I haven’t seen Brian DePalma’s The Black Dahlia yet, but I had to chuckle at Dana Stevens’s pan of the flick at Slate, which kicks off by decrying the film’s lack of “moral weight.” An amoral DePalma film? You don’t say! This is like complaining about the shocking presence of dick jokes in a Mel Brooks movie.
Anyway, the great Matt Zoller Seitz has his own review of the movie up at The House Next Door, and while I only got about four sentences into it before a SPOILER WARNING scared me away, the sense I get is that he had a more positive take on the film. As a great admirer of pretty much any DePalma film in which a blonde figures prominently (Body Double, Femme Fatale, Scarface) my hunch is I’ll be on Seitz’s side, but we’ll see.