The Black Dahlia 15, nationwide
An Inconvenient Truth U, selected cinemas
The Black Dahlia may look promising, it might have good pedigree, and the word might be positive, but don't be taken in. Just because it's directed by Brian De Palma (Scarface, The Untouchables, Carlito's Way), adapted from the novel by James Ellroy (LA Confidential), and it stars Scarlett Johansson and Hilary Swank in hats and red lipstick doesn't mean it cuts the mustard.
'The Black Dahlia' was the name given to the victim of an unsolved murder committed in Los Angeles in 1947. Ellroy based his novel around the crime, turning the story into a detective novel which examined all the grimy corners of 1940s Los Angeles: the film business, the sex 'industry', and the sex-film trade.
The body of two-bit actress Betty Short is discovered cut in half, disembowelled and with her face slit from ear to ear. Her murder is investigated by Lee Blanchard (Aaron Eckhart) and his junior partner Bucky Bleichert (Josh Hartnett).
Blanchard is an old hand in the business, with appropriately skewed moral standards, but Bleichert is new to detecting and boasts a clean slate and an unspoiled nature. However, with a blossoming crush on his partner's girlfriend, and a spot of hanky-panky with one of the suspects, his hands are soon dirtied.
Like all De Palma's films, it's on a socking great scale and it has a whiff of the Eighties about it. Something about the grand spectacle, the money spent and the Blam-Blam-Kaboom of his films will always call that decade to mind. This might not necessarily be a bad thing, but I suspect a link between the hollowness of this film and the bigness of its ambitions. It all seems horribly staged. Los Angeles looks like a filmset (which it is -- the film was shot in Bulgaria), the rain looks as if it has come out of a rain machine, the cars look like toys and the actors don't so much inhabit their characters as raid the dressing-up box. It's a sham.
The sex scenes just about sum up the lazy attitude of the director. Three scenes follow the same step-by-step routine which is supposed to describe uncontrollable passion. Bleichert passionately kisses whichever woman he's got hold of, using a wall for support; he tears off his braces; she tips her head back in ecstasy as he kisses her throat; he pulls down her dress/up her skirt/off her slip. . . and then the music soars: up trumpets! And De Palma cuts away to spare our modesty. I mean, really.
It's about as passionate as an aerobics class.
Most upsetting of all was to be reminded of Chinatown every time I heard the mournful solo trumpet. If only I had been watching that instead.
Also out this week is real-life horror movie An Inconvenient Truth. Since that messy election result of 2000 Al Gore has travelled the world, lecturing on a subject which poses an even greater threat to our future than George W. Bush: global warming. This film is that lecture, plus a few diversions, delivered to an American audience.
Gore's goal is a worthwhile one. He aims to reach as wide an audience as possible, to motivate his audience into applying political pressure, and to change the way the American government approaches the environment and those who wish to protect it. But incidentally (and I know this is going to sound shoddy) he happens to be doing a grand job with hearts and minds.
He introduces himself with the words 'I used to be the next President of the United States', and gets a big, warm laugh right off the bat. He refers modestly to the vote going against him as 'a blow'; he hints at the planet-saving he could have done had he been given office; he refers blithely to Bush as 'my opponent' or 'the present administration' (but not by name -- that would be cheap). Gore is a big hit in this film -- it's not just about the planet, it's about the presentation of its host. He is handsome, charismatic, humorous, responsible, authoritative. . .Gosh, this man should be President of the United States!
Everyone had better see this film, although quite why it's being shown in cinemas I don't know. There is nothing cinematic about it, and a TV audience (which it will get in due course) will reach many more millions. It is too long (and a bit dull after a while, which is odd when it deals with what might very well be how the world ends) but Gore himself is rather fascinating and the facts he presents are, though gruesome and unnerving, somehow compulsive. Rather like the footage of planes crashing into the World Trade Center, images of vast columns of ice cracking off glaciers and tumbling into the sea have come to represent our future.
They make curiously addictive viewing.
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Copyright 2006 Spectator, The London
