James Ellroy's biography "Love Me Fierce In Danger" by Steven Powell

James Ellroy and the Meta-narrative of the Black Dahlia Case’ in Cross-Cultural Connections expands to include new research. Ellroy’s attempts to control the Black Dahlia narrative by tying the story inextricably to his own experiences and his Demon Dog of American Crime Fiction persona began to fall apart when he became involved with two historical researchers on the Dahlia case, Larry Harnisch and Steve Hodel. There have been multiple true-crime books published about the Black Dahlia case, all written with the intention of doing what the LAPD could not: solve the case (or exploit the case's interest). For many years after the publication of The Black Dahlia, Ellroy did not comment on any of the Dahlia theories, as he seemed content with his fictional portrayal of the case. Ellroy’s first public endorsement of the work of a Dahlia researcher marked a distinct change in attitude from the novelist, and came in the documentary James Ellroy’s Feast of Death, where Ellroy endorsed Los Angeles Times reporter Larry Harnisch’s theory that the LA-based surgeon Dr Walter Bayley murdered Elizabeth Short. Ellroy did not take his endorsement of Harnisch’s work much further. Elements of Harnisch’s theory faintly echoed the narrative of The Black Dahlia, which may have appealed to Ellroy. According to Harnisch, Dr Bayley was in a state of mental decline at the time of the murder and died shortly thereafter: his personal and professional life was falling apart, and Elizabeth Short inadvertently reminded him of a family tragedy which sparked a homicidal reaction, all of which would have been familiar to Ellroy and the connections he weaved between the Sprague family and the Dahlia murder. It would not be until the publication of Steve Hodel’s Black Dahlia Avenger (2003) that the remarkable parallels between fiction and reality in Ellroy’s work would emerge. Steve Hodel was completing the research and writing on the ‘Aftermath’ chapter for the paperback edition of Black Dahlia Avenger, and Ellroy asked to see the new material. Ellroy later commented that he had been ‘unconvinced’ by Hodel’s theory when he first read the hardcover edition. Hodel requested that Ellroy provide a blurb for the new edition, but Ellroy responded with an offer to write the foreword. 

Hodel said: ‘to his credit, Ellroy never claimed his novel was anything other than “pure fiction.”’ Then Hodel hypothesized that George Hodel’s friend and criminal accomplice Fred Sexton was a plausible suspect in the murder of Ellroy’s mother. For Ellroy the murder of his mother and Elizabeth Short had always been symbolically linked, but now he had been confronted with the second true-crime writer to claim the cases were factually connected through the same murderer – a serious blurring of the line between fact and fiction that Hodel claimed had been the source of his initial reservations about Ellroy’s work. Ellroy expressed his opinion of this element of Hodel’s theory in no uncertain terms: ‘Bullshit, bullshit, just bullshit, and I told Steve that. Just bullshit.’ As Ellroy was beginning to distance himself from the work of Harnisch and Hodel, unsurprisingly, both true-crime writers expressed some degree of regret over Ellroy’s endorsements, with Harnisch commenting, ‘James Ellroy’s various endorsements have more to do with Ellroy’s well-established hunger for publicity rather than genuine support of any particular theory’ (Harnisch 2010). Hodel was rather less critical: ‘I know for a fact that James truly regrets writing the Foreword to my book. However, I suspect that his real regret is coming not so much from the heart, but rather from Ellroy, the businessman. And, believe me James is first and foremost - a businessman. His business is the promoting and marketing of James Ellroy, and he is very good at it’ (Hodel 2010).Through his involvement with Harnisch and Hodel, Ellroy realized he had lost his prominence in the Dahlia narrative. In terms of his authorial control, the least successful was the debacle of the Harnisch/Hodel affair, and it was during this period that Ellroy made repeated comments about ending his involvement with the Dahlia legacy. ―Love Me Fierce In Danger: The Life of James Ellroy (2023) by Steven Powell

Larry Harnisch (March 2, 2023, IG @lmharnisch): "I don't know what James Ellroy says about me and frankly I don't give a shit either; let me put it this way: there's a new biography of James Ellroy out and I refuse to buy it, but the book says that I complained bitterly that Ellroy drops all his friends which he does so yeah to me James Ellroy is an over the hill writer who keeps writing racist, sexist crap. In real life if you are buddies with James Ellroy, he thinks he is the greatest writer ever. I mean the guy has a phenomenal ego. I worked at the LA Times, I worked in a building full of good writers; a lot of them were better than Ellroy. I was a copy editor at the LA Times and here's this high school dropout James Ellroy schooling me on how to speak and use his Hipster language, the jive talk that he does all the time. And every fifth sentence is about his manhood, you know it's how prodigious it is, how massive it is; he's always talking about it, you would not believe how much... and to me, somebody who has to talk that much about it, he has a problem. So that's kind of my thing with Ellroy. I know there is a new biography out of him. I'm never  buying it in any bookstore. I might thumb through it but sure as heck I will never buy it."

