A lot of people consider The Usual Suspects to be a great movie.  I don’t even consider it good.  Here’s why:

Imagine you were watching a movie (not hard to imagine), and in the vein of Citizen Kane, there is a question that keeps getting asked over and over and over again (E.g. What is rosebud?  Why Rosebud?).  That one’s a little more difficult.  Better yet, think about it in terms of a mystery–Who is the serial stalker?–and people keep asking “Who did it?” over and over and over again.  You expect that from some movies.  In the case of mystery movies, it really drives the plot, it’s the essential question that motivates why the story movies along and what goal the investigator has.

In a more complicated (not that most mystery movies aren’t complicated), movie like Citizen Kane where you have a guy at the beginning of the movie calling out “Rosebud!  Rosebud!” and people wonder what it is, the essential question works  a little differently.  In Citizen Kane, it was a starter to the almost epic biography of a man, his life, and what he most valued, which it turns out is Rosebud–this isn’t answered until the end of the movie, as a big reveal to explain what he really valued in life even though he couldn’t have it.

The Usual Suspects

Then there’s The Usual Suspects, which operates like a high class caper film.  It’s like a mystery, a mystery with the driving question: “Who is Kaiser Soze?”  (And, if you’re familiar with the restaurant Moe’s, which I love, then you’ll know the movie was popular enough for them to make a ‘Who is Kaiser Salsa’ salsa flavor after the movie.  That’s some pretty big stuff.  You know a movie has real popular weight when it’s satirized in restaurant food names.)  And, if you know the tricks of mystery capers, the solution will be one of three.

1. Kaiser Soze will be a character we know, possibly the character we know the best in the film. (E.g. Fight Club)
2. Kaizer Soze will be a minor character introduced at the beginning of the film with a small motive that is referenced at the end of the film with a big reveal.
3. Kaiser Soze will be a character we don’t see until the last scene of the movie, a reveal that gives satisfaction to a something like a real life chase. (E.g. Zodiac)

But we know the answer before we start the film because the film was directed by Bryan Singer.  And Bryan Singer is a film nerd.  He’s actually a nerd in many senses (e.g. comic book) but he’s a film nerd.  He probably knows movie history in and out, has seen all the film noirs like Laura, The Big Sleep, and The Maltese Falcon that defined The Usual Suspects.  So he knows which way the pendulum must fall.  The greatest, and most personally pleasing solution for directors like Bryan Singer (please note any movie by M. Night Shayamalan).  The most pleasing solution is to have the answer in front of you the entire time.  He will always choose option one.  No questions asked.

This makes the movie, plotwise, almost boring to watch because we’re only introduced to one main character that plays through the entire movie–Verbal.  So the answer is staring (literally, staring) at us right from the beginning. Also, the plot doesn’t make much sense.  We are told a story from the beginning through Verbal, but I couldn’t not really keep track of the story.  At once we were in California, then New York, and characters saying things that should mean something but meant nothing.  They decided to kill someone.  I knew not who the person was or what their importance was.  I was bored.

Thank goodness Singer is an excellent filmmaker.  Because technically, the movie is quite creative and interesting to watch.  He sets his film shots up very well, does a lot with color, tone, and mood in his scenes, and though unevenly edited, has a good overall flow to his film.  He made a great film noir, in the tradition of The Big Sleep, and for that I can fault him nothing.  The Big Sleep is so twisted with its own plot complications that the movie itself doesn’t actually make sense–this is a pretty well known fact in the film community.

But, let me say this.  I think the movie is pretty good–if only for the knowledge that it does well what a filmi noir is supposed to do.  That being, confuse, confound, confirm the dearth of life, and potentially have an interesting reveal at the end.  But the plot isn’t there, and it should be there.  A movie is in essence a story in pictures first.  And if I like the pictures, but don’t really get the story, why should I care?

At least The Big Sleep flowed.  A movie I consider to be only a step below The Usual Suspects is The Black Dahlia, which is a pretty awful movie in its own right–a film noir like The Usual Suspects, with too much plot for an audience to care.  Usual Suspects is a far cry from the much more carefully laid out, and classier film noir, LA Confidential.   It does not, cannot compete.  So, while The Usual Suspects may have its thousands of die-hard fans, this guy here isn’t, and there’s a reason why: it’s just not interesting enough to be good, let alone great.

You judge for yourself.  6/10.

I got this news via Feministe from TowleRoad. It is not, repeat is NOT being covered by the cable/network news organizations at all. Why? Because (1) it’s a hate crime, reminiscent of the Black Dahlia sex murder in Los Angeles in the Forties (which by its nature WAS a hate crime against women); and (2) it occurred in Puerto Rico, a territory, a “commonwealth” if you will, that could also be called a colony of the United States. Christopher Pagan who is reporting on this case is updating the situation as it occurs at the link below.

From CNN’s iReport by Christopher Pagan (CHRISPAGANSJPR@GMAIL.COM):

[...]On November 14 the body of a gay 19 year old was found a few miles away from the town in which he was residing in called Caguas. He was a very well known person in the gay community of Puerto Rico, and very loved. He was found on the site of an isolated road in the city of Cayey, he was partially burned, decapitated, and dismembered, both arms, both legs, and the torso.

This is has caused a huge reaction from the gay community here, but it’s a difficult situation. Never in the history of Puerto Rico has a murder been classified as a hate crime. Even though we have to follow federal mandates and laws, many of the laws in which are passed in the USA such as Obama’s new bill, do not always directly get practiced in Puerto Rico. The police agent that is handling this case said on a public televised statement that “people who lead this type of lifestyle need to be aware that this will happen”. As If the boy murdered Jorge Steven Lopez was asking to get killed. (Emphasis mine.)

