disappoint many audiences.
Yet it’s a reasonably faithful translation of James Ellroy’s book to the screen. And everyone loves and respects Ellroy... right? So what went wrong? Why doesn’t the script ultimately work?
I think Ellroy writes books that are meant to be books. Just like John Irving writes books that are meant to be books. Just like James Joyce does. Or Kurt Vonnegut. Sometimes, what works as prose won’t work as a film because what makes the prose special is the language, the play of it, the form itself. It’s the argument I hear time and again regarding any film adaptation of Alan Moore’s WATCHMEN, and I understand the position. Part of the way Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons critiqued the form of the comic book was by subverting it in very clever and powerful ways, and any adaptation automatically loses that part of the experience. BLACK DAHLIA was early in the writing career of Ellroy, and as he developed as an artist, he pushed his style further and further. BLACK DAHLIA is supercharged, pumped up, loopy at the start and loopier as it goes. By the time we’re introduced to Madeline Linscott (Hilary Swank) and her family, anyone expecting a serious period drama about a police investigation is going to be ready to run for the exit. But if what you want is one of De Palma’s jet black comedy thrillers, then BLACK DAHLIA successfully manages to meld his sensibilities with the acrobatic demands of Ellroy’s book. The result is so heightened that it does come across as silly, especially in the second half, and De Palma embraces it rather than fighting it. He takes every opportunity for his brand of visual fireworks, and there are some dazzling moments here. I love the scene where the actual body of Elizabeth Short is found, and the grand 360 crane shot that De Palma designed that makes the discovery of the body an afterthough, a digression, instead of the point. I love the way De Palma plays with the iconography of THE MAN WHO LAUGHED, the silent film that was the inspiration for the original design of The Joker. I love the set piece where one of the film’s major players meets a particularly grisly end, a scene that would feel right at home in a Dario Argento film. I love one of the few major deviations from the book, a moment in which Bucky finally metes out a bit of justice. The things I like add up, and I find that I’ve thought about this film several times since I saw it.
But much like HOLLYWOODLAND, this film doesn’t work as a whole because the story that seems most compelling ends up as background for something a lot less interesting. Try as he might, De Palma’s ultimately unable to bring the material to full life, and the result is a mixed bag, a mild diversion, hardly the best of this great filmmaker’s work.
"Moriarty" out.
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WOoooooooooooooooooooo
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dosen't suck but I was expecting a best pic. contender
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He's okay. Just okay. He gets points for taking chances. But often he fails, I think. His "original" style quickly became self-involved. I mean, he's not D.O.A. like John Carpenter is these days...but I really think he has lost it.
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Because you are bending over backwards to defend this movie and even THEN you can't bring yourself to recommend it. This one must be a real stinker. Oh and seeing SCARFACE with an audience (as opposed to alone) will not change the fact that it is an absolutely wretched film.
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And Mori is right... seeing it with a packed theater is an awesome movie experience. Hey Mori- thanks for the review. Not to press you but are we still going to see your analysis of Seven Samurai? I know you're a busy man but it's my fav all time flick and I'd love to read your opinion. Peace.
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Moriarty, how is it that you are the only regular writer on this site that knows that 'a lot' is two words? And since I'm here, I will say that even though the Demon Dog is my favorite writer, this movie lost my ten bucks U.S. when I saw the cast list.
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No disrespect here man but it does seem liek you are apologizing a bit and the praise you heap on him int eh beginning is just far more, by any calculation, than what he deserves. That's the whoel thing about De Palma, it always seems like hes joking. It's always so grandiose, hammy, and wink wink nudge nudge that yout hink you are in on some inside joke. I don;t think there is a joke, he's just a bad filmmaker. if it's a joke then he jokes so consistently that he almost never makes films based in anything even resembling reality anymore. I think at this point its safe to assume that he's just an overblown ham of a director. ANd Body Double? Jesus Christ, that's one of hte worst films ever made. i mean...Craig Wasson?
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oh...I can't stop listening to Austin, Texas' very own Black Angels debut record "Passover"
best of 2006 -
I left the theater with the distinct impression that it will get much better after repeat viewings. That's what usually happens with De Palma movies anyway.