"The Menu" as Allegory of the Film industry

I think The Menu is an extremely meta film that works by comparing itself with this restaurant culture. The movie is indeed about archetypes but The Menu tries to say that these archetypes work the same way in both restaurants and movie culture. The chef represents the director/creator of a movie, there is the movie nerd/foodie, the critics and the people that will just repeat whatever the critics say, the old couple who are into this thing but they dont really try to engage with it as they only care about the cultured status they get from attending, the old washed up insider and the fans that are there too just for the exclusiveness (like in the big festivals). Then there is the main character: Margot (Anya Taylor-Joy) who is a regular person who just wants to watch a movie/eat and is dragged there by another fan. She just wants to eat and is content with her usual choices, she does not want to be there and finds the movie/the menu stupid and pretentious but has her opinion shutdown by the movie nerd who will keep making up excuses for the film. The chef wants to know whether she's 'with them' or not, he wants to know whether she will engage with the film in the same way they all do or not. I think he's asking the audience if they will stick with the movie itself and asking them to give it a chance, he sets up a timer for when things will start to fully fall into place and wants to know if you will enjoy this movie as a quirky horror comedy or if you will accept the deeper message it's trying to convey.

At the end the main character, the average movie watcher gets fed up and asks for just a regular old fun movie without any abstract adornment, so the chef cooks her a good old fashioned burger because at the end the director's goal is to entertain her. She sails off and enjoys the end of the movie as just this funny thing, while all the people trying to dissect it all while they all collectively burn. High-class dining and those who participate in it (both on the creative side and the consumer side) serve as an allegory for how the film business has suffered a similar fate to Chefs Slowik and Hawthorn. Here's some of the most important characters and how they relate to the film industry: Starting with Tyler, a representative of the cinephile types. Tyler knows everything there is to know about food, and the processes in which the food is made. He even demystifies the starter dish, noting that it's created with a pacojet. The only thing he doesn't know about cooking is cooking itself. When Chef Slowik insists that Tyler cooks, he makes a fool of himself. He knows about all the tools and processes, yet can't execute upon something as simple as cutting up a shallot. Much like Tyler, the cinephile has the same predicament. They are cursed with the knowledge that lies behind all filmmaking, yet are unable to become filmmakers themselves. 

Bryce, Soren, and Dave are the producers. They're the ones who have financial control over the restaurant, but what they really want is creative control. To them, they don't see the value in eating at Hawthorn and being able to experience Chef Slowik's creations. If they had it their way, then Hawthorn would just be another McDonald's, and Chef Slowik would be simply someone to steer the ship. When the film shows the tax returns and how they fudged the numbers on those, it's an allegory for how studios fudge box office numbers in order to hide profits from the directors and cast and funnel money to themselves. Lillian and Ted are, of course, cuisine/film critics. I think the shot at critics is made fairly obvious by the tortilla scene. A bad review can tank a restaurant in the same way that a bad review can tank a director's career. There's also the broken emulsion - much like Tyler, it's easy to have the knowledge that the technique behind an art. Having the technique to do that art is much more difficult.

John Leguizamo's character actually doesn't even have a name and is simply referred to as Movie Star. It's actually pretty clever - he's just another movie star clinging onto whatever relevance still remains from his stardom. The Movie Star's sin is that he no longer cares about art. Even worse, he's completely detached from it. Slowik hates the Movie Star because he saw a movie that he starred in that was terrible. Not only was the film terrible, but it was also on one of Slowik's few days off. The Movie Star has no apologies for this. For him, he was just getting another paycheck. For Slowik, the apathy the Movie Star shows is worse than any terrible film he could have made.

Margot is the average movie-goer. In a way, she is uncorrupted. She's interested in the magic behind it all, but the cinephile's obsession puts her off. Her request for a simple cheeseburger doesn't show her lack of appreciation for the finer things in life but an appreciation for the simple things. Chef Slowik is jaded. His sole purpose in life, cooking, is now mostly "enjoyed" by the rich people. Even worse, those who are still capable of appreciating his skills are nitpickers and wannabes, incapable of enjoying something simply for the sake of enjoying it. Part of why Chef Slowik likes Margot is because she is capable of enjoying something simply for the sake of enjoying it. It takes Chef Slowik back to his days as a humble burger flipper, back when he knew what he was serving was not a dish meant to be picked apart by critics, analyzed by amateur foodies, and questioned by those who fund him. At the same time, the cheeseburger Margot asks is far from another mass produced cheeseburger from another franchise. Chef Slowik shows that there's room in the middle for things that aren't just another bite, but also can just be simply enjoyed. Source: medium.com

Tár/Art: Lydia Tár ascending to Godhood, struck down like Icarus

"Tár" arrogating to ascend to Godhood: Have you ever experienced an artwork that grips you viscerally, sensually, inexplicably? It’s like a painter has seen through your eyes, or a musician holds a key to your soul, and the rhythms and tones open your heart and you simply do not know why? The first time you were taken by that piece of art that gutted you, your "Starry Night" -- did you separate the artist Van Gogh from the art? You were smitten, and the experience is as much of the artist as it is a projection of your own experience, dreams, pains and desires. Do you deny that you ever saw yourself in that work? In darkness we hear Lydia Tár coaxing, “Just ignore the microphone. Sing as if it’s not there.” At the end, we hear a voiceover from the video game, “Monster Hunter”, a ship captain’s speech, “Once you step aboard this ship, there is no turning back. And those who choose may step aside. You will not be judged.” Tár makes art, caring not a whit for the opinions of the audience, because that is what drives her, beyond all else. She knows the bargain she made, summed up by the final message of the movie: If you dare to ascend to this stage, you will be judged, perhaps even attacked. You will hunt monsters, and in the process perhaps even become one for a while.