We have a gay rights activist in Puerto Rico, Pedro Julio Serrano, who does his best to defend these hateful acts, but the international attention is needed for this local government to wake up and give us the needed rights and proper justice to such hateful crimes. You are the biggest beacon of hope in such horrific events to be made known.

The murder victim was Jorge Steven Lopez Mercado, 19. The suspect, accompanied by his father, is 26-year-old Jose Bermudez. Here is what is said to have occurred to precipitate the murder.

Officials indicated how Jose Bermudez the accused explained that he went into the center of town in Caguas and then after making a few attempts to pick up a prostitute allegedly Jorge went to him dressed as a woman, and Jose invited him into his vehicle thinking he picked up a female prostitute.

He said that he did not know that it was really a man and they went to his apartment in Cidra, where Steven allegedly told him to have anal sex with him, which provoked anger in him and caused him to murder him. He also said that Steven tried to stab him, and that he armed himself with a kitchen knife and under a fit of rage he injured him, dismembered him, decapitated him and then later took his remains to Guavate where he was left.

Other allegations of the killer is that in 2003 he was arrested for domestic abuse and that in his youth he was molested and that is why he hates homosexuals. The authorities said that this case has been advanced and successful due to the cooperation of the local GLBT community. The agent Angel Rodriguez said that he is being interrogated and will be charged with first degree murder. He also indicated that he will submit another request to the federal judge to have this treated as a hate crime.

Later, Bermudez was arrested at around 11:30 p.m. last night, and accompanied to the police station by his father. He may be arraigned on a murder charge by the close of today. An investigation of the suspect’s home turned up a wig, a burned mattress, a burned PVC water pipe, and a knife in the backyard. Blood was splattered on the rear wall of the house. Two vehicles were also impounded. The FBI is also involved in the case.

I wouldn’t be surprised if the father is also involved as an accessory to dispose of the body parts, because it would take two people to do this kind of grisly work.

I’m going to say it: all murder is a hate crime, from that poor dear Shaniya Davis, to Derreon Albert, to Matthew Shepard, to this brave young man who had the nerve to be himself. In the U.S., the homosexual fear/self-defense angle Jose Bermudez is clinging to would be given short shrift. I would not be surprised if he is taller and heavier than Lopez. If Jose Bermudez was indeed raped as a boy by a child molester, then he was acculturated–erroneously–to hate gays. However, it’s still isn’t a viable reason to kill Steven Lopez. And Bermudez probably didn’t know or didn’t want to know who he was. The rage and confusion must have been as corrosive as Drano.

Bermudez doesn’t strike me as some kind of simpleton though. In most cities and towns all over the world, he must have known that there would be either women, transsexuals, or queens to be found at certain locations in town. That’s just street–and male–hearsay and knowledge. When Lopez offered him anal sex instead, Bermudez was furious. If he was genuinely tricked, he could have thrown the boy out. Instead, he probably started beating up the young man, because bringing Steven home, if not the act might make him “gay,” and that this information might get around and ruin his macho reputation. If Steven Lopez ever whipped out a knife, it was for self-defense and to get out of the house with his life. He had a lot of nerve for that, but not enough luck. That’s why I think Bermudez murdered this boy–because he had the nerve to defend himself and to be himself.

Rest In Pieces

Now enjoy a little song from my favourite movie!

I spent last Halloween in my pj’s at a bar with Mike in Vietnam. This year, I’m staying home. Not out partying with everyone else. But with lightning and a stormy like rain that has lasted the whole afternoon and evening now, I wonder if anyone is still up for partying down.

It’ll be well grim to hit up a haunted house on a night like this.

Happy Halloween!

A review of “The Black Dahlia”, by James Ellroy, read by Stephen Hoye on Unabridged Audiobook

Look for the woman.  This pulp fiction mantra is resurrected by James Ellroy in his signature novel, The Black Dahlia.  The golden age of such fiction had passed by, Dashiell Hammet and Raymond Chandler well into the big sleep by 1987, when Ellroy’s novel was published.  Yet as often happens with literature/fiction, what was old becomes new again if you just wait long enough.

Ellroy resurrected a true-crime story, that of the murder of Elizabeth Short in Los Angeles in 1947.  With such endeavors an author can assume one of two things about his reader, either of which may be correct.  The first is that the reader is not aware of the based-in-truth aspect of the story.  The second is that the reader is fully aware that the story is based on things that did occur and which the author fills in the gray areas with his prose.

I entered into my listening of the novel in the first camp.  I was aware that the novel had been made into a film and was in need of a distraction for a six-hour business drive.  I ran across the novel in a book called 1001 Books You must Read Before you Die, edited by Peter Boxall, which I use not as a firm list of titles to read, but more as a reference for authors whose works have some acclaim and deserve some attention (John Banville’s The Sea, reviewed prior, is also from the list).

With hard-boiled crime stories, authors have a number of approaches.  One is hard and fast, akin to two middleweights in a stick-and-move jab-fest, or in a more plodding fashion, as of two heavyweights feeling each other out and looking for the opening for the destruction of a haymaker.  Ellroy manages to do both with this novel.

The boxing analogy is apt.  Ellroy’s protagonist, Bucky Bleichert,  is a light-heavy of local renown, undefeated but now retired from the ring to a life as one of Los Angeles’s finest.  His partner is another former boxer, a heavyweight, and the opening sequences of the book center around their budding partnership and the murder that would drive them together and eventually, apart.