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My girlfriend and I were in agreement that the main problem with this movie was the stiff direction of Depalma, and how much better it would have been if Argento had been attached instead. As an Ellroy fan though, I can't be too disappointed, the story is pretty much all there. BUT, I thought that only Kirshner and Johansson were well cast. How does Josh Hartnett keep getting work ?!?
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word
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This movie is a complete and utter mess. There is no narrative whatsoever, Eckhart's acting is laughable, and Hartnett should go to the mall this weekend and start filling out applications. Scarlett's gorgeous, of course, but seriously - this thing is ridiculous. Plot points and twists that make no sense whatsoever, pointless drag show-like camp that has absolutely no place being there at all, needless sex scenes with no passion at all... I could go on and on. Damn shame, too - I was REALLY looking forward to seeing it, and I was let down in every way I could possibly think of.
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This was a collection pf the worst performances of the year, Utterly terrible.
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total crap. I kept expecting Keyser Soze to pop up during the big reveal. shite. i did like the baby carriage scene in Untouchables, even if DePalma swiped it from that Russkie, Ivan Whatyoumacallit.
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Cool!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
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Now it's just 8 balls and porn. Ever try to jerk off after an 8 ball?
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...the first time? I'm quite fond of this glorious clusterfuck of a movie, and I was just curious as to what you were talking about. And don't worry about spoiling it either. Years have passed.
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Anyone who rebukes me is doomed to boil forever in a scalding cauldron of pus and Negro semen. [That's a line from Ellroy's The Big Nowhere. Any wonder I love his shit?]
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Seems everyone flunked Film History 101 on AICN. Also, remember the "classic," "Hollywood Homicide?" Josh Hartnett was a detective in that and what a tuna that was! Hartnet and Eckhart were totally miscast in "Black Dahlia." These were supposed to be seasoned cops with rough edges. Mugs taht would crack your skull open with a billy club then arrest you for loitering and bleeding on public property. Not pretty boys. And Eckhart's character gets obssessed with the Short murder in FOUR DAYS? The writer should have gone back and watched "Laura." Hell, I would have settle for the unofficial remake, "Shakey's Machine." As I said before and I'll say it again; wrong director, wrong writer, wrong cast. Bad movie.
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Seriously. This guy is a rip-off artist par excellence. His best film (Sisters) is at least a GOOD Hitchcock film. Most of his films, like Ollie Stone's, are awfully overcooked. At least he's got some really kinetic moments and great set-pieces. He should tackle a different film-maker for once, like, say Fassbinder.
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I just thought his name would look more interesting with space randomly inserted between the letters.
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... SCARFACE is hardly a remake. Aside from the title, can you tell me anything the two films have in common?
It's more a case of a studio reusing a title they already owned. Stone's ambitious script and De Palma's coked-up super-muscular direction created something wholly original that Ben Hecht wouldn't have recognized in any way, shape, form or fashion.
I know plenty of Hollywood history, and just because the films share titles doesn't make them related in any other way. -
Damn you, Moriarty! Now thanks to reading your review, I can't help but think of Scarlett without picturing a big beard on her face. Thanks alot. Add that to your Hollywood History Fun Facts. Also, this new talkback system is kooky. According to the login form, I have been posting to the talkbacks for 36 years and 38 months. That is so awesome. Why doesn't it say 39 years and two months (which is the same as 36 years and 38 months)? Apparently I must have been posting from one of the few archaic proto-Usenets back in 1967. It's weird, because I don't remember being a member of the AICN community for 36 years and 38 months. Especially since my age is a mere 32 years and 7 months. I must be travelling back in time and posting on AICN with my wireless temporal laptop. So I got that going for me... which is nice.
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And I thought "Femme Fatale" was great. True, though, what someone said about wanting to like DePalma...it would just be easier to do if so many of his movies didn't end up sucking. And it's that they "end up" sucking: DePalma realizes he's supposed to be the master of suspense and then throws in some gratuitous crap from Discount Suspense Warehouse at the end, like in "Snake Eyes" or "Raising Cain." (Ooo..someone could get impaled on that pointy thing! I can't look!) The garrote scene in "Blow Out" -- that's suspense.