I think the Monster Hunter scene is a small triumph. It would disgust the Lydia Tár we are introduced to in the interview to see herself doing something so beneath her. However, I think there was a very important moment of self reflection in her home watching Leonard Bernstein where she sheds her ego and remembers what drove her to her career. Beneath the facade and all the power plays and pretensions there has to be a genuine love for art for someone to reach the heights she has. "You want to dance the masque, you must service the composer. You gotta sublimate yourself, your ego, and, yes, your identity. You must, in fact, stand in front of the public and god and obliterate yourself." She lost what made her great in the first place. Losing everything and going back to her roots as Linda Tarr in Asia is what redeems her. She is no longer the control freak who threatens a child at school. She throws up when she imagines herself in a transactional scenario at the massage parlor. In the end, despite performing 'lower' art, she has finally sublimated herself in service of the art, not the other way around. Source: medium.com

"Babylon": Chazelle's Schrödinger Hollywood

A dorky filmic ode to the early days of Hollywood, Damien Chazelle’s sprawling “Babylon” may begin in 1926, but the movie is soon burdened with a clairvoyance that allows it to become unstuck in time. Brad Pitt’s Jack Conrad is meant to somewhat resemble pre-Code era leading men such as John Gilbert, Douglas Fairbanks, and Clark Gable. But unable to deliver the diction that talkies demand, he equally brings to mind a character from Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon A Time In Hollywood­­­­; not the stuntman Cliff Booth, but Leonardo DiCaprio’s aging Western actor Rick Dalton and his distrust of the new wave that’s leaving him behind. In an earnest monologue, Jean Smart’s columnist Elinor St. John—call her an amalgamation of Hedda Hopper, Louella Parsons, and All About Eve’s Addison DeWitt—tells Conrad his time is up, the party is over, in the identical way it will one day be over for every A-lister that would come after him.

Chazelle's deliciously decadent Babylon has disorderly film sets owned by MGM as well the more ramshackle (and fictional) Kinoscope Studios. And one especially memorable segment when the Kinoscope crew tries to film a single scene with sound. You lose count of the unsuccessful takes, feel the studio’s overwhelming heat (they can’t run air due to sound quality) and wonder how anyone survived this transition. As fictional director Ruth Adler, Olivia Hamilton particularly leaves a strong impression through these repetitive takes, representing the era’s behind-the-camera female talent—a more common occurrence in those early days—with natural authority. But the heart and soul of Chazelle’s jazzy and freewheeling opus are Manny and Nelly, who each experience their own rise and fall through hearty plotting that the writer braids compassionately. In the end, this is Manny’s all-consuming love story: he can't give up on the self-destructive Nelly, even when she piles one poor decision after the next.

“Babylon” remixes old Hollywood with a modern flair. Then again, modernizing the golden ages has never been Chazelle’s problem, and so it hardly comes as a surprise that he only gets lost when “Babylon” starts trying to bridge the gap between yesterday and tomorrow. “Babylon” looks sensational from the start, bangs along to the year’s most brilliant score, and bubbles over with riotous setpieces that frequently capture the headrush of making movies for the big screen by restoring the thrill of watching them on one. It’s a feeling that silent film superstar Jack Conrad’s perch at the top of Mt. Hollywood allows him to see the potential for real art behind the scrim of cheap spectacle—he has too much faith in tomorrow to realize that he’s already been relegated to yesterday. “What is your greatest ambition in life?,” Jean Seberg once asked in Breathless. “To become immortal… and then die,” Jean-Pierre Melville replied. Achieving immortality was easy for Jack, it’s living with it that kills him.

Pitt’s suave John Gilbert stand-in is also the personification of the movie that Chazelle builds around him, which is likewise both ecstatic and moribund in equal measure—50 feet tall and six feet underground all at once (a big reason why “Babylon” feels so emblematic of Schrödinger’s Hollywood in the streaming age). Hosted by Kinoscope executive Don Wallach, the first bacchanal unfolds like a “Dear Penthouse” letter written by F. Scott Fitzgerald. It’s the height of excess laced with the fall of Rome, as the end of the silent era looms over the festivities. As far as studio assistant Manny Torres is concerned, Nellie’s voice is the most beautiful sound he’s ever heard. 