I won’t delve too deeply into plot; I don’t care much for reviews that tell too much of the story and as such will tend to focus on the elements of the story and how Ellroy makes them work.  There’s a personal bent in this novel, explained by the author in the afterword for the novel, printed in later editions after the release of the Brian De Palma film in 2006.  Ellroy’s mother was the victim of another unsolved crime of passion, near the same time as the Dahlia’s murder.  Ellroy mines those personal feelings and supplies the resultant ore to Bucky, allowing him to feel things in ways that another author would have struggled to achieve.

The novel is accessible in every way.  It is a topic of interest, it is written with a minimum of linguistic calisthenics, and most of all the characters are believable and strong, each and every one save ancillary police officers there to fill the gaps of shift differentials and departmental politics.

The men are men, the women are women, but the women are also strong in ways we don’t always associate with post WWII women.  Sexually adventurous, morally ambiguous, but with the outward appearances of dilettantes, soft features in tight, woolen clothing.  Think Mad Men’s women before Mad Men’s women were widespread in the media.

An overused critique of many male authors is that they fail to bring the proper insight into the world of women.  Seen but not heard is the calling card of the chauvinistic.  Ellroy couldn’t tell his story without making his women strong characters.  Kay Lake, Madelyn Sprague and even the Black Dahlia, who we never meet alive, are all well-constructed characters with depth, maybe even more so than the “what you see is what you get” Bucky.

Ellroy takes a hard-case crime story and makes it into mainstream fiction which is straddling the border with literature.   I’m not a literature snob, but it is all too clear that some things are undeniably literature while others don’t try to be.  I also don’t believe that just because something sells a million copies that it is populous crap.  Ellroy managed to write a novel that is, again, accessible.  As an individual who does enjoy a novel that sends me to the dictionary constantly, I didn’t feel as though Ellroy was selling anything short or pandering for an audience.  Billy Joel said in “Just the Way You Are” that he didn’t want clever conversation because he never wants to work that hard.  I don’t mind working that hard, but I also like not having too and still getting a good story in the end.

It is a personal novel above all.  In the afterword Ellroy speaks much of his mother and how he used the story to find solace in her murder.  The Dahlia was merely an avatar for his own searchings.  Cherchez la femme, after all.

A note on the reading by Stephen Hoye.

I think audiobook narrators are some of the most impressive voice actors around.  Hoye did a brilliant job in this work.  He managed to keep the voice of the characters consistent over the entire 13 hour reading.  Those voices also weren’t distracting.  Over the past summer, listened to E.L. Doctorow’s The March, and many of the voicings came off as hackneyed (though certainly some were on purpose, given the nature of the uneducated Southern characters) but I got none of that feeling from Hoye.  If I were on the fence with a future audiobook of two equal works I wanted to listen to, and one was narrated by Hoye, that decision would be an easy one to make.

Buy this audiobook at Amazon.com.

Buy this audiobook at Barnes & Noble.

. . .  and I married his girlfriend!
  

My father, Dr. George Hill Hodel, was a monster.

While a handsome, successful doctor living the good life in 1940s Hollywood, surrounded by beautiful women and esteemed artists such as Man Ray, John Huston, Henry Miller, and others, he committed a series of heinous murders. One of his victims was a former girlfriend named Elizabeth Short—cast in infamy as the Black Dahlia.

The photos of her bisected, exsanguinated body lying in the weeds near Thirty-ninth and Norton have become a grisly centerpiece of Hollywood noir history. Sixty years later people are still shocked by the premeditated evil of the crime. To look at the photos is to realize that you’re staring into the abyss. One can’t help but ask (as I did): Who was the sicko who cut this poor woman in half? And what the hell was going on in his head?

I was just a kid. Five years old at the time of the murder. Eight when my father abruptly closed his business and fled the country for Asia. He’d been tipped off by friends in the LAPD.

Nobody told me that Dad was the chief suspect in a series of killings in a twenty-mile radius of our house on Franklin Street. Or that detectives from the Los Angeles District Attorney’s Office had gone so far as to bug his bedroom and home office. Or that they were about to arrest him when he split.

I grew up innocent of my father’s dark secrets. Then, irony of ironies: I chose to become a homicide detective. My first wife suggested it. I found out later she’d been my father’s girlfriend.

Did she seduce me at nineteen as a form of revenge on Dad for dumping her? Probably. Did she want me to become a cop so I’d discover the horrific deeds committed by my father, ones that she only suspected? Maybe. I can’t ask her now. She’s dead.

I worked the Hollywood beat for twenty-four years, in the same neighborhood where I grew up—my father’s killing ground in the 1940s. Over the decades, I had occasional, brief contact with Dad, who was living abroad and had remade himself into a very successful international marketing executive based in Manila. He was a sophisticated man of the world with a genius IQ—my mother claimed it was one point higher than Einstein’s.

I retired in 1986. Dad died thirteen years later at the age of ninety-one.

I knew very little about my father when his ashes were scattered near the Golden Gate Bridge. Naturally, I was curious about the man he had been. I wanted to know more. Gentle inquiries started with a book of photographs he kept with him until his death. Two of them reminded me of a TV movie I’d seen about the Black Dahlia starring Lucie Arnaz.

My investigation widened and drew me into increasingly lurid and frightening territory. The result: my book Black Dahlia Avenger: A Genius for Murder.

Then in 2003, Los Angeles head deputy district attorney Stephen Kay reviewed the evidence I’d collected and declared the Black Dahlia murder “solved.” Old District Attorney files and forensics told the story. Only after delving into my father’s dark mind was I able to explain why he posed Elizabeth Short’s body the way he did and carved the ghastly smile into her face.

George Hodel did nothing by accident. He lived his life as a bizarre game that trumped even those of his hero, the Marquis de Sade, taunting and outwitting the police, seducing and brutally murdering innocent women.