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Both end in bloody gun battles that were infamous in their days. Both featured stories about illicit substance smugglers - that had territorial and legal problems in their day. But - um - It's a remake, the way OH BROTHER WHERE ART THOU is.
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now HARRY knows movies
harry, make sure to check out the black angels and report back, you lucky bastard -
Sep 16, 2006 10:21:37 AM CDT
Great review Moriarty. The MSM reviews concur w/ you.
by orbots commander
Most days I usually go through the NY Times, Wall Street Journal and NY Newsday (habit from my college PolSci. assignment days), and all three papers gave it way negative reviews. All papers basically called BLACK DAHLIA an interesting failure, but a failure nonetheless. The fact the film is being released in mid-September, home of most cinema dregs, should have been a clue to most of us.
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Paul Muni's rise to power is the same formula that's used for Al Pacino's. Look at the three acts. Rise, takeover, fall. Muni even kills his own right hand man because of the underlying incest theme. The thirties version used prohibition. Times change. The eighties; drugs. Hecht laid down the foundations of the story that Stone later on used in this film. Universal also owned the rights to the original; shot on the back lot. which, if you see the '32 version again, is pretty impressive and daring for its time. Then again, so was the eightes version. So, remake is correct.
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The undeserved effusive praise is the real problem.
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http://tinyurl.com/o76q8
"I call the failed actor Craig Wasson not because I can't remember the character's name but because Wasson's off performance is one of the crucial keys to understanding De Palma's Herschell-Gordon-Lewis-meets-Radley-Metzger-by-way-of-Bertolt-Brecht routine."
more deconstruction than you can shake a dick at.
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read so many reviews of how mediocre it is that ended up seeing talledega nights instead. you just can't go wrong with will ferrell stabbing himself in the leg with a knife...
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it's an adaptation (and a very loose one) of a literary work. there's a difference.
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Body Double is better, and might be my favorite De Palma movie. I know I'm supposed to say Scarface is the best movie ever made because I'm a guy and everything but for my money you can't beat that 20 minute chase scene with the Indian through the mall and onto the beach. Blow Out is a notch below the Conversation and a few notches below Blow Up anyway, so I'd usually opt for one of those instead.
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Sep 16, 2006 3:39:15 PM CDT
This place really needs a review of that BLACK DAHLIA..
by alonzo mosely
movie... I mean with all the reviewers and writers here, you think one of them would have bothered to give us their opinion...
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An unmitigated disaster. Character and motivation are tossed out the window. Incomprehensible nonsense that makes a garbled mess of Ellroy's best, most personal novel. People laughed throughout the screening I just attended. I'm so fucking pissed they fucked this up so bad. The script is the worst adaptation of a book I've ever seen.
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You mention that you wrote the review while watching a movie (ostensibly one you haven't seen before). How can you think and write about something, and still manage to see every shot of the film? I couldn't profess to having seen a film in question if I hadn't given it 100% of my attention. Some films hinge on a single shot.
I'm interested in your take on this. -
I tell you this not in an obnoxious way. There are a lot of movies that I find terrible, but I can see why other people might enjoy them, like Sideways and King Kong. This movie offers nothing for nobody, even your hardest core LA Noir fans will be stumped by how fantastically pointless this movie is.
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The thing is, the book report you descibed might actually have something in it worth reading, and the book report done three weeks before the due date by the obsessive-compulsive wanker who suppresses all thoughts of women's genitals and sits up straight in class will have nothing in it worth reading, even if it's perfectly typed and footnoted.
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They could have used another climactic scene where Capone's plan to get the witness out of town is thwarted, and the movie wouldn't have lost a thing. That scene has nothing to do with why Untouchables is a great film, so there's no point to accusing DePalma of ripping it off. It's a great film because of the post office scene and the police academy scene and the scene's with Kevin Costner's wife and kids and the scene where Kevin Costner throws the guy off the building and the scene with the mounties where Sean Connery scares the shit out of Moe from Slapshot. And the scene where Sean Connery kicks the ass of the older cop, and the scene where the accountant Treasury agent gets whacked in the elevator, and of course THE SCENE WHERE ROBERT DE NIRO EXPLAINS WHY HE LIKES BASEBALL. Watching that movie and then saying, "It's OK, but that one scene is stolen" is crazy.