The Mexican-American immigrant knows what it’s like to be typecast for how you talk, and he swoons for Nellie because both share the same dream for their self-invention. Jack Conrad believes in the movies’ power to bring the masses together, but he’s losing faith in an industry that often fails to recognize its own potential. Chazelle’s brilliance isn’t confined to the big setpieces, it’s also on display in the long and crushing close-up that sees Jack’s soul leaves his body as he watches Hollywood’s most powerful figures indulge in another snakebitten night of rank stupidity. Another bizarre scene forces him to perform “Singin’ in the Rain” for a scene in “The Hollywood Revue of 1929,” the actor rolling his eyes at a future that’s staring him in the face. “Babylon” is a romantic nightmare, a bat-shit crazy masterpiece. Source: www.indiewire.com

Tár: Existentialist Chaos, Karl Jaspers

“If you really want to talk about power and the long reach of history — the abuse and complicity of power, how it corrupts, all these clichés we’ve grown up with — you have to reckon with the idea that there is no black or white. To find the truth of something requires a little more rigor.” —Todd Field on the corruption of power in ''Tár"

Lydia Tár seems to acknowledge the risk of voiding her accolades if someone were to reveal her performative artistry—but she proceeds to manipulate her environment because she can’t help herself. In fact, it may even result in the ballooning of excessive narcissism and self-sabotage. Is this a feature of her real identity or does she miscalculate with her response to a crumbling empire to save her legacy? Where does her work as an artist stand in all this? The implications laid by the filmmakers for exploring this narrative are not to cast blame on any one individual, but rather to explore the shifting nature of power and those who wield it. Tár struggles to sleep at night and when she can finally shut her eyes, she’s susceptible to be swallowed whole by the ghosts of her past. In that regard, Tár reads like a chilling ghost story. When her mistakes inevitably halt her forward trajectory of power and fame, she begins a journey of self-discovery. This leads to her family on Staten Island, finally, where we might get an answer to who she was. As she enters her childhood home, the space starkly contrasts her modern aesthetic. She steps forward to a piano, only to learn that this pristine instrument is severely detuned. When her brother returns home, they share a brief moment where we learn that her real name is Linda Tarr. 

Deciding that she can’t really ever recover from the accusations levied against her, she heads out of the country where she may be able to reconstruct the artist and person she desperately wished to portray. And the final scene, shrouded in the mystery of the spotlight, reveals that everything she built is gone by a beautiful track shot. It’s an ending that feels so devastating, regardless of your feelings about the character. Tár is a kind of ghost story, in which we’re so deeply embedded in Lydia Tár’s psyche that nearly everything that appears onscreen is up for debate. The ghost is that of Krista Taylor, Lydia’s former protégée, with whom Lydia is accused of sleeping and who was blackballed from conducting jobs through the emails Lydia deletes. 

Even before Krista’s death by suicide, she haunts Lydia: We see her long red hair in the audience for Lydia’s conversation with Adam Gopnik. It’s also about the time Lydia starts hearing mysterious noises, some explicable (a medical device in a nearby apartment), some not. Who set her metronome a-ticking? And then comes the visit to the young cellist Olga’s grotty Berlin apartment building, where, she says, she’s staying with friends. Observed now by a gently drifting handheld camera, Lydia walks through the passageway and into a courtyard full of trash, where she hears, far away, a woman singing. We follow Lydia on her descent down the stairs, into a dripping, poorly lit underworld of unoccupied rooms. Where has Olga gone? What is this infernal place? Lydia flees, and face-plants at the top of the stairs. After her partner, Sharon, cleans up her face, Lydia gets up to comfort her daughter, Petra, in the middle of the night. And if you look closely, you’ll see, motionless in the dark corner of Lydia’s bedroom, nearly unnoticeable at the back of the frame, a red-haired woman: Krista. We are no longer watching a movie whose style is that of, as Slate’s Dana Stevens put it, “cool, keenly observed detachment.” The movie has swerved, in these scenes, into the uncanny. Are we seeing Lydia’s dreams? Her greatest fears? Her nerve disorder notalgia paraesthetica presents as a phantom itch, an “unreachable itch,” not unlike the memory of one’s own guilt, or a sound you can’t unhear.

It’s that right arm, Lydia tells Adam Gopnik at the film’s beginning, that marks time. “Right from the first moment, I know exactly what time it is,” she says, with supreme confidence, “and the exact moment that you and I will arrive at our destination together.” In the film’s final act, Lydia loses her confident control over time, and a film that was up till now conducted at adagietto, like the slow movement of Mahler’s Fifth, picks up. A video of a charged encounter at Juilliard goes viral, oddly edited from multiple perspectives, even though no one in that rehearsal room seemed to have a phone out. A story in the New York Post accuses her of grooming multiple young women. Her performance score for Mahler’s Fifth disappears without explanation. She loses the support of her foundation, and her access to a private jet. 

We are in Lydia Tár’s point of view now, in her subjective space, and all is unraveling with shocking speed, including possibly her mind. Protesters picket her poorly attended reading in New York. Olga abandons her at her hotel for someone more fun. Sharon kicks her out and withholds their daughter. She loses her position, loses her chance at the Fifth. Vivace. Tár isn’t a puzzle box, where the answer clicks into place at the end and we understand, at last, who Keyser Söze was. Think of this film, instead, as a journey through a haunted forest, like the ones the Grimms wrote about—like the one where Lydia hears that scream. We wend our way down ever-darker paths, becoming less and less certain what is real and what is not. By presenting the reality of Tár as increasingly subjective, Field is demanding that we question everything we see on that big screen, and receive the film as a mix of plot and psychology, incident and nightmare—all coming back around to the life, the dreams, and the fears of the incomparable Lydia Tár. Source: slate.com

Human mental life is constituted by a division between the subject and the object, and our other antinomical worldviews spring from this original antinomy. Often, the psychological analyses are punctuated by discussions of Kierkegaard and Friedrich Nietzsche – in particular, Kierkegaard’s stress on the choice that each individual must make and commit to. Karl Jaspers introduces one of his most influential ideas – that of boundary or limit situations (‘Grenzsituationen’). These are situations in which the subject experiences dread, guilt and anxiety, where we experience a lack of unity and stability: ‘everything is fluid, is in the restless movement of being in question, everything is relative, finite, split into opposites, never whole, absolute, essential,’ as Jaspers put it. Although a negative experience, these situations allow the human consciousness to confront its limits and restrictions.