He didn’t stop in 1950. Nor did he begin in the ’40s. Nor was Elizabeth Short just an ex-girlfriend.

I know now that my father was also responsible for a series of infamous murders in Chicago (where he was known for a time as the Lipstick Killer), Manila (where the local press dubbed him the Jigsaw Murderer), and the Bay Area of California (where he called himself Zodiac).

It’s a bizarre, terrifying, and surreal story that will alter criminal history, exonerate the innocent, and change the way we think about the motives and signatures of serial killers. Hang on.

—the introduction to Steve Hodel’s Most Evil (2009)

It’s been a weird couple of months for Dance, You’re On Fire. Long story, but we have a new set, a new look and finally managed to get a new song uploaded today. Give “Wolves” a listen here. We’re debuting our new songs at the Black Dahlia in Boksburg tonight and at Tings ‘n Times in Pretoria tomorrow night. Hope to see you there!

Dance, You're On Fire

THE BLACK DAHLIA (2006)

Selamat untuk film ini karena sudah bisa membuat saya bosan setengah mati untuk menontonnya, padahal saya nontonnya juga tidak langsung selesai, saya nontonnya terpisah-pisah.

Film Yang bersetting tahun 1946 tentang seorang polisi yang mencari pelaku pembunuhan seorang aktris ditengah konspirasi dan korupsi di kalangan kepolisian. Dibumbui kisah cinta segitiga dan konflik antar sahabat.

Apa yang bikin bosan?
Pertama : plot cerita yang tidak jelas , banyak adegan yang seharusnya tidak perlu.
Kedua : Pencahayaan dan warna film ini seperti kita berada di tahun 1946 memang, tetapi ini juga yang membuat bosan. Suram . Ditambah beberapa soundtrack dan adegan broadway hitam putih jaman itu yang bikin ilfeel.
Ketiga : Penokohan yang tidak jelas dari pemainnya.

Padahal yang main film ini tidak tanggung2 lho , ada Josh Hartnett, Scarlett Johansson, Hilary Swank. Sepertinya bukan salah sutradara Brian De Palma dalam mengarahkan para pemainnya tetapi memang dari awal kita sudah dibuat bingung dengan cerita film ini.

My rate : 5/10

Josh Hartnet and Hilary Swank in "The Black Dahlia"

De Palma is a fantastic director, and here shows flashes of his brilliance, but the problem is that he has turned a real life murder in to a pulp noir thriller.  This movie would have been right at home in the 1950’s.  The performances are all just a tad over the top.  The characters emotions are heightened by the non-stop soundtrack.  It is a lot different then I was expecting. 

Now it is not that I detest these types of movies, its just that the elaborate sets and lavish costumes are wasted on a plot that tries to incorporate way too many side stories.  Each sub-plot does not add up to a  whole in the end.  It is like watching ten writers each come up with a different idea each, then try to put it all in to one story.  The result is pretty much a mess.  In the end, I found no closure.  I felt under whelmed by the conclusion.  Its like they tried to condense the “Lord of the Rings” movies in to one film.

The story revolves around the real life murder of Elizabeth Short.  She was a young aspiring actress until her body was found in two pieces.  Her jaw was cut almost down to her ears. 

This launches an investigation, headed up by Dwight “Bucky” Bleichert (Josh Hartnett), and Leland “Lee” Blanchard (Aaron Eckhart). The two form an unhealthy relationship, including Lee’s girlfriend played by Scarlett Johansson.  They kind of form a family unit, giving us scenes where they have dinner together that caused a creepy, uneasy feeling in the pit of my stomach. 

Both of the men become obsessed with the case, each for personal reasons.  I won’t even touch on the plot more because it could honestly become this entire review.  What I will say is that it leads these men in to a labyrinth situation that most viewers will not be able to figure out. 

Perhaps this material is not really suited to someone like De Palma.  Perhaps a Sean Penn or David Fincher would be better suited to this.  At least they would have made a movie that was actually about the Black Dahlia.  De Palma movies seem to exist in fantasy worlds.  Where style and story meet head on.  There is a sense that the stories he tries to tell could not exist in the real world.  So to direct a movie based on real-life events seems like a contradiction.

I’ve recently discovered this thing called “journalistic integrity.” The thing is, you’re supposed to tell people if the article you’re writing is in any way biased, or if you as a writer aren’t being 100% objective. It’s supposed to be wild. So let me start this thing by saying that I love James Ellroy, I love his books, I especially love the Underworld U.S.A. trilogy, and that my copy of Blood’s a Rover is an ARC that was sent to me by the publisher. With that in mind, I’ll try and present as fair and balanced a review as I can. Let the Great Experiment begin!

It’s been eight long years since The Cold Six Thousand was published. Plenty of time for us to get our hopes up, hopes that once the new book came out it would make our collective socks roll up and down. Rest assured that Ellroy’s brought his A game. His protagonists certainly haven’t lost any of their piss. Returning is ex-cop Wayne Tedrow Junior, who after the events of the last novel, has finally come into his own. Also returning is FBI man Dwight Holly, in hock and working for J. Edgar Hoover. Rounding out Ellroy’s trifecta is kid P.I. Donald “Crutch” Crutchfield, who’s forced his way into the life, and may not live long enough to regret it.

Blood’s a Rover continues the various and sundry plot lines from the previous books while setting up several new ones. The Mob is bilking Howard Hughes and using the cash to build casinos in the Dominican Republic. A declining J. Edgar Hoover continues his crusade against black America, this time setting his sights on the militant movement. And of course there’s Cuba, the monkey no one can seem to shake off their back.