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Along with the performances. Not De Palmas directing, which is pretty good but not spectacular.
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Are recurring things in De Palma films. The nonsense logic and ludicrous characterization. It's par for the course. And if you like him fine but don't try to argue that he is one of the best directors of all time.
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I read two drafts of the script when Fincher was attached. Same writer, much different script. When I saw the flick yesterday, I kept asking myself "what the hell happened?"
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Sep 17, 2006 4:52:45 PM CDT
Hmm. Evidence has shown that DePalma has had the most
by orbots commander
success in bringing former TV shows to the big screen: Untouchables and Mission: Impossible. Maybe he should have been the guy to have adapted Miami Vice rather than Michael Mann.
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This movie was an absolute turd. I'm a fan of a lot of the actors/actresses but this was an intolerable mess of a motion picture.
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...was the one with Jemima Rooper having her way with Mia Kirshner. Thank goodness Jemima went topless in it, otherwise I would have been totally disappointed with the flick. Although I really wish it would have been her cast in Swank's role. Rather stupid when you think about it. Swank playing a character with a mixed American/Scottish accent and making Jemima - who is a Brit - do a fauxmerican accent instead of the hybrid American/Scots accent. She's also much sexier than Swank, and anyone that had ever seen *Hex* would know she can play the sexpot role with ease. I must admit though, Swank's character's crazy family generated a lot of laughs in the audience when I watched it. I don't know if De Palma intended that. And the theatre was not in an urban market either. Heh.
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he's like tarantino in that way. Except that Tarantino paddles in the tepid waters of pop culture while DePalma prefers to dip in more exotic pools. Constantly obsessing over what to do next, what to show the audience next. Which makes quite engaging cinema in its own way no doubt, but in revelling in the joy of cinema the joy of cinema is lost, or at least compromised.
the joy of cinema, i like to think, is the happy marriage of the content with the medium. But that's another discussion altogether.
I guess with filmmaking like this the only thing left to say is, "Long live the opera!" -
There's a very simple reason why Brian De Palma doesn't enjoy the freedom that Scorsese and Spielberg have - he's not as good. Not nearly as good. And its basically as simple as that. Scorsese and Spielberg are as cineliterate as anybody who's ever stepped behind a camera, but what ultimately marks them out as living legends who are afforded the latitude to essentially write their own ticket (and that's an opinion that Scorsese would probably contest) is that they understand that character and story come first. If you can't connect with an audience, you're always gonna come up short. I'm as big a supporter of 70s auteur-driven cinema as you're likely to find, but I can't blame the Hollywood brass for keeping De Palma on a tight leash - if he was given carte blanche, he'd end up wasting an awful lot of money. Don't get me wrong, I WANT to like De Palma. Like a lot of people, he's made films that I genuinely really like (though I'd be hard pushed to declare outright love for any of them the way I would for a TAXI DRIVER or a JAWS), but after almost 40 years of making movies, De Palma still strikes me as someone who's still searching for the way in which all the pieces fit together. Even his 'celebrated' aesthetic style seems overrated to me - I mean, he certainly knows how to move a camera, but I would argue that the marrying of one image to another is where the problems start. Editing is perhaps the most important element in terms on controlling the tone of a film, and for me, De Palma movies lurch wildly and erratically all over the place before invariably giving up long before reaching the finishing line - THE BLACK DAHLIA is a prime example. Right from the start, something just feels wrong. The opening scenes feel rushed and the transitions are too quick. Relationships are established in a kind of movie shorthand - a narrative convenience to get things going to the real story. Which is fine if it works...but it doesn't. The reason why THE BLACK DAHLIA is regarded as arguably Ellroy's most personal book is because the author transfers his demons between the two main characters. One one level, the case is about obsession and guilt. And on another, about Hollywood and the dark avenues the bright and beautiful can be so totally swallowed up by. Elizabeth Short's murder remains notorious not only because of the unspeakable savagery to which she was subjected, but what it said about the place in which it occurred - that