Yet while his colleague Max Weber predicted an ideologically fractured and disenchanted world, Jaspers translated this pessimism into a sense of tragedy that affirms the force of reason and justice in history. ‘Truth is what really unites us,’ he wrote. Philosophically, Jaspers is most renowned for his philosophy of existence, or ‘Existenzphilosophie’, which is laid out in his three-volume work Philosophie (1932). We may feel we are subjects who have an infinite capacity, who feel boundless but, when hemmed in by guilt, suffering and death, we come up decisively against the finite reality of our existence. In these situations, we have to act. We either transcend these situations or not. We can cement ourselves further in ‘Dasein’ (mere existence) or transcend into ‘Existenz’. After all, we cannot escape the world nor should be want to and, Jaspers wrote: ‘I really love transcendence only as my love transfigures the world.’ For Jaspers, that focus beyond the world is what is of value – remaining in the world, and reaching only towards the world, broken and imperfect as it and we are, perhaps does more frequently lead to failure and shipwreck. Source: aeon.co

Surprises and Snubs in Oscars 2023 nominations

To Leslie is played to riveting perfection by Andrea Riseborough, who delivers a performance that’s extraordinary in its sparks of hope and slow-dawning self-awareness amid the despair, dissembling and self-delusion. To Leslie is a movie about hitting bottom but also a story steeped in grace — and even, within its understated, lived-in aesthetic, tinged with a bit of fairy tale, Prince Charming arriving in the form of a low-key and affecting Marc Maron's Sweeny. Maron is a guileless but wise guardian angel, watching Leslie flail and lie and struggle, and keeping close while she suffers through cold-turkey withdrawal from alcohol. It’s a role full of opportunities to chew scenery and crumble melodramatically, but she never sounds a false note. Morris gives us a long, unbroken scene of Leslie just sitting at a bar and listening to a sad country song, and you can’t take your eyes off her. There are not many actors who can hold your attention, much less interest, doing that. Riseborough digs deep and takes no shortcuts in tracing a hard-won path to redemption, the rage that holds Leslie back transformed into the energy that fuels her survival.

In one of the strangest developments of the season, the Oscar voting period saw almost every A-lister in Hollywood log onto Twitter to heap praise on Andrea Riseborough’s performance in To Leslie, “a small film with a giant heart.” The movie, a low-budget sobriety drama that debuted at SXSW, hadn’t technically come out of nowhere: Riseborough did get an Independent Spirit Award nom, and the film was on the National Board of Review’s list of best independent movies of the year. Still, To Leslie made barely a peep when it was released in October and had been ignored by all the major precursors, leading most pundits to believe the Twitter blitz would be too little, too late. It turns out professional actors had a better sense of awards-worthy acting than those of us who sit behind a laptop. Riseborough’s rise brought the best-actress hopes of two other contenders to an abrupt end: “The Woman King” star Viola Davis and “Till” actress Danielle Deadwyler were both shut out of a best actress category that many pundits assumed would be mostly made up of women of color. Davis had cruised through the season so far, earning nominations from the Globes, Screen Actors Guild, Critics Choice Awards and BAFTA. Only Tuesday did the Oscar-winning actress fall short. The Whale is a ghastly, quite cynical film. The Whale missing out in Adapted Screenplay is a sign that many in the Academy felt the same way. It’s also a sign that Brendan Fraser’s hold on the trophy is far from secure.

Although the main duel will probably be between Cate Blanchett and Michelle Yeoh, it's Andrea Riseborough and Ana de Armas who offer the closer to a gritty naturalistic performance and, in the case of De Armas, stylish glamour. Riseborough is most known for her role in Brandon Cronenberg's chilly sci-fi Possessor and David O' Russell's overlooked Amsterdam. In his review for The New Yorker, Richard Brody considered Amsterdam one of the best films of 2022: 

"Amsterdam is a historical fantasy that is written and acted like a comedic tall tale, but it’s all the more remarkable for its solid basis in reality. It also takes its place in a recent, odd but significant subgenre of movies that has cropped up in response to the authoritarian and hate-filled deeds and rhetoric of the Trump era: resistance cinema. It would be easy to mock the very notion as a form of highly selective crowd-pleasing, were many of these movies, including “Amsterdam,” not among the most emotionally committed and aesthetically distinctive films of our times. The movie is full of felicities that manage to be, at the same time, poignantly earnest and giddily inventive, as when Burt (Christian Bale), heading off to perform the autopsy while bearing a bouquet for the estranged Beatrice (Andrea Riseborough) flees the police and reaches a safe hiding place while still grasping the flowers; or when Burt, resetting Irma’s broken wrist, gives rise to the film’s most breathtakingly rapturous moment. 

