death trip

James Ellroy's Feast of Death - Vikram Jayanti

Caught this while browsing Sundance Channel. This documentary meticulously reconstructs the murder of bestselling author James Ellroy's mother 47 years ago. However, the reconstruction limits itself to gruesome police photographs, the now-and-then description of the place where the body was dumped, and Ellroy reciting lines from his memoir My Dark Places. Interestingly, the movie also dwells with the unsolved murder of Black Dahlia (a crime which Ellroy attributed his mother's tragic demise- - -that until this very day---still remain unsolved), and in a astonishing diversion from Ellroy, he invited a colleague to present a plausible theory as to who really murdered Elizabeth Short. Superimposing with the detailed narration of the Betty Short case by Ellroy's friend Larry Harnisch (whom he considered to be a Black Dahlia freak) are crime scene photographs from the 1947 casefile including a close-up view of Short's face (gruesome, I know, that i tend to look away when the shot was shown), the decapitated body of the deceased and, also, the now-and-then comparison of the body dump place. Reviews of the film when it was shown at BBC and Showtime Channel a few years back claimed that it somehow solved the Dahlia case after all. Personally, I'm an Ellroy fan- - -read almost all of his books- - - and the movie in anyway, provided me with the answer as to who Ellroy really is (and probably the reason of his fetish with unsolved crimes). The film, though somewhat pretentious in its attempt to solve Ellroy's mother's death, is definitely a must see for any fan of the author.