Thoughts While Watching Ulli Lommel's 'Black Dahlia'

1. Whatever made the first actress who showed up to audition think it was a good idea to have tennis balls implanted in her cheekbones?

2. That girl has simultaneously the fakest and most annoying giggle in the history of screen villainy. She sounds like Woody Woodpecker. It makes Tommy Wiseau's attempts to fake a chuckle in "The Room" sound like Olivier.

3. I thought eventually we might get some explanation for why we keep cutting to the female lead sweatin' to the oldies in army fatigues, but it's just not that kind of movie, I guess. Humanity will never know.

4. This looks less like a movie and more like a demo reel if someone installed a copy of Avid and wanted to see what would happen if you pushed all the buttons. I mean, really, every cheap effect in the book seems to be thrown in for absolutely no reason. (Ulli's idea of "ominous," I guess.) I suppose it just goes to show that if you sat a room full of monkeys down at an editing suite and had them randomly push buttons, over the course of eternity you could have the collected works of Alfred Hitchcock, but if you could wait until Tuesday they could get you an Ulli Lommel video.

6. Only one cop on the L.A.P.D. has access to the Internet, I guess, or this crime would have been solved a lot sooner. No problem, Ulli would have resolved the run-time dilemma by simply repeating the same footage a few more times than he already had.

7. Penn Jillette is a crime scene investigator? Who knew? (He must be Penn Jillette, too, because even though I never saw the alcoholic cop call for any backup, he shows up anyway. Like magic!)

7. Alternate title: TOO DRUNK FOR BACKUP.