The frequent literary archness of the dialogue yields an incantatory set of smart poetic refrains. Margot Robbie delivers her best performance to date, incarnating Valerie with a lighthearted lilt and a distinctively dancelike element of deft physical comedy that belies the sacrifices demanded by her creative fervor, romantic passion, and drive for independence. Bale delivers a strange, recklessly great performance—with a hectic intensity it’s a comedic performance by a non-comedian that centers and suffuses the film with his wildly charismatic presence. “Amsterdam” is a drama of a country and a world shaken to their very foundations by the incurable traumas of war. 

O' Russell sees a link between white supremacy and misogyny, and indicts the arrogant avarice of American business leaders as cavalierly indifferent to democracy, wantonly selling out the country's institutions and freedoms to the interests of foreign tyrants, whose practices and policies they seek to install here. He shows the untroubled ease with which willful, corrupt, and self-interested media ideologues intentionally and uninhibitedly pollute the civic environment at large and bend the minds of the vulnerable masses, whose social burdens and political frustrations are the results of policies and leaders promoted by the selfsame media. He recognizes the contempt for art, the hostility to culture, as a fundamental marker of this nexus of hatred and oppression. Above all, he sees a country sickened by its own cruelty, feeding on itself, proving its own monstrosity by imposing on private lives and obliterating the fundamental virtue and value of romantic love. May Amsterdam’s melodramatic sentimentality be forgiven; not many films of such exuberance, since the time of Chaplin, have been fuelled by such rage. Source: newyorker.com

76th Anniversary of Elizabeth Short's death

Remembering the Black Dahlia: This 15th January, 2023 will mark the 76th Anniversary of Elizabeth Short's death.

"I kept everything pertaining to them away from him out of a desire to keep Madeleine's lesbian bar doings under wraps. I continued skimming the file, sweating in the hot, airless room. No Webster prefixes appeared, and I started getting nightmare flashes: Betty sitting on the westbound Wilshire bus stop, 7:30 P.M., 1/12/47, waving bye-bye Bucky, about to jump into eternity. I thought about querying the bus company, a general rousting of drivers on that route--then realized it was too cold, that any driver who remembered picking up Betty would have come forward during all the '47 publicity. I thought of calling the other numbers I'd gotten from Pacific Coast Bell --then jacked that chronologically they were off-- they didn't jibe with my new knowledge of where Betty was at what time. I called Russ at the Bureau and learned that he was still in Tucson, while Harry was working crowd control up by the Hollywoodland sign. I finished my paper prowl, with a total of zero Webster prefixes. I thought of yanking Roach's P.C.B file, fixing the notion immediately. Downtown LA, Madison prefix to Webster, was not a toll call--there would be no record, ditto on the Biltmore listings. It came on then: bye-bye Bleichert at the bus stop, adios has-been, never-was, stool pigeon niggertown harness bull. Bye-bye Betty, Beth, Betsy, Liz, we were a couple of tramps, too bad we didn't meet before 39th and Norton, it just might have worked, maybe us would've been the one thing we wouldn't have fucked up past redemption" -"The Black Dahlia" (1987) by James Ellroy

Larry Harnisch: "James Ellroy’s various endorsements (he has since discounted Steve Hodel’s “solution”) have more to do with Ellroy’s well-established hunger for publicity rather than genuine support of any particular theory. Ellroy isn’t a historian, nor does he pretend to be one. Like many authors, he treats the facts as a malleable first draft, discarding much of the truth but keeping a few vivid details as he sees fit to give the flavor of authenticity. Dr. George Hodel was indeed a suspect in the Black Dahlia case — for about five weeks. But so were many other individuals. In fact, the case was so complicated that the original investigators treated anyone who ever knew Elizabeth Short as a potential killer who had to be eliminated. Detective Finis Brown, one of the lead detectives in the case, said that they interviewed thousands of people. The scenario recounted in Steve Hodel’s “Black Dahlia Avenger” and turned into a serial killer franchise with “Most Evil” is based on a foundation of speculation and distortion, embellished with layers of supposition, wishful thinking and vigorous suppression of anything that doesn’t fit. Indeed, “Avenger” is a classic example of reverse engineering that starts with the preselected killer and works backward through a torturous, convoluted route to the victim. The photographs Hodel found in his father’s belongs — which he claimed to be Elizabeth Short — are now firmly established as being other women, according to Short’s family and a woman who recognized herself in one of the photographs. In the same way, Dr. Hodel was never a surgeon, despite ardent attempts, based on wishful thinking, to prove otherwise. Finally, there is nothing to show that Dr. Hodel and Elizabeth Short ever met. Again, everything is speculation, distortion and suppression of conflicting facts. About Elizabeth Short and Walter Bayley, we have physical proof — in photos and official documents — showing that the families knew one another (Bayley’s daughter was friends with Short’s oldest sister), that the Bayley family lived within a block of the crime scene and that Dr. Bayley was a distinguished surgeon whose mind was unraveling. No one else has ever come close to that."