If you were to describe the first two books in the trilogy as “sprawling,” you could describe the third as “personal.” In American Tabloid and The Cold Six Thousand, Ellroy wrote what he writes best: hard-hitting badass noir. Only then he threw it up on a much grander stage. It reached across oceans and included everyone from the President of the United States to low-level gangsters. There’s no shortage of any of that in Rover — as Ellroy says, the book is filled with his trademark craaaaazy shit — but Ellroy does seem to have gone back to some of the more familiar ground he tread in his L.A. Quartet.

The book opens in Los Angeles, with an armored car heist and a load of stolen emeralds. It’s a setting and a crime that Ellroy is very much at home with. He also returns to one of his most prevalent themes: powerful women. This time it’s in the form of Joan Klein, the Red Goddess who quickly becomes the obsession of Ellroy’s protagonists. Actually, the female characters in Rover are the most powerful Ellroy has ever written. The power they hold over men isn’t just sexual, but real power.

I think that for Ellroy, writing Blood’s a Rover was extremely cathartic. Anyone who’s read his memoir, My Dark Places won’t be able to help but see Ellroy himself inside Donald Crutchfield. With that in mind, we see that it’s Ellroy himself who’s living, not what’s explicitly described in the books, but what those events are representative of. Destruction. The fascination with the darkness inside us all. Perhaps most importantly, the power that women have over the lives of men. This is why I would describe the book as personal. Crutchfield makes his bones after throwing in his lot in with Tedrow and Holly, but it’s Ellroy we see making that journey. The man who emerges on the other side is mature. He embraces, respects, and accepts the process that’s made him who he is. This gives us a new appreciation for the book’s title, which was taken from “Reveille,” a poem by A.E. Housman.

Clay lies still, but blood’s a rover;
Breath’s a ware that will not keep.
Up, lad; when the journey’s over
There’ll be time enough for sleep.

I have to admit, when I first read Blood’s a Rover, I wasn’t sure what to think. It was only when I looked at it in the context of the entire trilogy that I realized what a powerful book it was. Ellroy’s characters are paying the price for their dark deeds, and that story provides the trilogy with a perfect third act. The author, through his characters speaks with a maturity and wisdom that until this point we have not seen in him. For years we’ve waited and Ellroy hasn’t disappointed. He’s finally delivered his masterpiece.

Blood’s a Rover will be released on September 22. You can preorder it now at amazon.com.

Scarlett Johansson as Kay Lake in The Black Dahlia.

Hilary Swank does the femme fatale thing in The Black Dahlia.

Just like my last review, Burn After Reading, I was giving this film a second chance. I will say the result didn’t change much from what I thought of it in the theatre. Since it was directed by Brian De Palma (Mission Impossible), I expected so much more. The theatrical trailer for this movie was so misleading. The trailer really sells the Black Dahlia murder, and the film really doesn’t focus on that at all. The focus of the film seems to center around the two cops that were at the crime scene, Josh Hartnet (Pearl Harbor) and Aaron Eckart (Thank You for Smoking) and their relationship with Scarlett Johanson (The Other Boleyn Girl). Before any murder even takes place, the story seems to be more worried about creating a boxing rivalry between Eckhart and Hartnet.

As far as the cast, there are a lot of big names in this film and none of them seem to deliver. Josh Hartnet seems to look as disgusted during the film as I was watching the film…FOR A SECOND TIME! I even thought the saving grace for me might be Scarlett Johanson, just because she is in it (Just as Daniel Craig and Adrien Brody are my better half’s saving graces), but she seemed to just be in the frame reading lines. And then there is Hilary Swank (Best Actress Million Dollar Baby and Boys Don’t Cry), what was she thinking? She does ad some interest during the family dinner scene, but from nothing she did other than the fact that she took Hartnet over to her house for dinner where her mother and father seem to go a bit ballistic.

If this film had a title of  Boxing Cops or LA Crime, I might have been more forgiving about this film going all over the place, in every direction except the way it should have gone. Being billed as a murder mystery, I was starving for information about the crime and details. The Black Dahlia has so much creepiness about it, and is such a bizarre macabre murder, you don’t have to tell all of the side stories. The film was titled The Black Dahlia, and to see less than a story of the Black Dahlia murder is highly disappointing.

Jack Webb will forever be remembered as the creator, producer and star of the phenomenally successful television series Dragnet. Dragnet began as a radio show in 1949 and made its television debut two years later. Webb starred as the hero, Sergeant Joe Friday of the Los Angeles Police Department. Webb wanted the show to be as realistic as possible and every episode was shot in a semi-documentary style. It also featured many genuine police terms, such as MO (method of operation), PV (parole violator) and 488PC (petty theft). Webb had tremendous respect for people who worked in law enforcement, and the show was actually designed as propaganda for the LAPD. The LAPD had earned itself a horrendous reputation for corruption after numerous scandals in 30s and 40s. Webb worked closely with LAPD Chief William H. Parker to clean up its image in the public mind.     

