Article: L.A. stories; De Palma wilts and Affleck is eh. Plus: scruffy crusader Al Franken.(Brian De Palma)(Ben Affleck)(The Black Dahlia)(Hollywoodland)(Al Franken: God Spoke)(Movie review)

ACRITIC OFTEN HAS to play the role of coroner, dissecting a work to find out why it died (or never lived), but I'm frankly stumped by the Brian De Palma thriller The Black Dahlia; I can't tell you how it ended up such a stiff. It has a potent source: James Ellroy's feverishly overplotted fantasia on Hollywood's most notorious unsolved murder, the 1947 killing of Elizabeth Short--a pretty, not too bright young woman who arrived in L.A. with dreams of stardom, got around (and around), and wound up a different sort of legend. Photos of her bisected corpse are horrible in ways that transcend the grisly particulars. Drained of blood and denuded of innards, her body had been ...

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