One of the first films to even loosely approach the Black Dahlia murder as a subject was the 1953 film noir The Blue Gardenia. Directed by Fritz Lang from a story by crime writer Vera Caspary, The Blue Gardenia concerns a young switchboard operator (played by Anne Baxter) who is engaged to a serviceman stationed in Japan. On the night of her birthday, she sets two places at the dinner table, one for her and one for the photo of her fiancee. She then sits down to read a letter from him, which she has saved for the occasion, only to discover that he has fallen in love with a nurse and has written to say goodbye. Depressed, she decides to throw caution to the wind and go on a date with the caddish Harry Prebble, a man who hangs around her office trying to pick up vulnerable women. He takes her to the nightclub The Blue Gardenia where she starts to drink too much and is quickly intoxicated. She finds herself back at his apartment, but when he comes on to her too strong, she defends herself from his unwelcome advances with a poker before falling into a drunken unconsciousness. She awakes the next day in her apartment only to discover in the newspaper that Prebble is dead and the police are looking for the woman he was seen with in the nightclub, who is now the prime suspect. An ambitious journalist labels the missing woman as ‘The Blue Gardenia’ and the case quickly becomes a press sensation. Some critics believe that the influence of the Dahlia case does not extend beyond the title. Although the Dahlia influence may be only minor and allusive, it is interesting nonetheless: there is the near-fantasy relationship with a serviceman, a possible sex crime which escalates into a murder and an intense public interest in the case which develops after a journalist gives the murderess an intriguing nickname. As the story is told mostly from Baxter’s point of view and portrays her sympathetically, the viewer sees the ‘Gardenia’ woman as both victim and murderess, although the final twist deconstructs this merging of identities. Source: venetianvase.co.uk

"The myth of Elizabeth Short is this is what happens to star-struck girls from... little towns back East... who come out to big bad Hollywood with ideas of getting into movies," Larry Harnisch said. Elizabeth Short was not an aspiring starlet seeking screen time, according to Harnisch. Rather, she was the product of a broken home during the Great Depression who lost her fiancé during World War II. She was only in Los Angeles for about six months, couch-surfing in various abodes, before she met her unimaginably awful end in January 1947: her naked remains were discovered in the city’s then largely undeveloped Leimert Park neighborhood. Harnisch’s guess is that Short’s goal was to find stability with a husband and a family. What most she would have needed was psychological therapy, some kind of intervention she never got. Harnisch considers Steve Hodel's theory to be hogwash: Steve Hodel’s case “kind of fits in with the film noir attitude of this evil puppet master doctor who lives in this crazy house in Hollywood and has all these weird parties.” Historian Kim Cooper, who runs a Black Dahlia-themed bus ride, argues there is something “timeless” about Elizabeth Short. “Somehow, she does not look like a woman of her time,” Cooper says. “The way she wears her makeup; the way she carries herself: She’s such an other, she’s such an oddball. And that’s, perhaps, what drew her killer to her.” Source: pastemagazine.com

Golden Globes 2023 (Winners)

Best Performance by an Actor in a Motion Picture - Musical or Comedy: Colin Farrell for The Banshees of Inisherin. Inisherin is a fictional island and literally means "Ireland island." Pádraic (Colin Farrell) is a simple Irishman living with his sister, Siobhan (Kerry Condon), spending his days waiting for his time to hit the local pub and drink with his dear friend, Colm (Brendan Gleeson). The pair have partnered for years, but now it’s come to an end, with Colm rejecting Padraic’s company, telling the confused man their friendship over. Padraic doesn’t take the news easily, trying to reconnect with Colm, also spending time with Dominic (Barry Keoghan), a younger man with intellectual disabilities. Hurt and baffled, Padraic tries to make sense of a situation he’s been removed from, also dealing with Siobhan, who’s fed up with male behavior in the village. 

The Banshees of Inisherin brings viewers to a remote part of the world, with a small community going about their daily business while the Irish Civil War rages nearby, with battles raging on in the distance. Padraic is a decent brother to Siobhan and a loving owner of a pet donkey, but he thrives with Colm, depending on this connection to get by. McDonagh sets up a sense of history that’s shut down by the fiddle player, who, without much warning, doesn’t want anything to do with Padraic, which launches both the dramatic elements of the screenplay, especially when it comes to motivation for such coldness. The Irish Civil War was between those who accepted the treaty with England, establishing the Republic of Ireland and those who rejected the treaty. This was not Northern Ireland vs the Republic. Colm might represent the IRA. If Colm really did represent the Republic of Ireland, breaking off his relationship with Pádraic, Northern Ireland, then a stronger allegory would have some kind of third party that Pádraic was beholden to that caused the decline of the friendship (England). You can't tell Ireland's story without reference to England's colonial involvement. Source: screenrant.com

Best Screenplay - Motion Picture: The Banshees of Inisherin.

Best Performance by an Actor in a Motion Picture - Drama: Austin Butler for Elvis.

Best Performance by an Actress in a Motion Picture - Musical or Comedy: Michelle Yeoh for Everything Everywhere All at Once.

Best Performance by an Actress in a Motion Picture - Drama: Cate Blanchett for Tár.

Best Performance by an Actor in Any Television Series: Kevin Costner in Yellowstone.

Best Performance by an Actor in a Supporting Role in Any Motion Picture: Ke Huy Quan in Everything Everywhere All at Once.

Best Performance by an Actress in a Supporting Role in Any Motion Picture: Angela Bassett in Black Panther: Wakanda Forever.