unshakeable feeling that this kind of depravity could only have happened where it did, amidst the neon and the glitz. Ellroy understands this. Its where a great deal of the book's power comes from. A number of other filmmakers have understood that foreboding sense of what lurks beneath the shadows of the Hollywood sign in the telling of other great L.A. stories from Billy Wilder's SUNSET BLVD. to David Lynch's MULHOLLAND DRIVE. Curtis Hanson understood this with Ellroy's own L.A. CONFIDENTIAL, the standard to which any subsequent adaptation of the author's work shall be compared. L.A. CONFIDENTIAL is a masterpiece. Of story, character, atmosphere and style. A film truly deserving of its modern classic status. The film demonstrates how to be evocative without being nostalgic. How to pay homage to its cinematic influences without devolving into pastiche. L.A. CONFIDENTIAL was a film in which the director had complete control over the telling of his story and total confidence in his material. I'm really not sure what De Palma thinks of this material because as you watch it, it really doesn't seem like much thought went into what's up on the screen at all besides the staging of its elborate crane shots. This is a film that descends into a pantomime. It really doesn't seem worthwhile to point out the deficiencies of performance because you really can't blame the actors. They all seem to think they're in a different film - Harnett is too earnest, Eckhart is too broad, Johansson too vacant and Swank...well, maybe De Palma told her it was a comedy after having the same conversation with Fiona Shaw, who clearly thinks this was some kind of slapstick nightmare. But like I said, you really can't blame the actors - they were completely stranded here by a director who never had a grip on his film. And whilst both Scorsese and Spielberg have misfired in the past, I don't believe either have ever had that criticism levelled at them with any justification. It honestly gives me no pleasure to write any of this - I'm genuinely gutted about this film. This is probably the biggest disappointment of the year so far. I'm a big fan of James Ellroy. I was a big fan of the book. I really thought De Palma could be well suited to the material. But this film is an absolute wreck, and its all De Palma's fault. He has completely and utterly failed to transfer the nuances and substance of the book to the film, taking only Ellroy's trademark crudity which, outside of the context provided by the feeling and conviction behind the words, seems juvenile and tasteless. This would have been an infinitely better film if David Fincher had remained on board. Fincher wanted to explore all of the nuts and bolts of the case and the psychological journey the characters endured in the investigation (though if reports are true, it seems as though he has essentially made the film he would've intended here with his upcoming ZODIAC). De Palma's film is being marketed as a psycholical thriller, but is too empty to get at the psychology behind the crime and too flippant to achieve any suspense. Ellroy's books make for great thrillers, because he makes his characters work hard. The narratives are driven by hard graft. The detectives have to slog though each detail for a break, which is why almost every protagonist is brought near to breakdown. It often comes close to the perverse, but its always fascinating and compelling. The main protagonist of THE BLACK DAHLIA is Bucky Bleichert, and in the first person narrative of the book, struggles against his limitations as a detective to see beyond the lies and corruption obstructing the investigation into the Dahlia's murder and her past. The Bucky Bleichert of De Palma's film stumbles ignorantly through the story, understanding little and coming away with only superficial wounds. In the book, his life is irrevocably changed. De Palma has made a film devoid of real feeling, and it's also worth pointing out that once upon a time, there was an actual person called Elizabeth Short and she died a truly horrific death. Perhaps the final criticism of this film should be its failure to recognize the horror she endured, the fear and suspicion it spread throughout the community, instead choosing to dismiss her ordeal amidst what becomes a very convoluted and ultimately very silly explanation of events as a theory behind her demise. I hope De Palma makes more films, I really do, because right now, he has a lot of ground to make up if he is to ever truly be remembered as a talent capable of greatness.
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Sep 18, 2006 10:07:26 AM CDT
Dickie, that was a fantastic, thought out analysis.
by orbots commander
Well-written as well. AICN, hire this guy!
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may i just say, despite the wrenching effort this movie was to watch, i barely recognised swank til someone pointed out who she was to me. seriously, did anyone know she could do sexy? she usually looks so shithouse. i literally rubbed my eyes.
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