When viewing Dragnet today, it does not seem to be a particularly Realist work. Webb gives a suitably rigid performance as the morally rigid Sgt Friday. Perhaps a better example of Realism and the LAPD is The Badge (1958), the book Webb wrote as a companion piece to Dragnet. Censorship laws of the time were more relaxed in publishing than they were for television. Webb used The Badge to portray the LAPD’s investigation into some of the City of Angel’s most infamous crimes, crimes too violent and disturbing for 1950s television. The book contains a famous ten page synopsis into the Elizabeth Short (a.k.a. the Black Dahlia) murder investigation. There are also pieces on the Brenda Allen scandal, the murder of the Two Tonys, the Club Mecca arson case and many more dark moments in LA history. But what is more important now than both Dragnet and The Badge is how the latter inspired the greatest crime fiction writer alive today. In 1959, a young boy named Lee Earle Ellroy was given a copy of The Badge from his father, Armand Ellroy, as a gift for his eleventh birthday. Since his mother’s murder the previous year, Lee had become a voracious reader of kid’s crime books, but it was the gripping and terrifying crime stories in The Badge that would inspire him for life. Lee Earle Ellroy changed his name to James Ellroy upon publication of his first novel Brown’s Requiem in 1981. That novel includes a fictionalised account of the Club Mecca arson case (renamed as Club Utopia). Ellroy’s masterpiece The Black Dahlia was published in 1987, twenty-eight years after he first learned of the case in The Badge. The Brenda Allen and Mickey Cohen scandals that rocked the LAPD appear in The Big Nowhere (1988). The gangland slaying of the Two Tonys, Tony Brancato and Tony Trombino, appears in White Jazz (1992). L.A. Confidential is less inspired by material gleaned from The Badge, than it is in paying tribute to the book itself, as the character Detective Sergeant Jack Vincennes works as a technical consultant on the fictional television programme, Badge of Honour, which is based on Dragnet.

In his introduction to the 2005 republication of The Badge, Ellroy paid tribute to Webb and the impact his book had on his literary career:

Books attract the inner brain and leave their virus there. Books rarely shape a writer’s curiosity whole. Books rarely give him sustained subject matter and a time and place to re-create anew. I’m anomalous that way. I got lucky at the get-go. It was one-stop imaginative shopping. I found all my stuff in one book.

Today Ellroy is as staunch a supporter of the LAPD as Webb ever was. Ellroy has defended the LAPD’s actions during the Rodney King and Rampart scandals. In recognition of this, the LAPD presented Ellroy with a replica police badge inscribed with Sgt Friday’s number 714. Also, Ellroy has been awarded the LAPD’s highest honour, the Jack Webb award.

 Here’s a clip of Webb as Sgt Friday in a famous scene from Dragnet.

For a visual history of Los Angeles’ most famous and infamous crimes, you’d be hard-pressed to find anything better than Scene of the Crime: Photographs from the L.A.P.D. Archive. The book (which has an excellent introduction by James Ellroy) is a collection of over one hundred L.A.P.D crime scene photographs taken from the 1920s to the1970s: the graphic and haunting photographs from cases such as the Black Dahlia, the murder of the Two Tonys, the Onion Field killing and ransom notes from the Symbionese Liberation Army are included. Perhaps more moving than the images from these famous cases are the pictures of crimes that happen everyday. There’s one of a beaten woman. Her face looks slightly away from the camera as though unsuccessfully trying to hide her wounds. A man is hanging from an unseen ceiling beam. Why did he commit suicide? The image will haunt you more for not knowing.

If you can’t get your hands on the book right away, take a look at some photographs of historic crime scenes that I took on a recent research trip to L.A.

On January 15th, 1947 the tortured, severed body of a Miss Elizabeth Short was found at Leimert Park, 39th and Norton, in L.A. Miss Short was dubbed the ‘Black Dahlia’ by the press, most likely due to her black hair and the black clothing she often wore. The ‘Black Dahlia’ case is still officially unsolved, and it is the most publicized case in L.A.P.D history. At the time, the area where her body was dumped consisted mostly of vacant lots, now, like the demographics of L.A., it has changed irrevocably and become part of the city’s wealthy suburbs— a fact alluded to in John Gregory Dunne’s excellent novel based on the Dahlia case, True Confessions. In Dunne’s novel, the opening prologue is a first person narration by Detective Tom Spellacy. Spellacy’s words are both racist and strangely elegiac about the changing face of L.A.

    Anyway. 39th and Norton two weeks ago. It’s a Jap neighbourhood now, Jap and middle-class colored. No empty lots, no bungalows, no Hudson Terraplane. The Neighbourhood Association has put up streetlamps that look like gaslights and there are topiary trees and over on Crenshaw there’s a Honda dealer and a Kawasaki dealer and Subaru and Datsun and Toyota dealers. The colored all have Jap gardeners and the Japs have colored cleaning ladies, and right where Frank Crotty said, “You don’t often see a pair of titties as nice as that,” there’s this Jap-style house and just about on the spot where we found Lois Fazenda’s bottom half, this Jap family has put up one of those cast-iron nigger jockeys.
    Son of a bitch if they haven’t.

June 22nd 1958, El Monte, California, the body of Geneva Hilliker was discovered by some kids playing baseball. The body was lying face down in an ivy patch on a road beside the playing field of Arroyo High School. She had been strangled with a thin white cord and her own nylon stocking. The case is still unsolved. Her son James Ellroy was merely ten years old at the time. Unlike 39th and Norton, the crime scene has barely changed with the passing of time, although much of the ivy is now gone. In 1994, Ellroy (now the legendary Demon Dog of Crime Fiction and the author of The Black Dahlia) would reopen the case with Bill Stoner a retired homicide detective from the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department. The subsequent reinvestigation is the basis of Ellroy’s book My Dark Places.

Arroyo High School gained another footnote in crime history when in 1969 a recently graduated student, Steven Earl Parent, became one of the victims of the Charles Manson Family. My thanks to the indispensable local resident Ronda Logan for her help in El-Monte.

I don’t think I had this much reading scheduled since I was in school! I’m looking forward to each of these books.

Scheduled Reads

Of Bees and Mist: A Novel by Erick Setiawan

This is the Barnes & Noble First Look Book for June. This is my first time participating in this program, and I’m looking forward to discussing this book on-line throughout the month. Thank you to B & N for sending the book my way.