Best Performance by an Actress in a Supporting Role in a Musical-Comedy or Drama Television Series: Julia Garner for Ozark.

Best Performance by an Actress in a Television Series - Drama: Zendaya for Euphoria.

Best Director - Motion Picture: Steven Spielberg for The Fabelmans.

Best Motion Picture - Drama: The Fabelmans.

Best Motion Picture - Musical or Comedy: Babylon.

Best Original Score - Motion Picture: Babylon.

Best Motion Picture - Animated: Guillermo del Toro's Pinocchio

"Babylon" (2022): the Mystery of It All

Babylon (2022): “Boogie Nights” meets “Singin’ in the Rain.” Or to wonder how a filmmaker can simultaneously celebrate the remarkable power of movies while indicting much about the industry, exploring the ability to create and destroy, prop up and tear down, in all its swirling glory. Deliberate and wise in all the ways a maximalist like Baz Luhrmann is not, writer-director Damien Chazelle’s (“Whiplash,” “La La Land”) “Babylon” is “Singin’ in the Rain” as a tragedy, albeit one that’s also filled with satirical comedy. Like “Singin’ in the Rain,” “Babylon” reaches from the past into the cinematic present, with another fact-based fantasy—a wild montage of subliminally brief clips that build the arc of movie history from Muybridge and the Lumière brothers to nineteen-sixties modernists and onward to recent cinematic times. 

Margot Robbie, in another starring performance that feels like a new discovery, plays Nellie, an aspiring actress in the mid-1920s who’s sure that she’s a star–it’s something you can’t become but simply something you are or aren’t, she says. She sneaks into a big-time Hollywood party thanks to Manny (Diego Calva of “Narcos: Mexico,” excellent), who has about as little clout as someone at this high-profile carnival of debauchery can have. (Manny helped secure the elephant, which is somehow one of the more restrained methods of entertainment on hand.) This event, which Chazelle gives dizzying life with the same astonishing flair he brought to the opening sequence of “La La Land,” will launch each character’s trajectory into moving pictures, and the results range from screamingly funny to surprisingly moving to immensely complex in its look at a world that replicates humanity but doesn’t always practice it.

This isn’t to suggest Chazelle is the first person to acknowledge the high stakes and cold realities of this industry. But few have brought such exhilarating contradictions to a portrait of people drawn to the development of an escape and yet inevitably victimized by the implicitly ticking clock of fantasy. Also featuring typically excellent, mature work by Brad Pitt as aging star Jack Conrad, “Babylon” considers the constantly expanding potential of movies as well as their limits as influenced by both the values and instincts of the people both making and watching. Also recalling Chazelle’s “La La Land,” the Coen brothers’ “Hail, Caesar” and the classic "A Star is Born." But Chazelle brings both empathy and strange truths to the idea that human flaws are forgotten any time a great love or a great movie emerges out of nothing–while wondering what we gain when looking to art as an artificial instead of a real source. “Babylon” is about how we delight in the ways movies lie to us, that something filmed is immortal. New ways push against old institutions. Multiple revolving doors determine the life cycle of creativity, and the timeframe of a legacy.

Most filmmakers can’t even fathom this many big ideas in a project so gutsy in its technical and historical scope. As with much of his previous work, Chazelle is an essential chronicler of fierce dreams and heartbreaking compromises. In “Babylon,” subjective taste and objective identity collide, with movies never seeming more human than when they pursue euphoria and make it seem like time can stop, only to, no matter how high the peaks, eventually reach a point when the lights turn on, and you go and determine how to engage with what else is out there.  Like most American institutions — in politics, in religion, in family-focused suburbs and packed-together urban spaces — the institution of Hollywood has a seedy underbelly. It’s just that in Hollywood, the scandals feel juicier, like continuations of the stories we’ve seen onscreen. “The dream,” Joan Didion once wrote of Hollywood, “was teaching the dreamers how to live.”

Chazelle accomplishes this by continually and, seemingly, anachronistically referencing the future throughout the film. Visual and narrative references to other movies made later appear throughout (like Singing in the Rain, My Fair Lady, and Phantom Thread); by the end, the continuum is made explicit. This is a movie about how Hollywood casts a spell on all of us, while also churning through talented yet damaged performers. Much of that churn is predicated on technological changes, as well as the shifting tastes of the country. Most of it is just about money: who brings it in, who doesn’t, and who executives guess will maximize profits while causing as few headaches as possible. That’s the sense in which Babylon is a profoundly humanist film, mourning the tragedies that litter Hollywood histories. But it’s also a worshipful film, one that gladly buys into the Tinseltown dream, the spell, the mystery of it all. 

And so to the grand finale. Suffice to say that it includes a generous splash of “Singin’ in the Rain” (1952)—which triggers an instant desire for more Gene Kelly. Undaunted, Chazelle then offers a frenzied scrapbook of the medium’s greatest hits, with bits of Kubrick, Godard, Bergman, Stanley Donen, Paul Thomas Anderson and God knows what all pasted together. The implication is that Jack, Nellie, Fay, and the gang, delirious and doomed as they were, did not strive in vain, and that from their efforts bloomed the glory of cinema, to which “Babylon” is a crowning valediction. In the brave words of Jack Conrad, “What I do means something.” Source: www.vox.com