From the description: Of Bees and Mist takes place in a nameless town during a timeless era, where spirits and spells, witchcraft and demons, ghosts and clairvoyance — both real and imagined — are an everyday reality. Setiawan skillfully blends the real and the fantastical as he follows our heroine over a 30-year time span in which her love, courage, and sanity are tested to the limit.

Beach Trip: A Novel by Cathy Holton

is the June Read for the Books on The Brain Summer Reading Series on 6/16. Thank you to Lisa Munley (of Books on the Brain) for arranging for my copy of the book. I may need to schedule some time at the beach to read this one!

From the description on Amazon.com:
Mel, Sara, Annie, and Lola have traveled distinct and diverse paths since their years together at a small Southern liberal arts college during the early 1980s. [...] Now the friends, all in their forties, converge on Lola’s lavish North Carolina beach house in an attempt to relive the carefree days of their college years. But as the week wears on and each woman’s hidden story is gradually revealed, these four friends learn that they must inevitably confront their shared past: a failed love affair, a discarded suitor, a betrayal, and a secret that threatens to change their bond, and their lives, forever. Darkly comic and deeply poignant, Beach Trip is an unforgettable tale of lifelong friendship, heartbreak, and happiness.

Interred with Their Bones by Jennifer Lee Carrell

is Book Club L’s June read,  date not yet set– probably mid to late month.  I discovered this book at Book Group Expo last year.  I’m looking forward to it as a fun read, and I hope there will also be enough to discuss as well.

From the GoodReads.com description: Jennifer Lee Carrell’s highly acclaimed debut novel is a brilliant, breathlessly paced literary adventure. [...] From London to Harvard to the American West, Kate races to evade a killer and solve a tantalizing string of clues hidden in the words of Shakespeare, which may unlock one of history’s greatest secrets.

The Black Dahlia by James Ellroy

is Book Club M’s book for our July 6 meeting.  I probably won’t get to it in June, but I’ll go ahead and list it here in case I decide to read ahead.  One of our members found this on a list of top 25 novels in the past 25 years, and nominated it.  I don’t know much about it.

From The Great Book List: With this novel, Ellroy invented neo-noir crime fiction and elevated himself from genre novelist to serious writer of literature. The Black Dahlia is the first book in Ellroy’s L.A. Quartet, a cycle of novels set in 1940s and 1950s Hollywood. The Quartet continued with The Big Nowhere, L.A. Confidential, and White Jazz. Based on the true story of the murder of Elizabeth Short, the novel follows two fictional detectives as they try to solve the crime and as they do, they reveal a city of corruption and depravity.

In another message, I describe the other books I want/need to read in June.

The Black Dahlia
Brian De Palma takes on the James Ellroy novel about the notorious 1947 murder of Elizabeth Short. It should be very good, based on that alone, but I found it very turgid.

The most excellent review site Cinema de Merde rates it, but whilst Scott’s persuasive arguments brought me round to love Body Double, here I’m not so sure.

The Chronicles Of Riddick
Pitch Black was great. This is not. Judi Dench, Karl Urban, Keith David, Colm Feore, Linus Roache and Thandie Newton are amongst the embarrassed here. Some crap about ‘Necromongers’ and and and…

Jersey Girl
Non-View Askewniverse Kevin Smith, with Ben Affleck as a widowed PR guy forced back to New Jersey by some choice (but impolitic) remarks made about Will Smith whilst under nappy-changing pressure. Very likeable.

All The King’s Men (2006)
Sean Penn as populist Southern Governor who becomes as corrupt as those he sought to replace. Worthy, dull. Jude Law FFS!

Conspiracy
Excellent real-time staging of the 1942 Wannsee Conference which sealed the fate of Europe’s Jews by way of the ‘final solution’. Kenneth Branagh and Stanley Tucci are particularly powerful as Heydrich and Eichmann, though there is not a bad performance from any of the cast.

Atentát
Very economical retelling of the assassination of Reinhard Heydrich, the architect of the ‘final solution’ and Nazi overlord of Czechoslovakia, directed in 1964 by Jiří Sequens. Couldn’t find subtitles for this (it’s in Czech and German), but it doesn’t matter, you can follow it just the same.

Below
Supernatural war horror flick set aboard an American sub in WW2, courtesy of Riddick dude David Twohy.

Thematically in the realm of The Keep, Deathwatch and The Bunker, and sadly, like the last two, never quite meeting its potential.

The presence of merchant seaman Dexter Fletcher and nurse Olivia Williams – survivors of an earlier torpedoing – hints at rollicking genre fun like The Land That Time Forgot, but mostly it’s a locked room mystery with ghosts.

1968 Tunnel Rats
Dull film about interesting topic: the tunnel complexes used by the NVA/NLF in the Vietnam War. Oh, it’s directed by Uwe Boll. That would explain it.

[pic]

Star Trek
I am not and never have been a Trek fan (though I’m partial to a bit of Babylon 5) – this was this LLF’s idea. It was much better than I feared, easy enough for a civilian to follow, with the odd LOL moment or two.

I’m taking my cat to the doctor later. He’s been sneezing and feeling poorly (picture above deceptive). His pretty pink nose is a little swollen and he’s rubbing snot all over me and everything else, I suppose because he’s itching.

I met his first owner, Julia, the other day. She’s a very charming, friendly NYU student. She gave me his adoption papers. He was found starving in Williamsburg with his sister, Dahlia. The shelter strongly recommended in his bio that he be adopted with his sister, because “he is very playful and will be bored alone.” Yup. I guess Dahlia is long gone.

His origins explain why he startles so easily and why he yearns for the outside—source of danger, fear and excitement, as it is for me too. Of course, he could be like that even if he had a safe kittenhood, but it satisfies me to know his story. I’m sorry he lost his sister. It’s a good thing when siblings team up against the cruel world.

For some reason, my mind keeps inserting the adjective ‘black’ in front of her name. The Black Dahlia was the sobriquet given to famous murder victim Elizabeth Short by reporters. (Novel by James Ellroy, film by Brian de Palma. Neither read or viewed recently.)

Elizabeth Short was found on January 15, 1947, in a vacant lot in Leimert Park, Los Angeles, severely mutilated, cut in half, and drained of blood. Her face was slashed from the corners of her mouth toward her ears, and she was posed with her hands over her head and her elbows bent at right angles.

Elizabeth Short was born in Hyde Park, Massachusetts and her father built miniature golf courses until the 1929 stock market crash. In 1930, he parked his car on a bridge and vanished,[1] leading some to believe he had committed suicide. Later, it was discovered he was alive. Elizabeth Short was raised in Medford, by her mother. Troubled by asthma and bronchitis, Elizabeth was sent to Florida at 16 for the winter, and spent the next three years living there during the cold months and in Medford the rest of the year, while working as a waitress. She was 5′5″ and 115 pounds, with bad teeth, light blue eyes and brown hair. At the age of 19, she went to Vallejo, California, to live with her father, who was working at Mare Island Naval Shipyard. The two moved to Los Angeles in early 1943, but after an argument, she left and got a job at one of the post exchanges at Camp Cooke (now Vandenberg Air Force Base), near Lompoc. She then moved to Santa Barbara, where she was arrested on September 23, 1943 for underage drinking and was sent back to Medford by juvenile authorities.

Elizabeth Short returned to Southern California in July 1946 to see an old boyfriend she met in Florida during the war. For the six months prior to her death, she remained in Southern California, mainly in the Los Angeles area. During this time, she lived in several hotels, apartment buildings, rooming houses, and private homes, never staying anywhere for more than a few weeks.

~Condensed from wikipedia article. Their links.

Perhaps I’ve been reading too many mystery novels. His sister is most likely The Apricot Danish, adopted by a strange, solitary novelist in his mid 40’s, determined to write the first bestselling paranormal romance in which the heroine changes, not into a lioness or a leopard, but an orange tabby cat with miraculous demon-killing powers.

The paranormal romance field is booming these days. If only I’d thought to write one 10 years ago. I’d be a natural. But now there are women falling in love with shapeshifters left and right (werewolves, weretigers, werehorses. The wererats are so far only supporting characters.) It makes you wonder how much bestiality really takes place in this country.

I do have a shapeshifter in my fantasy novel, but she’s dead. She doesn’t even come back as a vengeful ghost or a charismatic zombie. She’s merely a beautiful memory.

***

One thing I’d like to teach the cat is not to step on my breasts. I work in bed because it’s the most comfortable for my arms, and he sleeps near me. When he gets lonely, he walks up to my face for a cheek-rub without regard to terrain. When I yelp he runs and hides in the closet so I try not to, but it hurts. Especially when he steps directly on the nipple. That made me scream. An armored bra would be appreciated, if any of you have one lying around.

I like it when he walks up between my breasts and gently bites my chin. That’s just so romantic, so ruggedly masculine, so…feline. Nevertheless, I’d like to get him a sister-wife (everyone says he looks Egypytian), and let our honeymoon be over, but this trip to the vet today reminds me why I should think twice. Charles has offered to pay for it, in exchange for the 3 or 4 new pictures of the cat I send him every day, but cats live long and my sister the vet—who likes nothing better than working for free for relatives, friends of relatives and perfect strangers with the same first name as one of her relatives—lives out of town.

Later  Back from the vet, the one Julia used. I wasn’t thrilled with the guy, though he seemed to know his stuff. He kept asking questions that I had already answered in my initial conversation, when he wasn’t listening. He gave me antibiotics for the cat’s cold, telling me that cat colds were bacterial, not viral. What I understand (and perhaps I’m wrong) is they start out as viral, and then sometimes bacteria move in when the immune system is compromised. I wish I knew a way to talk to doctors that would indicate I have enough brains and background to understand simple or even moderately difficult medical concepts without making them feel they’re being clobbered by an Internet-crazed knowitall. I can talk to my sister, and I can talk to Whitney and Laura, who are people docs, but it would be nice to be able to talk to the attending physician.

Fitzroy freaked when I put him in the cat carrier, but was good at the doctor’s. He sat quietly on the metal table, looking scared, only trying to jump off every few minutes. He hissed at the technician once, but for good reason. Now he’s home and seems relaxed, sitting on the living room floor licking his butt where the thermometer went in.

Which reminds me of a story about someone my brother knows, who fed her cat cloves of garlic for days to cure worms. “The cat had worms literally hanging out its butt,” he said. I first remembered this as the woman stuffing the garlic up the cat’s anus, and only when I started trying to picture how the garlic got through the commuter-crowd of worms (and felt a pang of disbelief that this woman, whom I also know, would be so…hands-on), did I realize my mistake. The stillbirth of a tall tale.

At the doctor’s

The good folks at Knopf were generous enough to send this over.

For the uninitiated, or those who can’t read, that’s James Ellroy’s (L.A. Confidential, The Black Dahlia) new book, Blood’s A Rover, which after many many years, will complete his Underworld USA trilogy. This summer, we’ll be reviewing all three books leading up to Rover’s release in September. Every time I crack open one of Ellroy’s books, I turn into a big slobbering idiot, so it’s really hard to articulate how excited I am to read this one.

The back cover is a letter from Ellroy to booksellers, written as only Ellroy can do it. You can read it for yourself below (click the picture for a bigger image).